The Missouri Review

If you’ve been following the controversy surrounding the denunciation of American writers by Nobel judging panel’s permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, then you’ve probably formed some opinion as to whether U.S. authors are truly “insular†and writing somewhere in the margins . . .

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It was quite a week: sad, scary and history-making. Paul Newman died, the country suffered the largest bank failure in U.S. history, Obama and McCain debated, and Americans—and their representation in Congress—split . . .

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Among the weekend’s big publishing stories is Oprah’s selection for her book club of a debut novel by David Wroblewski. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which had already made the NYT best-seller list this summer, is billed as an epic with a tinge of mystery. . . .

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The devastating news of Wallace’s suicide is all over the Web today. It’s tempting to compare him to other similarly tragic literary figures—the Hemingways and Woolfs and Plaths . . .

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Yesterday in the NY Times books blog, Bob Harris posed the question of where one can find essays in 2008 on the order of the periodical essays of Addison and Steele, Samuel Johnson, De Quincey and other celebrated English essayists. And, he says, it’s definitely not happening in blogs. . . .

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First off, why the ? It’s because as a literary editor I’m employed to ask questions. This, after decades of spending hours upon hours tinkering with textual representations of other people’s imaginations, is how I’ve come to understand what I do. Someday I’ll blog about it, but today I’m more concerned with the evil home inspector. . . .

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Yesterday after I had left the office and was standing outside waiting for my carpool ride, I felt something on my foot. I looked down. . . .

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If you’re one of the millions who are suckers for brain candy and/or celebrity news, it’s an act of extreme willpower to ignore the daily onslaught of lists-of-things-not-worth-listing on MSN.

One such item recently caught my eye: “Hot and Dirty: Stars We Like Better Grimy . . .”

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This morning my husband startled me with one of those questions that because they are so odd and come out of nowhere can really alarm you: “If I had to have my eyes removed, what would you do?” I almost . . .

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The fall issue of TMR is about to go to press, and despite some last-minute changes, we’re running on time. Our broad “theme” is Pick Your Poison: all of the selections deal in some way with damaging habits or traits or behaviors or other bad stuff. Obsession, sex, bad dogs, risk . . .

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn died yesterday, apparently of heart failure, at age 89. When I saw the news last night and mentioned it to my husband, he said it was incredible that the author had lived so long, given that the average Russian lifespan must be shorter than ours (I looked it up; it’s about 67) and that Solzhenitsyn had endured harsh labor-camp conditions for so many years of his early life and survived cancer. . . .

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The June issue of Scientific American featured an article by Jessica Wapner, “The Healthy Type,†(reprinted
online
as “Blogging–It’s Good for You,” describing recent research on the potential physiological benefits of blogging. Neuroscientists, psychologists and other medical researchers theorize that since expressive writing has been demonstrated to improve people’s health . . .

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While we have stacks of submissions waiting to be read, we’re once again short in the interview department. If you have an unpublished interview with an established author, please query me at mutmrquestion@missouri.edu. Past interview subjects include Richard Powers, Antonya Nelson, A.M. Homes, Julian Barnes, Charles Baxter and Stuart Dybek.
We’re also looking for good, sharp [...]

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TMR needs good, fresh author interviews for Volume 31 (2008).  Recent past issues include engaging conversations with such writers and poets as Sven Birkerts, Jeffrey Eugenides, Terrance Hayes, A.M. Homes, Jonathan Lethem.  Interviewers interested in publishing their work in TMR or in querying about interview subjects should contact us at question@missourireview.com.

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Our Editors’ Prize winners in the Essay category have pretty much been about serious subjects. We’ve given the prize to heartfelt elegiac memoirs about parents, childhood or the quasi-mythical ’60s. We’ve given it to tense, scary essays about grueling medical dramas. We’ve given it to indignant travel essays . . .

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The closing essay in the September 9 New York Times Book Review . . . lets Times readers in on the not widely known fact that Alfred A. Knopf once rejected Lolita–along with other well-known works by literary giants: Jorge Luis Borges, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anais Nin, Sylvia Plath, and James Baldwin. . . . But we actually published the Knopf readers’ reports urging rejection of all these major writers. And we did it seven years ago.

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With Labor Day behind us, the next thing we’re looking forward to is the publication of our fall issue, due later this month. New faces predominate in the issue, which we’ve titled “Exposed” . . .

