The Pushcart Prize XLlV: Best of the Small Presses 2020 Edition

by Bill Henderson

Overview

The 44th edition of the most celebrated literary series in America.

As Booklist’s Donna Seaman commented on edition #43, “a harvesting of the year’s finest stories, poems and essays…a deeply provocative and artistically resplendent anthology.” This current edition is further proof that important and exciting writing is found in small presses scattered around the country and the world.As the variety of selections in Pushcart Prize XLIV indicates, it is an eclectic and constantly changing community. Over 70 authors are included from more than 50 presses. The Pushcart series is winner of The Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from The National Book Critics Circle, and the Poets & Writers/Barnes & Nobel Writers For Writers citation, plus many other awards. Here are 600 pages of literary brilliance from both new and established authors, featuring traditional and experimental work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781888889963
Publisher:	Pushcart Press
Publication date:	12/10/2019
Series:	The Pushcart Prize Anthologies , #44
Edition description:	2020 Edition
Pages:	600
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.70(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.”

Editorial Reviews

"“The Pushcart Prize editions are urgent and absolutely necessary.”"

Mary Karr

"“The Pushcart Prize has changed the face of American literary publishing and has given untold numbers of young writers a boost.”"

Charles Baxter

2019-11-11
The venerable literary anthology turns 44, celebrated with the trademark mix of top-shelf poetry, fiction, and essays.

Not everyone who began the journey with Henderson in the mid-1970s is around today: The editor names Tony Hoagland, W.S. Merwin, and Mary Oliver among the recently fallen, and a poem by Tom Sleigh, among other commemorations, honors Denis Johnson, who died in 2017. The contribution by Hoagland, an essay called "The Cure for Racism Is Cancer," explores the disease that felled him. "From this rocky promontory," he writes, "you can contemplate the long history of your choices, your mistakes, your good luck. You can think about race, too, because most of the people who care for you will be nonwhite, often from other countries….Your attention is made keen by need and by your intimate dependence upon these inexhaustibly kind strangers." Hal Crowther contemplates another kind of death in his essay "Dante on Broadway," in which he notes that the Florence of Dante's time supported public schools with more than 10,000 students, whereas "seven centuries later in America, a republic with infinitely more wealth and a much higher technical rate of literacy, only the most stubborn optimist could overlook the intellectual stagnation and cultural dry rot that make another Dark Age seem possible, if not imminent." The point is well taken. In a collection full of standouts and only the occasional clunker, there are many excellent contributions, including a poem by Juan Felipe Herrera remarking on the things border crossers leave behind in the desert, with "children still running with / torn faces all the way to Tucson"; a slightly sardonic story by the always readable Joy Williams; and an entertaining tale by Jason Brown that recounts the odd interaction of an unnamed writer with an eccentric couple: "The quality of Grandma's crab cakes suffered after five hours of drinking, but semi-inebriation was the only state in which she would agree to feed people outside the family."

An essential report on the state of the art of American letters.

Kirkus Reviews