May/June 2010

Broadsided, a monthly literature-and-art project that brings poetry and prose into people's everyday lives by posting it in public spaces, reaches beyond local schools, streets, and shops to take open-air publishing global.

Curbstone Press, the independent, nonprofit publisher that for more than three decades published international literature in Willimantic, Connecticut, and Northwestern University Press in Chicago agreed late last year to form a partnership.

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 Dorothea Lasky's Black Life and Travis Nichols's Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.

In this feature, we offer a few suggestions for podcasts, smartphone apps, Web tools, newsletters, museum shows, and gallery openings: a medley of literary curiosities that you might enjoy. And if you don't? Quit complaining, they're free.

Since last fall, an Alameda, California–based start-up has been blending digital text, images, video, and social networking to produce what it calls "vooks" (a portmanteau word formed from video and book), which can be accessed through any Web browser or downloaded to mobile devices via Apple's iTunes Store.

A look at a sculpture by U.K. artist Su Blackwell, one of the thirty-three artists showcased in the art book and craft guide Playing With Books: The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Reimagining the Book, published by Quarry Books in April.

The Poetry Society of America, the oldest poetry organization in the country, is marking its centennial this year with a number of special events that are being held across the country. 

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features CityLit Press, an independent publisher based in Baltimore that provides a venue for writers who might otherwise be ignored by larger independent or commercial publishers.

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 Little Star, Still Crazy, the Paris Review, the Southwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, DIAGRAM, and Linebreak.

For Dawn Haines, a forty-something-year old MFA graduate, mother, wife, and teacher, the lack of deadlines postgraduation resulted in a fallow spell that only writing itself could undo.

Author Benjamin Percy has learned that, for the professional writer, real revision means moving beyond the tweaking of punctuation and word choice and freeing oneself to slash, burn, and reshape a work to fruition.