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THE PUSHCART PRIZE, XVI by Bill Henderson

THE PUSHCART PRIZE, XVI

Best of the Small Presses

edited by Bill Henderson

Pub Date: Oct. 1st, 1991
ISBN: 0-916366-71-5
Publisher: Pushcart

Once again, Henderson's annual sampling of the nation's small presses astonishes with its variety and energy. In this generous 16th edition, comprised of 55 stories, essays, and poems, writers well known (Joyce Carol Oates, Paul West, Howard Nemerov, Christopher Buckley) but more often not point up the vitality of the grass-roots American literary landscape. Edward Hoagland's introduction, ``Holy Fools,'' a rather mean-spirited lament for the days when writers wrote for art, not money, doesn't strike a promising note, but it's soon overwhelmed by the work that follows, from David Jauss's opening ``Glossolalia,'' an intensely moving story about a boy's reckoning with his father's sins, to Jess Mowry's ``One Way'' (also reprinted in his Rats in the Trees collection, 1990), a hard-edged yet compassionate slice-of-life about a young ghetto boy. As always, then: must reading for anyone interested in the present and future of American arts and letters.