The Missouri Review

On the sleety evening of Saturday, April 12, we had the pleasure of hosting the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize Reading and Reception. Despite rampant flight cancelations leading into the weekend, Robert, Jude and Otis were all able to join us. We had an incredible pool of submissions for last year’s contest, but our winners’ readings demonstrated the qualities of freshness and heart that won for them these prizes.

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Somehow we’ve neglected to raise a fuss yet over the fact that Paul Guest, one of the poets appearing in our current issue, very recently won a prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award, which currently comes with a sturdy cash prize of $50,000. Since 1985 it’s been awarded annually to ten emerging writers of promise, in […]

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We’re pleased to announce the winners of the first annual Audio Competition. We received 169 entries, and the quality was deep in nearly every category. In the coming days and weeks, we’ll be posting the winning entries on our homepage and packaging the top entries into Podcasts. Our thanks go to Jay Allison of transom.org […]

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The Missouri Review has a long history of sending our former interns into the world of publishing. Jason Koo, our former poetry editor, becomes our latest flag bearer into the literary magazine world. He and friends Bill Hughes, Robert Liddell, and Jeff Bernard have just launched Low Rent magazine. Check it out at www.lowrentmagazine.com.

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About rewriting and editing the American playwright Tennessee Williams said, “You have to murder all your little darlin’s.” It’s been known for several decades that the editor Gordon Lish did more than slay a few precious lines in Raymond Carver’s 1981 story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In […]

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On Tuesday, January 8, Governor Matt Blunt named Walter Bargen, one of our favorite local poets, as official poet laureate of Missouri.
Walter’s work has appeared in the pages of The Missouri Review no less than four times–in 1983, 1989, 1991 and 1997.

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On behalf of this year’s Editors’ Prize contest coordinators Jessica Garratt, Stephanie Carpenter and Darren Pine, we would like to thank everyone who entered this year. The quality of entries in all genres was exceptional, making reading fun but deciding on winners and finalists daunting. Around the office, we had many discussions about […]

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If you were listening to Columbia’s NPR station last week and thought you heard Speer’s voice, you weren’t mistaken. Speer sat down to chat with Janet Saidi for Off the Clock, a local arts/culture program. Listen to the complete interview here.

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The book world’s abuzz over news of the upcoming novel from James Frey. Perhaps you remember Oprah spitting his name with disdain. Frey wrote A Million Little Pieces in 2003, a blockbuster “memoir” about a hard-drug lifestyle that happened to contain more fiction than the world was happy about at the time.
After […]

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There is a disturbing misconception in the air these days that says if only we prepare enough, we can prevent tragedy.  Airports teem with Homeland Security officers.  Every local government has terrorist-response plans in place, as does every school.  We are told that the country is on code yellow, or orange, or, God forbid, red.  […]

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Congratulations to the winners of the 2006 Editor’s Prize Contest. It was a tough competition this year, and we’d like to thank everyone who submitted their work to our judges. Here are the finalists:
Fiction
Winner:
Jacob M. Appel, “Creve Coeur”
New York, NY
 
Finalists:
Jennine Capó Crucet, “And in the Morning, Work”
Champaign, IL
 
Erica Debeljak, “Biology”
Evanston, IL 
 
Elliott Holt, “Fem Care”
Brooklyn, NY
 
Poetry
Winner:
Jonathan […]

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Recently a group of University of Missouri faculty created a list of their favorite influential books published since 1900. Those that made the cut were chosen for literary merit, availability, and their appeal to young readers. You can browse the titles here.

