The Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses 2025 Edition

by Bill Henderson, The Pushcart Prize Editors (Editor)

Overview

AWARDS:

'HIGH HONORS’ FROM THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS (2021)

'LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT' RECOGNITION FROM THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE (2006)

HONORS FROM PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND POETS & WRITERS/ BARNES AND NOBLE

The annual international gathering of the best fiction, poetry, essays and memoirs from small, independent, literary presses, including more than 60 selections from 50 presses, chosen with the advice of 180 distinguished contributing editors.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798985469769
Publisher:	Pushcart Press
Publication date:	12/03/2024
Pages:	560
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Bill Henderson is the founder and editor of the Pushcart Prize. He received the 2006 National Book Critic Circle’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Poets & Writers / Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. He is also the author of several memoirs, including All My Dogs: A Life. The founder of the Lead Pencil Club, Henderson lives on Long Island and In Maine where he runs the Pushcart bookstore – “the world’s smallest bookstore.”

More than 200 Contributing Editors and CO-Editors help select the annual volumes of The Pushcart Prize. The Pushcart Prize Editors come from almost every state in the USA and around the world. Every year more than 8,000 nominations are received for the Pushcart Prize.

Editorial Reviews

2024-09-14
The famed literary annual stares 50 in the face.

The Pushcart anthology has always been admirably open to comers from all backgrounds, and if more of the contributors here are connected to creative writing departments than not, that’s just the way of the writing world these days. A noteworthy exception, Ann Chinnis—an emergency physician—turns in a richly metaphorical poem encouraging young women to “Ignore [their] brother’s laughter / Then go find a pony.” The late Charles Simic knew where he was going, hoping, in a short lyric, “To place one last chip / On this dark night’s / Spinning roulette wheel.” Death is a constant preoccupation of many writers here, as when Nishanth Injam delivers an affecting portrait of a mother, gifted at finding lost things, who leaves her child at a loss for direction when she dies: “Lost somewhere in her trachea: a phrase that would tell me how to live this life.” On matters of life and death, two pieces are especially perceptive. One, a brilliant essay in the form of a set of definitions, finds Abby Manzella writing of the demise of a Pennsylvania coal town, while in another essay Leslie Jill Patterson hauntingly describes the all-too-common American way of death by assault rifle, with bullets that “broke all the bones in the middle of her face, shredded her brain, tore through her abdomen, collapsed her right lung, and splintered her spinal cord.” Another highlight of many comes when the elegant Joyce Carol Oates swears like a stevedore as she peeks into a Carveresque working-class home: “Mick had a temper quick to flare up as a struck match, can’t blame Mick on his feet eight hours of the Goddamned day, if overtime as many as ten, twelve fuckin hours at a shit-job he hated where he had to wear a fuckin olive-gray uniform like a fuckin janitor.”

As ever, an invaluable snapshot of the small-press scene.

Kirkus Reviews