Genre: Not Genre-Specific
Beloved Named Best Work of American Fiction From the Last Twenty-five Years
Toni Morrison’s Beloved (Knopf, 1987) was recently named “the single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years,” according to a survey of several hundred writers, critics, and editors conducted by New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus.
New Study Shows Decline in U.S. Book Production
Book production in the U.S. last year totaled 172,000 titles, a decrease from 2004 of 18,000 titles, or nearly ten percent, according to a recent study by R. R. Bowker, the publisher of the Books in Print database and the official agency for assigning ISBNs in the United States.
Literary Blog Cooperative Recommends Fourth Title in the Read This! Program
The Litblog Co-op, an online cooperative of twenty-one literary blogs created in 2005 to promote books of contemporary fiction, recently chose Television (Dalkey Archive Press, 2004), a novel by French writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated by Jordan Stump, as the Spring 2006 selection for its Read This! program.
Small Press Points
Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Seven Stories Press, Impassio Press, and BOA Editions, Ltd.
Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin
This installment of Page One features excerpts from A Strange Commonplace by Gilbert Sorrentino, Genealogy by Maud Casey, and Visigoth by Gary Amdahl.
Literary MagNet
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 One Less Magazine, the Women's Review of Books, Cream City Review, Global City Review, Bat City Review, Backwards City Review, and Poetry.
The Joy of Collaboration: A Ten-Point I-Told-You-So Guide
One afternoon in March 2003, I received an unexpected phone call from writer Julianna Baggott. "I've got a crazy idea," she told me. "It's so crazy, I feel a little nervous even bringing it up."
Improvisers and Revisers: An Experiment in Spontaneity
It took a long time to write these words. I'm not referring to the psychosomatic affliction known as writer's block. I mean the delays caused by the process of composition and revision.
More to the Story: A.M. Homes
For this inaugural installment of More to the Story—an occasional feature in which we ask authors to list the movies, music, artwork, and books that inspired them during the course of writing their new books—we asked A.M. Homes about her fifth novel,This Book Will Save Your Life, which was published by Viking last month.