PUSHCART PRIZE L

The venerable literary annual turns 50.

“Fuck it, is the general feeling here, because we are minimum-wage employees in a doomed independent bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky.” So opens Henderson’s 50th edition (“L in the dead language”) of his prize volume, the words a bitter salvo from Christie Hodgen’s story “Rich Strike.” The year is 1999, the malcontents are young MFA holders who will go on to lives of unquiet desperation. If there’s a theme that runs through this volume, it’s just that: Granted that literary writers tend not to be the happiest bunch, there’s seldom a smile cracked in this portly anthology. There are some nicely ironic turns, though. One comes from Sarah Green’s found poem, “Tinder,” made up of pitch lines from the eponymous dating service, such as this: “I’m sort of like a deer: wild & free; gentle, yet / Love my life, won’t settle, must see stars.” (Now that’s a writer who deserves more space here.) Another irony begins with Ryan Van Meter’s “An Essay About Coyotes,” which is mostly about a dead dog, complete with the admonition to his writing students, “Write the animal essay that only you can write. Please don’t make me read fifteen dead dog essays.” A dead-dog essay follows a few dozen pages later, and an almost-dead-dog story follows shortly afterward, one that could be a country song (“Their mother is serving eighteen months in a state penitentiary after a prescription drug–fueled joyride…”). The book’s highlights are many, but the best are nonfiction, one a meditation on cancer by the noted poet Ted Kooser, the other a lovely memoir by Stephen Akey called “The Department of Everything” that recounts time spent as a reference librarian answering questions such as, “What time was low tide in Boston Harbor on May 14, 1932?” Nothing about dead dogs, though…

Essential, as ever, for literary trend watchers, and packed with good reading.