November/December 2011

Artist Colin McMullan, founder of the Kindness and Imagination Development Society, has found one way to take the act of sharing that’s become so popular with social media outside the electronic box and into the physical world with his Corner Library project.

CantoMundo, a burgeoning Latino poets workshop in its second year, has become the third organization to make up an unofficial triad aimed at nurturing the work of American poets of color.

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 Aracelis Girmay’s Kingdom Animalia, and Tomaž Šalamun’s The Blue Tower, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.

Despite the average wired American’s tendency to downsize their character counts, the page counts of newly published books of translated fiction show that the rest of the global literary community may be beefing up. 

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Exterminating Angel Press, the six-year-old independent book publisher with a big mission: to challenge the received cultural narrative.

While U.S. publishers continue their cautious march into the digitization of American titles, the rest of the world is looking to take advantage of other burgeoning markets in Europe, Japan, and beyond.

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 Memoir (and), Harvard Review, Huizache, the Coffin Factory, Monday Night, and Ploughshares.

In this issue we offer a look at one of the 552 illustrations by Tim Kish, who created a picture a day for each page of Melville’s tome, featured in Moby-Dick in Pictures, published in October by Tin House Books.

While working on his fourth issue as editor of Poetry Northwest, Kevin Craft, who succeeded David Biespiel in January 2010, discussed the importance of community, as well as a measured approach to editing, to the magazine’s success.

Novelist Ellen Sussman offers four simple steps for writers who want to get more out of their writing time.

From burger-slinging line cooks to space-walking astronauts, focusing on a fictional character’s work and well-researched working habits can set a story in motion.

Fiction writer M. Allen Cunningham shares his approach to digesting rejection, a fundamental part of this literary vocation that every writer—even luminaries such as Henry James and Wallace Stegner—must face.

After her daughter’s illness stripped the beauty and enchantment from her life, a writer finds inspiration to work again in the joy her child gains from creating her own art.