January/February 2011

Haiti Noir, a collection of stories edited by Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, is one of the latest in Akashic Books’ series of noir fiction anthologies from around the world.

In the past year several new electronic-submission systems have emerged, among them Submishmash, Green Submissions, and Tell It Slant, enabling journal editors to manage writer's work more efficiently.

With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Maxine Hong Kingston's I Love a Broad Margin to My Life and Michael McClure's Of Indigo and Saffron, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.

Literary journals learn to sidestep old-school printing, distribution, and marketing costs by leveraging new media and social-networking platforms.

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Solid Objects, the New York City–based independent press that publishes "short, self-contained works that might not otherwise find their way into book form because of their length."

Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features ZYZZYVA, Cave Wall, Annalemma, H.O.W. Journal, Assembly, and the Whitefish Review.

A day after he finalized the last of his illustrations for our January/February 2011 issue, Jim Tierney, an illustrator and designer at Penguin, spoke about the inspiration behind his work.

A pen-and-ink drawing and a typewritten letter by Charles Bukowski are two pieces among the documents and ephemera currently on view in Charles Bukowski: Poet on the Edge at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Awaiting the hard-won publication of her first novel, one author makes a case for detaching from expectations and focusing on the gritty work of writing.

Fiction writer Ana Menéndez’s early education in two languages—Spanish and English—became a wedge that opened her world to possibility, difference, and change.