PUSHCART PRIZE XLVI

BEST OF THE SMALL PRESSES 2022

edited by Bill Henderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 7, 2021

The 46th edition of the venerable annual shows a welcome burst of new life amid lots of death.

Small presses, notes longtime editor Henderson, are the bulwark between literature and a steadily agglomerating publishing industry in which “authors become mere content providers for the present moment.” That said, present-moment concerns abound in this overstuffed anthology. In this second year of Covid, death is a constant. In his smart short story “Biology,” Kevin Wilson opens with the death of an eighth grade teacher with whom his protagonist, 25 years earlier, had had an odd conversation concerning a game called “Death Cards.” If you drew a death card, well, you die. And what if you don’t draw a death card, asks the teacher. “You still die, but you die in your sleep,” says the protagonist. “Peacefully.” Just a few pages later, in a story by Daniel Orozco, a young boy whose mother has just died of “an exceptionally rare and virulent spinal cancer” is comforted—if you can call it that—by an alcoholic father who instructs him that, yes, we all die, and that when we do, “that’s all she wrote.” In a memorable short poem called “Black Box,” Sandra Lim conjures quiet grief: “Make him come back, she said, / her voice like something brought up intact / from the cold center of a lake.” Suicide, 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, all find their places here. Refreshingly, the old guard is not much evident in favor of comparatively new voices, though stalwart Joyce Carol Oates turns in an attention-getting prose poem incorporating parole petitions of the now elderly Manson family women: “Because I hated them. Because I had always hated them—beautiful women and girls,” says one to excuse her murderousness. A particularly high point: Sidestepping all the mayhem, in an essay called “The Kaleshion,” Jerald Walker recounts the perilous path from Afro to Jheri curl to self-administered haircuts, one of the last of which yields a hilarious disaster and a rare and welcome moment of laughter.

As ever, an essential volume for anyone tracking the progress of American letters.

Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-9600977-4-6

Page Count: 576

Publisher: Pushcart

Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021

Categories:

SHORT STORIES | GENERAL FICTION