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THE PUSHCART PRIZE XVII

Name: THE PUSHCART PRIZE XVII
Author: Bill Henderson
ISBN: 0-916366-77-4

BEST OF THE SMALL PRESSES

edited by Bill Henderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1992

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Now in its late teenage, Pushcart's pulse seems to need a jolt. Maybe it's unavoidable. The little magazines it chooses to reprint from are beleaguered from without (no money from their protecting institutions) as well as from within (their increasingly timid Workshop- style poetry and prose). Add to this the comically Kremlin-like apparat that gleans and winnows Pushcart's selections—a three-page list of editors, contributing editors, roving, and special, and managing editors- -plus the clubby in-grouping (in this year's edition there's both a poem about and a mosaical memoir of Raymond Carver!)—and you approach something that techies call system-stress. The poetry here is quiescent, bladeless—and almost all by the same old names. The fiction's somewhat better—yet here also only three voices really ring out engagingly: Francine Prose's in ``Rubber Life''; Lydia Davis's (the ever-increasing comic economy of her melancholy) in ``Four Stories''; and newcomer Karen Minton's, with a really terrifying imaginative proposal about an earthquake along the New Madrid fault, in ``Like Hands on a Cave Wall.'' But it's an essay, Mary Karr's sensible, vigorous skewering of neo-formalist poetry, ``Against Decoration,'' that stands above everything else here. In the shadows of its strong profile, most of the rest of ``the best'' looks barely good enough.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-916366-77-4

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Pushcart

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A SMALL GOOD THING
by Bill Henderson

- 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

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CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

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Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).

All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."

Pub Date: April 8, 1974

ISBN: 0385086954

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
OTHER WORLDS THAN THESE
by Stephen King & Peter Straub

- BOOK REVIEW
NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

- SEEN & HEARD
Stephen King Used ‘Carrie’ Advance To Support Mom

- BOOK TO SCREEN
New ‘Carrie’ Series in the Works at Amazon

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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.