The Pushcart Prize, XVI: Best of the Small Presses - Softcover

This annual anthology of the best stories, essays and poetry published by small presses continues to illustrate that highly literary standards can survive despite the power wielded by profit-hungry publishing behemoths. Edward Hoagland's introduction commends obscure, struggling artists with literary integrity, and William Kennedy argues in a witty essay, "Writers and Their Songs," that the novel is not dead. The best stories include Joyce Carol Oates's unnerving "The Hair," about two couples who fall in love with each other, and Helen Norris's beautifully descriptive "Raisin Faces," about a senile woman who mentally inhabits her sunny past. Many protagonists in the grab bag of fiction here are adolescents, often of ethnic heritage, or young women exploited by dominant men. In Janet Peery's "Nosotros," a Mexican girl is seduced by the Anglo son of her mother's employer. A 19-year-old black woman remains brave amid ghetto crime in Susan Straight's disquieting "The Box." Particularly moving is Renee Manfredi's "Bocci," in which a devout 10-year-old is raped by a man from her Italian community.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.