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Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.
When it comes to getting poetry into unexpected places, the sky's the limit for Billy Collins. Last fall the former United States poet laureate and author of eight books of poetry partnered with Delta Air Lines to create an audio program of poetry to be offered periodically to passengers on its entire fleet of airplanes.
At some point during her two-year stint atop an ancient 200-foot redwood tree in Humboldt County, California—an effort to to save the old-growth forest—environmental activist and writer Julia Butterfly Hill was approached by HarperSanFrancisco for the rights to publish her memoir, Legacy of Luna. Hill accepted the offer, with one stipulation: Her book had to be printed on 100 percent postconsumer recycled paper manufactured without the use of chlorine bleach.
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 the Kenyon Review, the Iowa Review, the Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, spork, Petroglyph, Isotope, Poetry Daily,Verse Daily, and Literal Latté.
Six months ago Larry Portzline, a professor of writing and literature at Harrisburg Community College in Pennsylvania, started a grassroots movement called Bookstore Tourism—a series of bus trips to urban centers where reader-tourists can patronize independent bookstores. At the end of March, a group of readers from the Harrisburg area will travel approximately 200 miles to the 10th annual Virginia Festival of the Book, where they will participate in festival events (readings, book signings, seminars, and so on) and visit the many independent bookstores that are in Charlottesville, Virginia, including New Dominion Bookshop, the Book Cellar, and Blue Whale Books.
The published correspondence of famous poets often accounts for more real estate on bookstore shelves than their books of poems. For academic scholars who spend their weekends in the special-collections rooms of libraries, the value of these books is obvious. But what are they worth to the general reader, or the practicing poet?
For writers seeking a structured learning environment without geographical or scheduling restrictions, the Internet can be a viable alternative to the bricks-and-mortar classroom.
British poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, author of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Return of the Native, among other literary classics, wanted his personal papers burned after his death. In 1928, a bonfire was dutifully lit but not everything was consigned to the flames. Hardy’s second wife, Florence, saved at least 12 notebooks filled with information and sources on which the author based his later works of fiction. Thomas Hardy’s ‘Facts’ Notebook, edited by William Greenslade and released this month by Ashgate Publishing, is only the most recent to appear.
A simple film about the solitary pleasures of reading has turned into a successful campaign to revive a short-lived literary career. Dow Mossman’s only novel, The Stones of Summer, was originally published in 1972 by the now-defunct press Bobbs-Merrill. After being lauded by John Seelye in the New York Times Book Review as “a marvelous achievement” that offered “fulfillment at the first stroke, which is so often the sign of superior talent,” the book went out of print and its author faded into obscurity. Last month it was reissued by Barnes & Noble Books.
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 American Poetry Review, Land-Grant College Review, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Octopus Magazine, Transition, Granta, and Evergreen Review.
This month the world’s first independent publisher of women’s writing, the Feminist Press, launches a steamy—and unlikely—series of pulp fiction titles.
Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from Jesus Sound Explosion by Mark Curtis Anderson and What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland.
Louise Glück has been appointed the 12th poet laureate of the United States by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. Glück, whose one-year term began last month, succeeds Billy Collins.
In November, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish August Kleinzahler's eleventh book of poetry, The Strange Hours Travelers Keep. A loner and a traveler himself, Kleinzahler has avoided the cloistered life of academia for stints as a logger in British Columbia, a political commentator in Germany and, most recently, a music columnist for the San Diego Weekly Reader.
Thanks in part to Stewart O’Nan, whose essay, “The Lost World of Richard Yates,” appeared in the October/November 1999 issue of the Boston Review, readers are enjoying a long-overdue critical re-appreciation of the author of Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, among a handful of other exquisitely written books.
David Foster Wallace’s long-awaited sixth book will arrive in bookstores next month. But it’s not what some might expect from the author of Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.
Since Dana Gioia was named chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in January, the organization has awarded nearly $1 million to poets and translators of poetry and over $2 million to literary arts organizations. But the highest profile project of Gioia’s term so far begins this month, when six theater companies—from New York City; Chicago; Minneapolis; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Portland, Oregon—will begin a yearlong tour of 100 small and midsized cities across the U.S. to perform a selection of plays by William Shakespeare. A seventh theater company will tour 16 U.S. military bases.
Laura Furman, the first female O. Henry series editor in more than forty years, has instituted some changes to the process of selecting stories for her first volume, due out next month from Anchor.
In her Pulitzer Prize–winning first book, The Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri explores the struggle of first- and second-generation Indian Americans bridging the gap between the country they call home and the heritage that defines them. Her much-anticipated first novel, The Namesake, explores a similar theme.
As more and more literary journals develop online counterparts to enhance, complement, and extend the presence of their print editions, editors—despite their love of the physical object—are finding new was to take advantage of the cost-effective and virtually boundless medium.
Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona by Ryan Harty, Indiana, Indiana by Laird Hunt, and Eyeshot by Heather McHugh.
Carol Seajay, former publisher of Feminist Bookstore News, a San Francisco–based magazine that covered the feminist, gay, and lesbian book industry until folding in 2000, recently launched Books to Watch Out For, a series of monthly e-mail newsletters featuring reviews of gay and lesbian books.
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 Poetry, Poems & Plays, the Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Bloom, the Harvard Advocate, Harvard Review, Meanjin, and Vallum.
Reviewers are accused of having agendas and of cronyism, are called show-offs and career-killers. It's a lot of heat to take for some free books, a few bucks, and a byline.
Book review editors—those powerful yet inundated tastemakers who choose from the more than 130,000 new books published each year the mere shelfful that are reviewed—get used to (and bored with) having nasty motives ascribed to them. This second installment of a three-part series on book reviews examines the subject at hand from the perspective of the assigning editors, who would like to set the record straight.
On April 4, United States District Court Judge John F. Keenan ruled in favor of Stuart Y. Silverstein in a plagiarism suit he filed against Penguin Putnam in 2001. Silverstein, who compiled Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (Scribner, 1996), claimed in his lawsuit that Penguin infringed on his copyright by publishing Dorothy Parker: Complete Poems, which includes a section titled “Poems Uncollected by Parker,” the identical poems published in Not Much Fun.
