The Missouri Review

Michael Martone never lacks for interesting things to say, whether it be about his native Midwest or the craft of writing or himself (or more accurately, all of himselves, real and invented). In a web-only contribution to The Missouri Review, “Four False Starts: On Beginning and Continuing,” Martone (or rather, “the author”) “reveals (in a [...]

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On the academic calendar, May is one of those transitional months. For the Missouri Review, the end of this May means the end of an era. The physical offices of the Missouri Review are returning to the campus of the University of Missouri-Columbia. The Review, which has been housed for the past sixteen years in [...]

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As part of our effort to participate in the ongoing audio/video revolution that’s sweeping through the Internet, The Missouri Review offers its latest podcast. While previous editions have featured TMR writers reading from their work, with this edition, a pair of TMR interns chat with Steve Almond, which inevitably means conversation about sex. And chocolate. [...]

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Joanna Luloff’s short story, “Let Them Ask,” received the 2006 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for fiction from The Missouri Review. It will appear in our forthcoming issue (29:1). Below, Luloff talks briefly about the roots of the story.
“This story was prompted by my experiences teaching English in a village school in southern Sri Lanka. [...]

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Our forthcoming issue (29:1) features the winners of our annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. As part of the celebration, we were able to bring two of the three winners to Columbia for a reading and reception in late April. Our poetry editor, Jason Koo, spoke with Derek Mong, [...]

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As the assistant managing editor for metro news at the New Jersey Star-Ledger, David Tucker has acquired the reputation of a tough, gruff newsroom boss, the sort of presence whose persistence and sheer relentlessness embodies the hard-nosed, hard-news glory days of journalism. In fact, he was part of the team that won a Pultizer Prize [...]

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The 90th annual Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Letters, Drama and Music, awarded on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board, have been announced by Columbia University.
In fiction, Geraldine Brooks received the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, March (Viking), which imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. Peter March, the absent father in Louisa May [...]

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We can admit that when we think of the National Basketball Association we don’t exactly think “classic literature”–unless, of course, you count Wilt Chamberlain’s autobiography or Dennis Rodman’s tattoos. But both the NBA and Penguin Classics share this in common–they were launched in 1946 and this year they’re celebrating 60 years in the business. So [...]

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Please join us Saturday, April 29, at the Upper Crust in downtown Columbia for the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize Reception and Reading, beginning at 6:30 p.m. The three winners of our annual contest–Joanna Luloff, of Boston, Mass. (fiction); Erica Bleeg, of Portland, Maine (essay); and Derek Mong, of Ann Arbor, Mich. (poetry)–will be honored [...]

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Stephanie Carpenter; Speer Morgan; Edward Falco, author of Sabbath Night in the Church of the Pirhana; Greg Michaelson, Unbridled Books
Thank you to all of those who stopped by our bookfair table at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ (AWP) Conference in Austin, Texas, earlier this month. We gave away several hundred copies of the [...]

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Eric Puchner, whose short story, “Diablo,” appeared in TMR 26:3 (2003), will publish his debut collection, Music Through the Floor, with Scribner. Puchner, who earned his MFA from the University of Arizona and who was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, has also published stories in Zoetrope: All-Story, the Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, and [...]

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Tim Bascom’s memoir Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia will be published in June by Mariner Books. In the foreword, Edward Hoagland calls the book “a tale well-grounded in a little boy’s close-grained focus on apprehensive innocence and vulnerability.” Tim was the Editors’ Prize winner in essay in 2004, and the memoir [...]

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As part of our efforts to bring quality contemporary literature to our readers and friends, the Missouri Review is proud to announce the availability of downloadable audio files of select readings from our authors. It is a service we hope to build upon in the months and years to come as more content is made [...]

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Jason Koo, newly appointed Poetry Editor of the Missouri Review, examines Bachelard’s Poetics of Space in a web-exclusive piece, “In Defense of Daydreaming: Bachelard’s Poetics of Space.”
Koo writes, “I love the title of this book, but it could easily be retitled, In Defense of Daydreaming. Bachelard argues for a certain kind of reading (one that [...]

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For the past 57 years, on January 19, a man has slipped inside a graveyard in Baltimore to pay tribute to Edgar Allan Poe on the writer’s birthday. The man leaves roses and a bottle of cognac on Poe’s grave and then slips back into the night. Despite the efforts of the curious to discover [...]

