November/December 2006

A decade after the founding of Cave Canem, Eady speaks about the ways in which the organization has developed into a "safe haven for black poets."

Taking cues from Letters to a Young Poet, published more than seventy years ago, the Letters to Poets project puts an updated spin on Rilke’s experiment in mentorship with organized correspondence between two distinct types of poets.

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 Ploughshares, Calyx, Gargoyle, and American Short Fiction.

Last year a total of 172,000 books were published in the United States. Although that number reflects a 10 percent decrease from the previous year, it's easy to see how any one book could get lost in the shuffle—especially if it's one among the many memoirs being published every season. With the idea that there's strength in numbers, four memoirists who published books earlier this year have joined forces to promote their titles, developing a community of like-minded authors—and fostering emerging writers—along the way.

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Featherproof Books, Hourglass Books, Haymarket Books, Dalkey Archive Press, BOA Editions Ltd., and Omnidawn Publishing.

When fiction writer Barry Eisler heard last summer that Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, California, would close after fifty years in business, his first reaction was a loud expletive. His second was an e-mail to owner Clark Kepler with an offer to help. "I used to see those big author photos in the window…and I was working on what would become my first novel," says Eisler, the author of the Jain Rain series of thrillers. "My fantasies of literary success were all based on doing book signings at Kepler's."

Art from Up Is Up, but So Is Down, a collection of writing and more than 125 photographs, book covers, and flyers that illustrate the dynamic, subversive work of the literary community known as "Downtown."

This installment of Page One features excerpts from The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian and American Genius: A Comedy by Lynne Tillman.

Afghanistan's poetry community thrives despite the country's political turmoil.

The question of privacy emerges in the life and work of novelist and short story writer Bernard Malamud.