The Missouri Review

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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On my drive to school a few days ago, while I was stopped at a red light, behind a Chevy pick-up, I saw something I didn’t understand. A pair of anatomically correct, flesh colored plastic testicles dangled below the truck’s Missouri license plate. Was this what the state legislator had in mind when [...]

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“Language death is a global phenomenon - and has been for millennia - but a global conscience to actually care and do something about it is regrettably recent.” In his book Language Death, linguist David Crystal explores this phenomenon, troubling from the first realization that currently four percent of languages account for 96 [...]

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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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Google Print today resumes its project of digitally archiving the holdings of its partner libraries (the University of Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, the New York Public Library and Harvard). The project has been suspended since August, allowing publishers to determine which of their titles they wish to withhold from the archive. This concession has [...]

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Here’s a fun time-waster: it’s called Book-a-Minute, but really you can “read” a classic novel in about 10 seconds. (My favorite is the entry for The Great Gatsby.) Also, there’s Movie-a-Minute. Be sure to check out the entry for Dr. Strangelove.

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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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In the past weeks, Louisiana State University has welcomed nearly 2800 hurricane-displaced students to its campus. But these students’ hardships are not over. The Southern Review has established its own channel for donations to LSU’s Hurricane Katrina Student Relief Fund. Editor Bret Lott will send a free copy of the journal’s latest [...]

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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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The New York Times announced last week the inception of a new Sunday Magazine feature. “The Funny Pages” will debut on September 18 and consist of 10 pages of serialized fiction and comics, plus weekly “True Life Tales” — “‘A new column showcasing the best young humor writers who tell hilariously true [...]

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Perhaps it doesn’t carry the cocktail-party cache of creative writing or even capital-L Literature, but Faith Kurtyka, in “Confessions of a Comp Enthusiast,” reminds us that there is much for the writer and the artist to appreciate and learn from in the composition classroom.

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Recently, the Multnomah County Library of Portland, Oregon, opened an archive of Native American literature, collections often overlooked, if not historically ignored. The John Wilson Room, Special Collections, “aims to collect all books published (historical and contemporary) of fiction, poetry, short stories and drama by American and Canadian Indian writers.” With over $60,000 in donations, [...]

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In an era when political discourse has been reduced to buzzwords, catchphrases, and slogans–not that ours is the first era in which this has been the case–William Bradley considers his own role as a writer of creative nonfiction. In his web-exclusive piece, “On Personal Essays and Political Discourse (or, Mr. Speaker, We Don’t Need Your [...]

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Two collections of short stories and two memoirs highlight recent book releases from past contributors to the Missouri Review: Brocke Clarke, Carrying the Torch; Donald Hays, Dying Light and Other Stories; Bill Roorbach, Temple Stream: A Rural Odyssey; and Floyd Skloot, A World of Light.
Clarke’s collection of stories, Carrying the Torch (University of Nebraska Press), [...]

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Every once in a while, we get to celebrate one of our own. In this case, it’s a unique literary double-celebration.
Steve Gehrke, poetry editor of the Missouri Review, and his wife, Nadine Meyer, have both been selected as winners in the 2005 National Poetry Series Open Competition. Gehrke’s book, Michelangelo’s Seizure, was selected by T.R. [...]

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If pressed, we can admit this, can’t we? We walk into the house of a friend or a stranger, and our eyes immediately find the bookshelves, begin to assess the contents, and we make instant judgments about the person before us. Hardcovers or paperbacks? Damaged spines or dust jackets in mint condition? Alphabetized by author [...]

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Maybe it’s the caffeine. Maybe it’s the atmosphere. Or maybe it’s just a desire, consciously or unconsciously, to feel like a writer, even if you haven’t yet published a single sentence of prose or poetry. Whatever the case, coffee houses and cafés have long attracted writers and would-be writers, and in today’s Starbucks culture, it’s [...]

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In October 2002, Tom Montag left a career in the printing industry to devote himself full-time over five years to a project he calls “Vagabond in the Middle: An Expedition Into the Heart of the Middle West.” In the nearly three years since, Montag has been traveling what he considers to be the Middle West [...]

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In recogniton of the generosity of Jeffrey E. Smith, of Columbia, Missouri, the Missouri Review is proud to announce that our annual Editors’ Prize contest has been renamed the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, Essay, and Poetry. Thanks to Mr. Smith’s support, the Review will now offer cash prizes of $3,000 to the [...]

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Poet Stanley Kunitz will turn 100 this Friday. To honor him, the New York Times has posted a great little Op-Art piece by Lauren Redniss wherein Kunitz’s words–a narrative about the woods he grew up exploring and which remain an unsullied source of inspiration–surround what seems to me to perfectly capture his uniquely 20th-century [...]

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With 15 countries vying for rights to his debut novel and a feature-length film already in the works, first-time author Chris Cleave seemed well on his way to making it big in the publishing world when an unfortunate turn of events landed his promising novel, Incendiary, in controversial waters. Written in the form of [...]

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Perhaps our poetry editor Steve Gehrke is merely a skeptic. Maybe the problems with his memory are simply his own. But in “The Problem of the Beard,” Gehrke raises an important issue in regard to the reconstruction of the past in creative nonfiction and memoir. “How does the nonfiction writer, the memoirist, deal with the [...]

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How do you celebrate a 400-year anniversary? It is certainly not the paper anniversary, or the silver. But 40 million euros will do the trick. To commemorate the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’ Don Quixote of La Mancha, the government of Castilla-La Mancha in southern Spain is spending 40 million euros ($48.2 million) on a tourist [...]

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Last week while traveling–ironically, not a Kiss’ throw from Hershey, PA–I heard an essay on NPR by recent TMR contributor Steve Almond (”My Mouth, Her Sex, the Night, My Heart,” Spring/Summer 2005) giving his preview opinion of the then-soon-to-be-released Charlie and the Chocolate Factory vs. Gene Wilder’s 1971 film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. [...]

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The Missouri Review tips its hat to Nigerian-born author, Segun A. Afolabi, who, earlier this month, won the Caine Prize for Literature, awarded annually to an African author for a single short story. The prize is named after Sir Michael Caine, the former head of the Man Booker Prize for Literature. During his lifetime, [...]

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Sure, you’ve heard of standard publicity stunts for book promotion—flashy websites, book signings, trade shows, interviews—but floating down the Mississippi on a man-made raft? Sounds a little out of the ordinary, to say the least. But for Brooklyn author John Wray, successfully promoting a book means making headlines. In a highly competitive industry that [...]

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