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The top publishing story of the past two days has been Barnes and Noble’s reversal of an earlier decision not to stock the Goldman family’s repackaged version of O.J. Simpson’s ghostwritten confessional/hypothetical (take your pick) If I Did It in their stores. Online preorders for the book were so good . . .

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One week ago today, the Man Booker International prize, now in its third year of existence (the biennial prize was first given in 2005, to Albanian Ismail Kadare), was awarded to the seventy-six-year-old Nigerian literary icon Chinua Achebe. The award carries a 60,000-pound cash prize, along with the obvious international acclaim that may help [...]

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Five years ago we published a story called “Motherland,” by an emerging author named Min Jin Lee. We were unanimous in our admiration of what was later selected as the best fiction of that volume year. It’s the story of a Japanese woman restaurant owner with a compromised reputation [. . .]

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TMR has been publishing book reviews for the past fifteen years or so, and I feel safe in boasting that over that period our reviews have gotten better and better: longer, sharper, better selected and more effectively presented.  And they’re about to get better still.  (And reviewers will get paid more for writing them.)
We started [...]

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Alex Mindt must be blessed. 
First of all, he has a new short-story collection, Male of the Species (Delphinium) which just hit bookstore shelves on May 8. 
Second, his book was an Entertainment Weekly “Pick of the Week” a couple of weeks back.  The EW review gives the book an A.  Incidentally, the title story, “Male of [...]

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. . . of events that stun the nation and news stories that preoccupy the American press, we receive submissions — essays, usually, but also fiction and sometimes even poetry — that comment on the crises in question.  In the course of twenty-one years here, I’ve seen it again and again:  the Oklahoma City bombing, [...]

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On April 13 I turn fifty.  I could say that I’m grateful that my hair is still its natural color-and I am.  That I weigh about what I always have and wear the same size, and still gravitate toward jeans in most situations, if they can be gotten away with, and can still usually get [...]

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Last week I blogged about the awful week I’d had the week before.  But this, the week of April 1, is a good week.  True, it began with April Fool’s Day.  But I only had one joke played on me (my eleven-year-old hair-banded the trigger on the sink sprayer in the on position, so that [...]

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Toward the end of last week I became aware that I was having something that could only be called a bad week. It was tangibly bad. The badness was not an aura; it had weight. It was like a slunking creature following me and creating snickering disturbances behind me that fouled up everything I tried. Or like having a fat gargoyle on my shoulder. The word “gargoyle” comes from the French “gargouiller,” to gurgle, because gargoyles once functioned primarily as spouts on gutters. The gargoyle on my shoulder was gurgling and then drooling on everything I touched, sort of the reverse of the Midas touch-everything the associate editor touched turned to drool, including, I fear, some of my edits.

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Several TMR authors and one about-to-be TMR author have new or recent books out. Michele Morano, whose troubling essay

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Our archived content from past issues is, for the moment, a little hard to find. Maybe that’s why I haven’t looked at it in awhile. Or maybe we’ve just had such a monumental slush pile that it hasn’t crossed my mind. But go to Content, click on Online Features, scroll down, and you’ll see, across the bottom, a list of genres to click on for access to some exceptional literature from TMR’s past. Most of the selections there were originally plucked from the slush pile by our editors, interns and advisors (as is most of our content for every issue).

Skimming the list of archived fiction the other day, I saw a title of a story that I particularly don’t want to forget. “Nine Worthy and the Best That Ever Were” was an Editors’ Prize winner, if memory serves me, but it was no different from most of our regular, slush-pile submissions, in that we’d never heard of the author and had no reason to notice his story over any other.

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Our Editors’ Prize issue is about to happen. We have the cover. We have the contents. We have just about everything finished, with the exception of the last, dirty job of proofing and correcting.

And we have the theme. Or should I say, we have the un-theme.

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The other morning the first news story I heard on the radio was the report of a murder in a very small neighboring town. The town where our family lives is small, but the town in which the murder took place is even smaller, a beautiful, waning river town where almost everyone is some kind of cousin to everyone else (in fact, my husband has several cousins there). It was a clear tragedy, a young woman’s mother shot by an ex-boyfriend when the mother refused to let him see her daughter. The mother was only thirty-seven. The young man, if I heard right, was twenty-one.

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