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PUSHCART PRIZE XXXV

Name: PUSHCART PRIZE XXXV
Author: Bill Henderson
ISBN: 978-1-888889-59-8

BEST OF THE SMALL PRESSES

edited by Bill Henderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 2, 2010

As ever, an essential barometer for spotting literary trends—and, for would-be writers, figuring out where to send the next...

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The Pushcart Prize hits its 35th anniversary, and editor, literary activist and Pushcart pusher Henderson is ticked off.

That’s about 16 decades in dog years, or a century in computer years, a time long enough to note some trends and to develop a cantankerous irascibility. When he started his annual round-up of the small-press world, writes Henderson, “as now, publishing was in crisis,” with conglomerates snapping up formerly independent houses and pundits bemoaning the collapse of literary culture. Well, now things are different, he writes: “Now, our busy money folks don’t even recognize print—fake books (Kindle) and fake publishers (vanity) abound.” No e-books, presumably, for the Pushcartians, and Henderson compounds the snippiness later with outlashings at the likes of Northwestern University Press and Doubleday for various sins against the culture. But no matter; publishing may be in a state of crisis, but that seems not to have stanched the flow of manuscripts into the judges’ inboxes. As usual, the Pushcart Prize anthology turns up many of the usual suspects, the tenured MFA mafia, seasoned with young and emerging writers bursting with fresh insights. Which is to say: It’s always good to hear from warhorses such as Philip Levine (“I’m doing my feeble best to entrance you”) and Barney Rosset (“Beckett came in, tall, trench coated, and taciturn, on his way to another appointment”), but for the news-seekers, the greater pleasures in the book will be in the arrivals of writers such as Amanda Rea, who writes affectingly of her father’s efforts to make it as a country singer, and Susan McCallum-Smith, who blends offbeat family history with, of all things, episodes in philately. As is often the case, the nonfiction is fresher than the fiction, which tends to the derivative (if the accomplished derivative)—though Marilyn Chin’s subversive take on Buddhist folklore, mixing plainspun folktales with lines of the Don Rickles variety (“Leave the poor bird alone, you loser-redneck”), makes up for a lot of workshoppish sins.

As ever, an essential barometer for spotting literary trends—and, for would-be writers, figuring out where to send the next submission. And, as ever, essential, period.

Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-888889-59-8

Page Count: 580

Publisher: Pushcart

Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
PUSHCART PRIZE L
by Bill Henderson & edited by Pushcart Prize editors

- BOOK REVIEW
THE PUSHCART PRIZE XLIX
edited by Bill Henderson with Pushcart Prize editors

- BOOK REVIEW
THE PUSHCART PRIZE XLVIII
edited by Bill Henderson

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

- SEEN & HEARD
The Snowy Day Is NYC Library’s Most Popular Book

- SEEN & HEARD
ALA Releases List of 2020’s Most Challenged Books

- SEEN & HEARD
NYT Readers Voting on Best Book of Past 125 Years

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.