The Pushcart Prize XXXIV: Best of the Small Presses 2010 Edition (The Pushcart Prize Anthologies, 34) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1888889551 ISBN 13: 9781888889550

Publisher: Pushcart Press, 2009

Synopsis

Reviewing the 2008 edition of The Pushcart Prize, Publishers Weekly called it "a must-have for contemporary literature lovers" (starred review). The Chicago Tribune has raved, "When it comes to contemporary American literature, the small press is where the action is . . . of all anthologies, Pushcart's is the most rewarding to read straight through." In The Pushcart Prize XXXIV more than sixty selections of short stories, essays, and poetry have been picked from thousands of nominations by Pushcart Press staff, contributing editors, and hundreds of small presses. This year Rosanna Warren and Wesley McNair serve as poetry editors. The result is an introduction to a literary world that few readers have access to, where much of today's important new writing is published, far from the commercial influence of the conglomerates. The Pushcart Prize has been chosen for the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement recognition by the National Book Critics Circle and for numerous other awards.

About this title

About the Authors

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.”

More than 200 Contributing Editors and CO-Editors help select the annual volumes of The Pushcart Prize. The Pushcart Prize Editors come from almost every state in the USA and around the world. Every year more than 8,000 nominations are received for the Pushcart Prize.

Reviews

This year's Pushcart anthology offers consistently good prose and poetry that covers a broad range of styles and topics. On the historical front, Tied to History by Greil Marcus and A Poetics of Hiroshima by William Heyen are among several pieces that reinvigorate well-plowed terrain from WWII, while Return to Hayneville by Gregory Orr offers a shocking true tale of police rounding up, imprisoning and battering peaceful protestors in the segregated South. Contemporary standout pieces from J.C. Hallman (Ethan: A Love Story) and Charles McLeod (Edge Boys) mine the rich veins of, respectively, video games and suburban teenage prostitution. But not all of the pieces work: two of the unsuccessful stories in this volume—Mary Gaitskill's The Arms and Legs of the Lake and Brock Clarke's Our Pointy Boots—are failed efforts to interrogate the realities of troops returning from the second Iraq War. The anthology is at its most innovative with its poetry, which surpasses the prose in experiments with language and form. (Nov.)
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The Pushcart Prize collections provide an invaluable record of the most artistic facet of American letters, while editor Bill Henderson’s introductory essays, or what he calls his “annual sermon,” succinctly critique the ups and downs of the publishing world, which is taking its hits along with every other pillar of civilization in the current financial crisis. But Pushcart, a hands-on and sustainable endeavor (Henderson affectionately refers to it as a “funky little commune”), continues to support and celebrate the fruits of small presses and the so-called little literary magazines, considering more than 7,000 entries as they built this year’s brimming, vibrant anthology, the perfect introduction to new writers and adventurous new work by established writers. This particular gathering is extraordinary in its range of voices and subjects, and in the contributors’ passion for language, story, and hidden truths. Here are poets undaunted, including Sallie Tisdale and Paisley Rekdal; daring fiction writers such as Richard Powers and Brock Clarke; and deeply inquisitive essayists, among them Ginger Strand and Lia Purpura. Here is literature to have and to hold. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Pushcart Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1888889551
• ISBN 13: 9781888889550
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 600
• Editor: Henderson Bill