The Pushcart Prize XXII: Best of the Small Presses 1998 Edition - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1888889012 ISBN 13: 9781888889017

Publisher: Pushcart Press, 1997

Synopsis

"The Pushcart Prize series is the best of its kind.... Henderson ignores the latest fads and zeroes in on quality wherever he happens to find it". -- Kirkus Reviews on last year's edition

Pushcart Prize XXII continues as a testament to the flourishing of American literature in our small presses. Edited with the assistance of over 200 distinguished contributing editors -- including Andre Dubus, Joyce Carol Oates, Rosellen Brown, Rick Bass, Carolyn Kizer, Edward Hoagland, Rita Dove, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sandra Tsing Loh, and Sharon Olds -- this volume celebrates over 60 stories, essays, and poems from dozens of little magazines and small presses. It seems that the more commercial publishers consolidate into a few companies, the more small presses capture and encourage what is truly lasting and important in our literary culture. Each edition of The Pushcart Prize has increased from strength to strength as the small presses expand in influence and energy.

The reviews and features for last year's edition confirmed this strength. "A generous and stimulatingly eclectic selection of fiction, poetry and essays -- the biggest anthology in the 21-year history of the Pushcart Press", said Publishers Weekly in a starred review. "The largest and most adventurous volume so far", commented Booklist. "The Pushcart Prize has become a literary institution ... perhaps the single best measure of the state of affairs in American literature today", noted the New York Times.

About this title

About the Author

Bill Henderson is the founder and editor of the Pushcart Prize. He received the 2006 National Book Critic Circle's Lifetime Achievement Award and the Poets & Writers / Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. He lives in Wainscott, New York.

From Kirkus Reviews

This year's Pushcart anthology of small-press literature is the biggest yet--which means more gems, and yet more dross surrounding them. This year's crop of short stories mostly consists of straightforward depictions of working-class life and death. In this vein, the stand-out is Ron Carlson's ``Oxygen,'' a vivid account of a late-'60s summer spent delivering oxygen to invalids in Arizona. Meanwhile, Pamela Painter's short study ``The Kiss'' addresses a question on many minds lately: What is it like to kiss someone wearing a dumbbell-shaped rod through his pierced tongue? The Pushcart's forte remains literary criticism and memoir. This year features strong contributions from Charles Baxter on the relation between poetry and prose, Lewis Hyde on the place of the aleatory in art, Charles Simic on his days as an unknown poet in New York, and Gretchen Legler on her passion for hunting. Once again the selection of poetry is fairly uneven. A contribution from Robert Pinsky finds the US poet laureate at his most pedantic, while selections like Julia Vinograd's ``For the Young Men Who Died of AIDS'' (which asks, ``How can people go on buying toothpaste / and planning their summer vacations?'') court bathos. A shorter, more surreal poem succeeds, however: David Hayward's speech in the voice of a combative minor-league baseball mascot, ``Davy Cricket.'' Similarly surreal and successful prose efforts include Susan Daitch's dreamlike ``Killer Whales'' and Tomas Filer's ``Civilization,'' an intriguing tale of how the borders between life and movies blurred in the California of a lifetime ago. The baseball-team mascot Davy Cricket from Heyward's poem provides a kind of emblem for the Pushcart. If the anthology, like the blue-foam-suited Davy, can appear bloated and overly loyal to the performers it celebrates, to complain would be churlish. For the Pushcart's cheerleading calls our attention to some wonderful literature, and, what's more, to the wonderful variety that redeems the existence of more mediocre work. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pushcart Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1888889012
• ISBN 13: 9781888889017
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 658
• Editor: The Pushcart Prize, Henderson Bill