Pushcart prize XLIV, 2020 : best of the small presses / edited by Bill Henderson with the Pushcart Prize editors.

Title :

Pushcart prize XLIV, 2020 : best of the small presses

Format:

Books

Summary:

"As the variety of selections in Pushcart Prize XLIV indicates, it is an eclectic and constantly changing community. Over 70 authors are included from more than 50 presses."--Amazon.com

Language:

English

ISBN - ISSN:

9781888889956

1888889950

9781888889963

1888889969

Physical Description:

599 pages ; 25 cm

General Note:

"With an index to the series"--Spine

Contents:

The arms of Saturday night / Cally Fiedorek -- Homeschool / Meghan O'Gieblyn -- Roll under the waves / Juan Felipe Herrera -- The human soup / Maureen Stanton -- Arson / Charles Simic -- The history of sound / Ben Shattuck -- ERL king / Julia Elliott -- A fable / Graham Barnhart -- Fat swim / Emma Copley Eisenberg -- Old school / Allen Gee -- An endless story / Louise Glück -- Hi ho cherry-o / Becky Hagenston -- The Almadraba / Maia Jenkins -- Say it with your whole black mouth / Danez Smith -- "General: unskilled" / Ryan Eric Dull -- Monticello house tour / Kiki Petrosino -- The peaches of August / Toi Derricotte -- The entertainer / Whitney Collins -- Reza's Restaurant, Chicago 1997 / Kaveh Akbar -- Say this / Lucia Perillo -- Monsters / Margaret Wardlaw -- Stethoscope / Tom Sleigh -- Scandalous women in history / Malerie Willens -- That's the job / Edward Hirsch -- The last voyage of the Alice B. Toklas / Jason Brown -- How to mourn the dead / Nausheen Eusuf -- Braindrain / C Pam Zhang -- The ugly American / Shara Lessley -- Walking in fast-falling dusk what is between us besides / Mary Szybist -- Stories that fit my hands / Rebecca McClanahan -- Rewinding an overdose on a projector / Sean Shearer -- Festival / Mary Miller -- Human traffic / Bruce Cohen -- Hao / Ye Chun -- Versal / Francine J. Harris -- The important transport / Diane Williams.

Footprints in the order of disappearance / Fady Joudah -- The cure for racism is cancer / Tony Hoagland -- Dearest water / Nancy Takacs -- Pattycakes / Claire Davis -- Mud matrix / Hoa Nguyen -- The effect of heat on poor people / Farah Ali -- Is all writing environmental writing? / Camille T. Dungy -- Four short essays personifying a future in which white supremacy has ended / Chen Chen -- New Bees / Claire Luchette -- American landscaping, Philadelphia to Mount Vernon / Roger Reeves -- Bad Northern women / Erin Singer -- The white orchard / Arthur Sze -- Double visitation / Jeffrey Harrison -- I confess: my cultural misappropriation / Allan Gurganus -- Skin-light / Natalie Diaz -- Flour / Joy williams -- An open letter to white women concerning 'The Handmaid's Tale' and America's cultural amnesia / Tiffany Midge -- Wild pansy / Lisa Bellamy -- Stay there / Leslie Pietrzyk -- Five and a possible / Alison C. Rollins -- Bon voyage, Charlie / Dan Pope -- Jailbait / Ottessa Moshfegh -- Falling / Ron Sottlemyer -- Chinko / Samantha Libby -- Draft/mouth / Peter LaBerge -- Citizenship / Javier Zamora -- A deliberate thing I once said to my skin / Megan Baxter -- In that time / Richard Bausch -- In the studio at the end of day / Catherine Barnett -- Eulogy / Patricia Foster -- Dante on Broadway / Hal Crowther -- Infidels / Joanna Scott -- If you find a mouse on a glue trap / Suzanne Farrell Smith -- Young hare / Diane Seuss -- Petronia Petronia Jyekundensis / Jan Verberkmoes -- Oasis / Deborah Forbes.

Subject:

American literature -- 21st century.

American literature -- History and criticism.

Small presses -- United States.

Short stories, American -- 21st century.

American poetry -- 21st century.

American essays -- 21st century.

Autobiography -- 21st century.

First Title value, for Searching:

Pushcart prize XLIV, 2020 : best of the small presses / edited by Bill Henderson with the Pushcart Prize editors.

