The Missouri Review

I just read an article on newly discovered sea creatures that reminds me of a wonderful little essay by Lewis Thomas. The essay’s titled “Seven Wonders.” Everybody should read it. It appears in Lewis’s collection, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a title that fits rather nicely with our latest List of the Week.
My first encounter with “Seven Wonders” was as an undergraduate at [...]

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Want to get noticed in a good way? Get out there and buy a sled. 
Today I discovered the power of the sled-bearer to bring joy to the masses. Everyone pays attention when a shopper carries a sled through a store. Some people even pause to compliment the sled and speculate as to the amount of fun that will be had with [...]

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I love clothes and have enjoyed the primaries and this election in part because all the candidates are so snappily dressed. We are well past the days when politicians were limited to power ties, button-down shirts and navy blue Brooks Brothers suits. Much of Washington has discovered designer duds.
Yet, female politicians and political [...]

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My apologies, folks. My TMR blog this week was going to be a comic strip, but Berkeley Breathed — my favorite cartoonist ever — is retiring his Opus character tomorrow, and, frankly, I’m just too sad.
If I may, a few words in remembrance of a beloved friend.
Farewell, gentle penguin. Many will remember you as [...]

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Time to address a seldom discussed but alarmingly common trend I’ve noticed in creative nonfiction submissions — a specific kind of essay I call the Embarrassing Restroom Adventure.  
The details of ERAs vary widely, limited only by the number of ways going to the bathroom can go horribly wrong. Still, almost all ERAs follow the same basic trajectory: narrator enters restroom and gets comfortable; [...]

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I’ve never been a baby person. More than that, I find baby lust a boring subject. There’s been a recent spate of movies about women whose biological clocks are ticking loudly, the alarm set to go off somewhere around forty. Baby Mama, Miss Conception, and Then She Found Me are three movies [...]

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Here’s a question for you, writer. What do you keep in your writing toolkit these days?
What materials do you keep within arm’s reach when you work? What does your reference library look like? What, in other words, is vitally important to your job as a writer?
Do you still use your trusty old print thesaurus, or do [...]

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Good news this week for transparency, which is poised to make a huge comeback in the wake of global economic apocalypse.
This is one of those weird moments in history right after the words, Oh, busted! echo through the collective human consciousness, when it’s still unclear just how much deception there’s been, but all parties tentatively resolve to [...]

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately of misinterpretation. As a student of literature and a participant in several creative fiction workshops, I’ve dealt with both sides of the issue—I’ve spent hours trying to unearth the true meaning of a poem or a passage, only to find that my interpretation is grossly different from my professor’s; [...]

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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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Here at The Missouri Review, we strive to publish captivating poems, stories, and essays. We hope our readers enjoy them, find them enlightening, provocative, and moving. Often when we publish something, we hope the reader finds it somehow relatable. 
As the 2008 presidential election draws near, though, I’ve found myself rethinking the term, “relatable.” It seems all the major players in the [...]

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Earlier this afternoon, almost running late for our weekly editorial meeting at The Missouri Review, I rode my bike hard along a stretch wooded trail. Walking toward me was a short white-bearded man in a straw Panama hat and tropical shirt and a very tall, fresh-faced nun in a full, modern-day habit. I [...]

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The best poetry is timeless and speaks to any age. Yeats’ often-quoted poem “The Second Coming†was written in 1920 in the aftermath of the First World War. He believed the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic moment, a feeling that resonates today.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy [...]

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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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It’d been one of those days when my mind was like a personal check from a grad student: unlikely to clear. I stepped outside to give it a try nonetheless.

I left my office and walked across campus toward the little coffeeshop in the library, figuring that if the stroll didn’t do the trick, a couple doses of caffeine [...]

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Why Enter Our Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize?
Our former poetry editor Jessica Garratt’s poetry collection Fire Pond has won the 2008 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. Her book will be published by the University of Utah Press, and she will be reading in their upcoming guest writer series. Also Jessica will receive [...]

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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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Lately, I’m totally fascinated by the spaces where people write. This was demonstrated today when my friend Marybeth called to tell me she finished the story she’s been working on for the last year and a half.
“Where did you write it?†I asked, forgetting that I probably should have congratulated her first.
She thought for [...]

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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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Good news this week for planet Earth, which was not destroyed when CERN turned on its new Large Hadron Collider.
The enormous, expensive, subterranean experiment gave citizens around the globe cause for conCERN (see what I did there?), especially after some experts warned that the device could create a microscopic black hole that would absorb the [...]

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It takes some pretty fancy foot work to forge over 400 literary letters and then get a book deal out of it as Lee Israel has done with her recently published memoir “Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger.â€
In the 90s when Israel’s career as a biographer stalled she made a bold [...]

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Bad news this week for author Stephanie Meyer, who had previously distributed a few rough copies of the manuscript of her latest novel, Midnight Sun, and was disappointed to learn that … bum bum BUM! — you guessed it — somebody put one on the Internet.
The novel would have been the last installment of Meyer’s Twilight series, which, as far as I [...]

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Now that the Olympics are over and Michael Phelps with his eight gold medals is off on a victory lap of TV talkshows (look for him on SNL this weekend), we can take time to consider the proper pronunciation of the city “Beijing.”
In her blog “The Word” from The Boston Globe, Jan Freeman, takes on [...]

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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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According to Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History, the word “biography†was not coined in English until the late seventeenth century (the word is a Greek concoction meaning “life depictionâ€). Until a hundred years ago biography was relegated to inferior status in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a sub-branch of literature devoted to [...]

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Cash Peters’ entertaining take on print-on-demand technology

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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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