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PUSHCART PRIZE XXXIV

Name: PUSHCART PRIZE XXXIV
Author: Bill Henderson
ISBN: 978-1-888889-55-0

BEST OF THE SMALL PRESSES

edited by Bill Henderson and Roseanna Warren and Wesley McNair and Pushcart Prize editors ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 30, 2009

Smart, if perhaps a touch thick around the middle, as befits the onset of middle age.

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The 34th annual gathering of the small-press tribes, as broad-ranging as ever.

In a time when publishing is conglomerated and compromised and when, notes ringmaster Henderson, writers are called “content providers,” it’s hard to remain hopeful. Yet, Henderson adds (a touch predictably), we now have “a president who can actually read, write, feel, think and govern,” so things may not be so terrible after all. Having worked through 7,000 submissions, Henderson and his fellow conspirators present some of the usual suspects, if sometimes in lesser-known guises: Edward Hoagland as fiction writer, for instance, rather than as travel essayist and journalist. Some of those usual suspects are academics ironically distancing themselves from the academy while honoring all the usual academic tropes. (Identified in that lineup: Christie Hodgens, J.C. Halliman, Brock Clarke.) Other contributors operate somewhere between the fringe and the mainstream, doing their work without much support but with obvious devotion—poet Kim Addonizio, for example, represented here by a delicious send-up of the academic poetry scam: “Spend an afternoon having your makeup professionally done for the taping of a Barnes & Noble interview in which you say things like, ‘If you want to be a writer, you must simply persist.’ ” Among this year’s highlights: a paranoia-tinged story by Richard Powers about a computer virus that may be more deadly than even its makers intended; a superb piece by Adam Zagajewski about the all-too-human but somehow divine Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz (“tender, magnanimous, and charming…but when he spoke in public he retained the tone of an angry prophet”); a searching investigation by emerging writer Ginger Strand of the life of Iron Eyes Cody, and of the big-polluting sponsors of his “crying Indian” ad; and, best of all, a meditation by Sallie Tisdale on, of all things, flies.

Smart, if perhaps a touch thick around the middle, as befits the onset of middle age.

Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-888889-55-0

Page Count: 532

Publisher: Pushcart

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009

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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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.

Pub Date: June 1, 1985

ISBN: 068487122X

Page Count: 872

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).