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Library	Audience	Home Location	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Ring	Adult	Non-fiction	Book	810.8 P	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

As Booklist's Donna Seaman commented on edition #43, "a harvesting of the year's finest stories, poems and essays a deeply provocative and artistically resplendent anthology." This current edition is further proof that important and exciting writing is found in small presses scattered around the country and the world.As the variety of selections in Pushcart Prize XLIV indicates, it is an eclectic and constantly changing community. Over 70 authors are included from more than 50 presses. The Pushcart series is winner of The Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from The National Book Critics Circle, and the Poets & Writers/Barnes & Nobel Writers For Writers citation, plus many other awards. Here are 600 pages of literary brilliance from both new and established authors, featuring traditional and experimental work.

Author Notes

Bill Henderson is the author of "The Kid That Could", a novel, & two memoirs, "His Son" & "Her Father". He is the founder & publisher of Pushcart Press & the editor of the acclaimed Pushcart Prize series. He lives on Long Island & in Maine.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Henderson's sprawling, trenchant anthology opens with a fitting dedication to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose "risky publication of Allen Ginsberg's Howl" in 1956 marked an "essential legacy" for small presses. With fiction, poetry, and essays, the writers showcase a willingness to "write above the fray in a society most comfortable with palatable mediocrity," as Ottessa Moshfegh declares in her essay, "Jailbait," about her experience navigating the fraught sexual ground between her as a young woman and a famous male writer. In "Braindrain," C Pam Zhang imagines a startling phantasmagoria of disembodied border crossings, while Danez Smith offers a hymn of outrage at racial profiling with "Say It With Your Whole Black Mouth." Other entries are more understated. Ben Shattuck's story, "The History of Sound," features an older man's elegant remembrance of an affair with another man who shared a love for Scots-Irish ballads in 1917; the protagonist in Mary Miller's "Festival" considers the consequences about remaining quiet about the truth; and stories by Ryan Eric Dull and Malerie Willens explore the humanity beneath the euphemistic language of the workplace. While Tony Hoagland's essay, "The Cure for Racism Is Cancer," falls short with tone-deaf generalizations, the anthology's only real embarrassment is its riches. Readers will delight in this exciting mix of established and emerging authors working at the top of their game. (Dec.)

Kirkus Review

The venerable literary anthology turns 44, celebrated with the trademark mix of top-shelf poetry, fiction, and essays.Not everyone who began the journey with Henderson in the mid-1970s is around today: The editor names Tony Hoagland, W.S. Merwin, and Mary Oliver among the recently fallen, and a poem by Tom Sleigh, among other commemorations, honors Denis Johnson, who died in 2017. The contribution by Hoagland, an essay called "The Cure for Racism Is Cancer," explores the disease that felled him. "From this rocky promontory," he writes, "you can contemplate the long history of your choices, your mistakes, your good luck. You can think about race, too, because most of the people who care for you will be nonwhite, often from other countries.Your attention is made keen by need and by your intimate dependence upon these inexhaustibly kind strangers." Hal Crowther contemplates another kind of death in his essay "Dante on Broadway," in which he notes that the Florence of Dante's time supported public schools with more than 10,000 students, whereas "seven centuries later in America, a republic with infinitely more wealth and a much higher technical rate of literacy, only the most stubborn optimist could overlook the intellectual stagnation and cultural dry rot that make another Dark Age seem possible, if not imminent." The point is well taken. In a collection full of standouts and only the occasional clunker, there are many excellent contributions, including a poem by Juan Felipe Herrera remarking on the things border crossers leave behind in the desert, with "children still running with / torn faces all the way to Tucson"; a slightly sardonic story by the always readable Joy Williams; and an entertaining tale by Jason Brown that recounts the odd interaction of an unnamed writer with an eccentric couple: "The quality of Grandma's crab cakes suffered after five hours of drinking, but semi-inebriation was the only state in which she would agree to feed people outside the family."An essential report on the state of the art of American letters. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

There are hundreds of small presses in America, each of which has, to quote Pushcart founder Bill Henderson, kept the faith in a culture that often does not care about the heart, mind, and soul of all that writers and editors express and support. Each year, Pushcart pushes back against society's cacophony, aggression, and divisiveness with a robust anthology of exceptional poems, stories, and essays by writers emerging and established. Pushcart is a beacon and wellspring for aspiring writers and inquisitive readers. The list of indie presses which have contributed works to this, the forty-fourth triumphant Pushcart Prize volume, fills more than 20 pages, providing a unique resource. And the contents are, as ever, thrilling and reassuring in their adventurous variety and piercing insights. Camille T. Dungy explains why all writing is environmental writing. Claire Luchette's wily story follows a band of self-sufficient nuns on a quest for bees. The unexpected also occurs in stories by Joy Williams and Maia Jenkins. The traumas of displacement shape poems by Bruce Cohen, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Hoa Nguyen. Imagination, artistry, and compassion flourish here.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist