Saturday, November 7, 2009

Pushcart Prize XXXIV in stores

A few developments. I'm up to five agents now holding full manuscripts of Remedy Wheel. Surely one will offer representation, if only by accident. Fingers crossed.


Also, the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology has dropped, available now by Amazon or, better yet, your local bookstore. This one includes my essay, "Put on the Petty," originally published in The Missouri Review. It's available both in hardcover and trade paper and probably makes a fantastic companion text in a writing or short story lit class, too--not the original intention of the series by any means--but a good way to help keep it alive in difficult market conditions. In any case, you should go buy it. I can't say enough about how humbled I am to have work appear in this venerable series and how grateful I am to those who encouraged me during the writing of that difficult essay, especially Jeff Doty, Scott Blair, Kristen Keckler, Speer Morgan, and Lee Martin, who picked the title out from a description I gave him over dinner in October 2008. Thanks, all.

On a side note, author Cliff Garstang has long maintained a ranking of those magazines whose fiction either appears or is cited for special mention in the Pushcart most frequently. It's an interesting exercise, not intended to be critical at all, but an arbitrary way to gauge the quality of fiction from the various "little magazines." Here's his latest ranking with the 2010 results included.