The Pushcart Prize 2000 XXIV: Best of the Small Presses - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1888889195 ISBN 13: 9781888889192

Publisher: Pushcart Press, 1999

Synopsis

For the year 2000 edition, The Pushcart Prize series presents one of the largest volumes in its history―over sixty short stories, poems, and essays selected from hundreds of small presses and literary journals with the help of over 200 distinguished contr

For the year 2000 edition, The Pushcart Prize series presents one of the largest volumes in its history--over sixty short stories, poems, and essays selected from hundreds of small presses and literary journals with the help of over 200 distinguished contributing editors. In the best Pushcart tradition, this fascinating edition combines the work of today's luminaries with a host of new talents, creating a wholly original amalgam of diverse voices. The most honored literary series in America, The Pushcart Prize has been chosen for many Book-of-the-Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club selections, named a notable book of the year by the New York Times, and hailed with Pushcart Press by Publishers Weekly as "among the most influential in the development of the American book business over the past 125 years."

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 is also the author of several memoirs, including All My Dogs: A Life. The founder of the Lead Pencil Club, Henderson lives on Long Island and In Maine where he runs the Pushcart bookstore – “the world’s smallest bookstore.”

Reviews

The 24th annual anthology honors those essays, short stories and poems nominated by the small magazines in which they have been published. In this year's collection of winners, there are notable essays from Gabriel Garc!a M rquez, Ann Hood, Alice Mattison and Paula's Fox's memoir is characteristically unsentimental but deeply affecting; Elizabeth Sifton's is rich with insight and cultural history. Lesser-known writers also shine. "Neon Effects," a memoir by Emily Hiestand, recounts her sudden desire to put blue neon tubing under the carriage of her car, low-rider/U.F.O.-style. It's a little gem of eccentric vision, with fun quirks like a footnote on the phrase "no problem." "Odd Collections" by Alexander Theroux details the obsessions of collectors, from the man in Pittsburgh who hoards moist towelettes to the Asian prostitutes who "collect fluff from the navels of their clients." Stacy Richter's stellar, hilarious fiction, "The First Men," is the rant of a high school teacher, Miss Roberts, who owes money to a drug-dealing student. When she runs into her drug dealer's Neanderthal but undeniably cute enforcer at the mall, her survival instinct fails her. The protagonist of the novella "The Wedding Jester," by Steve Stern, is a washed-up writer tired of his work retelling Jewish folktales, who accompanies his mother to a wedding in the Catskills where the bride is possessed by a dybbuk with a dirty mouth. Other short fiction comes from the pens of Leonard Michaels, Robert Coover, Frederick Busch, Robert Boswell, Rick Moody, Pam Houston and Charles Baxter. The poems represent a range of styles and schools, with entries by well-known poets such as Robert Creeley and Jane Cooper and less familiar voices. Ray Gonzalez's poem "The Poor Angel" is a standout, surrealist liturgy with overtones of Artaud, and Bob Hickok's "Building a Painting a Home" is a wistful wonder of domestic meditation. Overall, it's a fascinating compilation, reflecting the year's varied bounty of literary feats, as selected by an equally varied pool of editors and writers in the field. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For this year's anthology, essays again rank higher in quality than stories, despite being outnumbered. In the top slots for essays and memoirs, Gabriel Garca M rquez reveals his origins as a writer; Elizabeth Sifton traces the theological-activist career of her father, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the unexpected popularity of his famous ``serenity prayer''; Alexander Theroux collects cases of obsessive collectors; and Amitav Ghosh browses his inherited literary tastes in ``The March of the Novel Through History: The Testimony of My Grandfather's Bookcase.'' The next rank, even with the standard essays on chronic ailments, childhood, and cultural/religious heritage, fares pretty well: Daniel Henry vividly recounts an Alaskan camp's Hitchcock-like invasion by ``A Murder of Crows,'' and Pam Houston gives a winsome survey of love in San Francisco in ``The Best Girlfriend You Never Had.'' The short story selection is headlined by Charles Baxter, Frederick Busch, Richard Bausch, Rick Moody, who all submit satisfying tales, but only Robert Coover, with his Wild West phantasmagoria, ``The Sheriff Goes to Church,'' really delivers the goods. Elsewhere, Stacey Richter goes over the top with a drug-addict teacher and her pusher students, Bruce Holland Rogers weaves a spooky allegory in ``The Dead Boy at Your Window,'' and Steve Stern crosses The Dybbuk with the Borscht Belt (and a touch of Updike's Bech) in ``The Wedding Jester.'' Writing seminars show their influence in the stories by the few newcomers Mary Yukari Waters, Tom Bailey, and Peter Love, but the diversity of stories and styles is a far cry from the last decade's assembly-line MFA fiction. Unfortunately this time there are no critical essays to balance the selection of poems, which, led by Alicia Ostriker and Robert Creeley, ranges from open-mike slam verse to metered artifice. To independent publishing what Sundance is to independent films: a little buzz, a lot of variety, some second-raters, and many chances for discovery. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The Pushcart Prize anthologies extend the reach of small presses and literary magazines and comprise a vital archive of American letters, framing, as each compelling volume does, a mosaic of the year's freshest writing. The entire spectrum of creative literature is covered as poems nestle between works of fiction, memoirs, and essays, and new writers follow in the footsteps of established voices. Editor Henderson, sensitive, as always, to both losses and gains, begins with a tribute to the late Andre Dubus, a master short-story writer and essayist. The collection itself then begins with an incantatory work of fiction by Rick Moody, which introduces a style that can best be described as humor with a concealed weapon, a voice also heard in a terrifically unnerving story by Stacy Richter, and Steve Stern's edgy satire, "The Wedding Jester." This year's poets include Bob Hicok, Susan Hahn, and Elizabeth Alexander. Ann Hood and Pam Houston are present as memoirists, and high standards for essay writing are set by Alexander Theroux and Amitav Ghosh. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Pushcart Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1888889195
• ISBN 13: 9781888889192
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 585
• Editor: Henderson Bill