November/December 2008

As the presidential election approaches, our national hand-wringing has ramped up and everyone is once again focused on the perennial question: What makes America America? Two recent literary anthologies show just how far this popular introspection reaches into our creative communities of writers and artists.

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 Robyn Schiff's Revolver and Adam Braver's November 22, 1963, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.

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 GUD, Night Train, Quick Fiction, the New Renaissance, AGNI, Ploughshares, Salamander, Post Road, and the Harvard Review.

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features City Lights Publishers, Grove Press, Grove/Atlantic, Atlantic Monthly Press, New Directions, Coffee House Press, Akashic Books, Harbor Mountain Press, Goats and Compasses Press, EM Press, and Perceval Press.

Jayne Anne Phillips, who is in her second year as program director of the new MFA program in creative writing at Rutgers University's Newark, New Jersey, speaks about the program's genesis, its connection to Newark's literary and cultural community, and finding the time to complete her new novel.

The story of the Paris Review cofounder Harold Louis "Doc" Humes is at once sad, fascinating, funny, and tragic. Doc, a new documentary by his daughter Immy Humes, which, to use her father's words, "puts a frame around the wreckage" of the story, will premiere on the PBS series Independent Lens on December 9.

The brief, contentious, and ultimately fruitless relationship between poet Stacey Lynn Brown and the editors of Cider Press, points to an essential question that pops up often in literary publishing: Whose opinion—author's or publisher's—should matter most when it comes to finalizing the product that enters the marketplace as a book?

In the cyclone-ravaged country of Myanmar, where citizens face censorship and repression, contributor Stephen Morison Jr. speaks with authors who, despite the country's Orwellian police state, refuse to be intimidated and continue to write.

Novelist Aharon Appelfeld is a writer for whom language is dangerous, a man who measures every word because every word is sacred.  

Deadline poetry, aspiring more for political effect than literary greatness, takes its place on the op-ed page.