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The short list of nominees for the annual Costa Book Awards, formerly known as the Whitbread Prize, has been released.   To be eligible, authors must be based in the UK or Ireland.  Winners will be announced in early February. 
Leading contenders for the prize in the novel category are Mark Haddon (A Spot of Bother) and […]

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Each year, The Missouri Review awards the Peden Prize to the author of the “best short story,” as selected by an outside judge. This year, Ed Falco, author of Plato at Scratch Daniel’s, Acid and Wolf Point, picked the Paul Eggers’s story, “This Way Uncle into the Palace,” as the best of the volume year. […]

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In the past few weeks we’ve had a lot of news from past staff members, authors and others.  Here are some bits and pieces:
Former Web Editor and prolific TMR blogger Scott Kaukonen has moved on to an Assistant Professorship at Sam Houston State University.  Scott, a talented young fiction writer who replaced past managing editor […]

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I was deeply saddened to learn recently that Deborah Tall passed away late last week. Poet, essayist, editor of the Seneca Review for twenty-four years, wife, and mother, Deborah is the author of Summons, From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place, and most recently, A Family of Strangers, a memoir in the […]

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An unpublished work by Sylvia Plath has been discovered in the Plath archive at Indiana University.
The sonnet appears in Blackbird, the joint online venture of the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University and the New Virginia Review.

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Books, not guns, are some of the latest weapons against crime in Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico. The Nezahualcoyotl police force now requires its officers to read classic literature, such as Don Quixote, as part of their training to tackle crime in the streets. The program is aptly named Literature on Alert.

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While poetry readers should check out Kevin Larimer’s feature on debut poetry collections, “Finishing the First: A Dozen Poets Who Sealed the Deal in 2006,” in the Nov/Dec issue of Poets & Writers, his diplomatic list, by default, neglects many other knockout first books.  Here are a dozen more first-timers from 2006 to look for:

Brian […]

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The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006 was announced last Thursday and this year’s winner, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, “has a reputation as a social commentator even though he sees himself as principally a fiction writer with no political agenda.”  Listen to Pamuk’s address on artistic freedom at the PEN Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Memorial […]

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It’s that time of the year, when a young writer’s thoughts turn to $3,000 cash prizes. You only have four more weeks to polish off those manuscripts and get them in the mail for the 16th annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prizes at The Missouri Review. We’re giving away $3,000 each to the first place […]

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The Pushcart Prize XXXI: Best of the Small Presses (2007 Edition), available this December, will include stories by John Clayton and David Schuman.
Included in the anthology are Clayton’s “Voices”, which appeared in issue 28:3 of The Missouri Review, and Schuman’s “Stay” in issue 28:2.
Congratulations to these authors!

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Mark Wisniewski’s short story “Stricken” recently took first place in the contest for the 2006 Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction. Mark’s story “Birdie” appeared in THE MISSOURI REVIEW, Volume XVI, Number 1.
Henry Shukman (”Mortimer of the Mahgreb”) has just had a story collection of that same title published by Pan Macmillan.
Davis […]

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It is still hard for me to believe that Milosz is dead. I know he was 93, but his age, so far from being an indication that he would die soon, seemed rather proof of his invincibility. No poets, I thought, lived into their nineties—and if they did, they certainly weren’t productive. One could be […]

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[By Michael Piafsky]
n a few months, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) will host its annual convention, and this year, for the first time, it will be held outside of the United States, in beautiful Vancouver, B.C. Many of the best writers from across Canada will be there, but one, among the best […]

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An article in The New York Times reported a decline in book consumption by Americans in recent years. The article noted a “particular decline” in fiction, poetry, and drama. While this may seem like more good news for nonfiction writers (who already live longer and are less likely to be mentally ill–as Bern […]

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While people across the country celebrated the Fourth of July, much of the rest of the world was watching the final game of the European Championships — the second greatest competition in the world of soccer next to the World Cup. The final brought the implausible match-up of two underdogs: the host country, Portugal, and […]

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The New Yorker recently published an article about the history of writer’s block that recounts many famous cases of the malady. As many of you may already know, writer’s block strikes everyone… not just the famous. So what can you do to get past it? Prompts might be a small step in […]

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Dust off your eyeglasses, because this month, Barnes & Noble is giving you a few reasons to pick up a good book. If you’re looking for a canonized, tried-and-true classic, stock up on B&N’s pocket-sized Collector’s Library editions. Books such as Homer’s The Iliad, Austen’s Persuasion, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Flaubert’s Madame […]

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In my last post, I briefly discussed the value of literary magazines. This week I have a piece of related news that puts last week’s preaching to practice. The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses has received the green light to host a several-city Lit Mag Fair; the CLMP’s first Fair was held […]

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