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When Stephen King weighed in for Entertainment Weekly recently with his best books of 2005, his list included–at No. 2–a book that isn’t yet available, but of which King had read an advanced copy. The book? This Book Will Save Your Life, by A.M. Homes. An interview with Homes, by Michael Piafsky and Christie Hodgen, [...]

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The University of Wisconsin Press has published Funny by former TMR contributor Jennifer Michael Hecht. Winner of the 2005 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, Funny isn’t your typical poetry collection. Divided into three sections–”Sonnet on Mirth,” “Prosody on Comedy,” and “Sonnet on the Ribs of Laughter”–and including an 11-page essay on the “philosophy of funny,” [...]

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Beginning Wednesday, December 21, and over the next week, the Missouri Review Podcast is being featured on iTunes. Visitors to the iTunes home page for podcasts will find our banner among those in rotation at the top of the page. Be sure to check it out as we seek to introduce our writers to an [...]

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In case you missed it on your late local news, the winners of the National Book Awards were announced in a ceremony hosted by Garrison Keillor. Joan Didion took top honors in nonfiction for The Year of Magical Thinking, which recounts the year in which her husband, the author John Gregory Dunne, suddenly died and [...]

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To reach the desk of TMR associate editor Evelyn Somers, one must often skirt around, step over, wade through, lift-and-move precarious stacks and leaning piles of books–hot-off-the-press, ink-not-yet-dry, here-for-your-review books. It’s a feast of words awaiting her consumption, and, like a grand dinner, it’s simply impossible to finish them all. In “A Feast of Books,” [...]

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As part of its “College Week,” Slate asked a handful of journalists, celebrities, CEOs, professors, writers, and editors, “What’s the most influential book you read in college?” Among the respondents were James Fallow, Nicholson Baker, Mark Cuban, David Brooks, Gish Jen, Chris Matthews, Bill Simmons, and Daphne Merkin. Among the answers were The Fountainhead, The [...]

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John Fowles, the author of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Collector, and The Magus, among other works, has died at the age of 79.
As described in the New York Times obituary, Fowles wrote “teasing, multilayered fiction (that) explored the tensions between free will and the constraints of society, even as it played with traditional novelistic [...]

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With the holiday season bearing down upon us, it seems appropriate to note the arrival of two new novels about the life of Jesus from a pair of prominent American authors—Anne Rice and Walter Wangerin Jr.While the life of Jesus as a subject for Wangerin, a Lutheran pastor and author of the National Book Award-winning [...]

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It’s not just here. Two weeks after Walter Bargen, a veteran of the literary scene here in Columbia, announced at a reading that Columbia Books would be closing its doors, comes news that one of the nation’s finest independent bookstores will be following suit.
Athena Bookshop, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, will be closing its doors Nov. 12. [...]

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Stories and poems may be timeless, but writers are not–as Stephanie Carpenter recognizes in “On Being Ma’am-ed.” Though we may long for eternal inclusion in anthologies that celebrate that rare combination of youth and talent, the window of opportunity for such an event in one’s own career closes much more rapidly than we want to [...]

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Jack Nicholson, who is thought of as a Hollywood literati, talks about his reading habits in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly. Nicholson says “I like [Andrew] Vachss’ thirllers, and I just ordered Rushdie’s Salimar the Clown and Doctorow’s The March. Doctrorow chews it up pretty good.” While neither of the latter [...]

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Nonfiction writers, consider attending the NONFICTIONOW conference at the University of Iowa, November 10 to 12. The conference “will highlight some of the best writing of this burgeoning and often indefinable genre,” as well as “generate a discussion of the writing and teaching communities of nonfiction’s myriad forms and the places of intersection.”
Featured speakers include [...]

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British playwright Harold Pinter has been awarded the 75th annual Nobel Prize for Literature. Best known as the author of The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and The Birthday Party, Pinter will receive the $1.3 million prize and joins a long list of distinguished authors including William Faulkner, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jean-Paul Satre, who [...]

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John Grisham stood on the porch of Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s former residence in Oxford, Mississippi, and announced this year’s finalists for the National Book Awards. Five finalists were announced in four categories: fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and young people’s literature. According the National Book Foundation, 1,195 books were nominated this year. Only publishers may nominate.
This [...]

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The Missouri Review proudly announces that “The Passage,” by Murray Farish, of St. Louis, has won this year’s annual William Peden Prize. The prize, given in memory of Dr. William Harwood Peden, a professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia from 1946 to 1979 and co-founder of the Missouri Review, recognizes the best piece [...]

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