Five years ago, when I learned that Neil Azevedo—a former editor at Columbia University Press—was starting a literary press in Nebraska, I was delighted. Even if it was called Zoo Press, I’m a fourth-generation Nebraskan, so I wanted very much to see this venture succeed. And Azevedo initially made some exciting moves. He forged contest partnerships with Paris Review and Kenyon Review, he arranged for distribution through the University of Nebraska Press, and acquired Nebraska Review from the University of Nebraska–Omaha. By late 2004, he seemed poised for a breakthrough.

His upcoming line-up included: a second book by New England Review poetry editor C. Dale Young that was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award; a book of essays by Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry; and the Zoo Anthology of Younger Poets, edited by New Criterion poetry editor David Yezzi. Azevedo seemed to have cornered the market on talented, young poet-editors. Then, he did something very strange… He disappeared. He stopped publishing books. He stopped answering his correspondence.

But, lest you think that Zoo had gone completely out of business, the press’s website continues to offer updated information on upcoming contests—and instructs people on where to send their money. But apparently they’re not publishing those books either, because David Baker, poetry editor at Kenyon Review and annual judge of Zoo’s Kenyon Review Poetry Prize, has taken the extraordinary measure of posting an open letter on the Kenyon Review website, informing their readers that Priscilla Sneff’s winning book O Woolly City “is still not available; nor is it in production. She has never received the substantial prize money ($3,500). She has heard nothing from Zoo Press for a year. Neither have I. For the past year I have left many emails at Zoo Press’s address and at Mr. Azevedo’s address; I have left phone messages at his home and at the office; I have sent real-mail letters. I have received not a word from him or any associate.”

Neil Azevedo, where are you? And what are you doing with the entry fees submitted to your contest?

Apparently, a few Congressional staffers are rewriting or deleting portions of the Wikipedia entries of their bosses (via Slashdot). The adminstrators at Wikipedia have temporarily resorted to banning them: “the IP ranges of US Congress have been currently blocked, but only for a week until the issue can be addressed more directly.” The (Mass.) Lowell Sun reports that:

The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat. . . . The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six months.

Stefan Beck of The New Criterion disses the new journal n+1.

Congratulations to Arthur Sze on becoming the first Poet Laureate of Santa Fe. There’s a very nice profile of Arthur in the Santa Fe Free New Mexican, and you can read one of his poems in the current issue of VQR.

Edward Wyatt, in yet another investigation of the James Frey case published in Saturday’s New York Times, says that the book industry is beginning to ask questions about Kassie Evashevski, Frey’s agent, and Sean McDonald, who edited A Million Little Pieces and Mr. Frey’s second memoir My Friend Leonard. Let’s pause for just a second to take this in: the book industry is shocked to learn that an agent may have been advocating for her author, rather than prioritizing the needs of a publisher? This seems a little pollyanna in the first place, but here’s how Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove/Atlantic, phrased it: “I want to know, where is Kassie in this? What did she know and when did she know it?” Are Frey and his agent really this bad? Thirty years ago—when Republican Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee asked, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”—such a question was reserved for abuse of power in the highest precincts of government. Today, we have an administration that feels it is okay to: wiretap any of your phone calls or e-mail correspondence “with someone abroad,” track what books you buy on Amazon, and record what you check out of the library or web pages you visit while there. If the administration decides—remember, we don’t need no stinkin’ judges—you are dangerous based on this information (which is classified and therefore unavailable to your attorney), they have the power to arrest you without charge and torture you for information. And our greatest outrage is that Kassie Evashevski may have known that portions of A Million Little Pieces were made up?

CBC Arts is reporting that a newly discovered letter reveals that Upton Sinclair—the famed muckracker and author of the novel Boston, impassioned fictionalization of the conviction and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti—had direct knowledge that the two men were, in fact, guilty of the murders of a security guard and a factory boss, committed while robbing the factory’s payroll. Sinclair describes meeting their lawyer: “He … told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them.” It’s time for someone to reread The Jungle. Maybe turn-of-the-century meatpacking wasn’t so bad either…

British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion is leading the charge to raise money to help the British National Portrait Gallery buy a rare painted portrait of metaphysical poet John Donne. Trouble is, they need £1.6 million. The London Telegraph quotes Motion as saying: “It is cheap at the price and if we don’t buy it somebody else will and that will be somebody else overseas. If that happens it will be a catastrophe.”

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a science fiction editor at Tor Books, offers an interesting take on the ephemerality of literature and current copyright law, based on a close look at past bestseller lists:

The literature taught in schools is that which has survived: a collection of gross statistical anomalies. This is misleading. Falling out of print is a book’s natural fate. We can belatedly train ourselves to believe that this will happen to other people’s books. What’s hard is for writers to believe it will happen to their own. . . .

Consider, then, the duration of copyrights. They’ve gone from 28 years renewable to 56, then 28 renewable to 95, to life of the author plus 70. Given the range of human lifespans and the extreme rarity of prepubescent authors, you can pretty much figure that by the time a 95-year copyright runs out, the author will be dead and gone, and any offspring will have reached their majority. You can’t exactly draw a line, but somewhere in there, copyright stops being about directly rewarding an author for his work. What’s left is an intangible time-travelling value: the hope of being read.

(via Boing Boing)

Galleycat reported yesterday Nasdijj, the “Native American” writer that the LA Weekly outed last week as a middle-aged white guy of Scandinavian descent named Tim Barrus, has turned up offering one publisher his side of the “the scandal of Nasdijj.” And Hillel Italie reports in the AP that Ballantine has pulled their two Nasdijj memoirs from the market after the Raleigh News & Observer discovered that Barrus and Nasdijj share the same Social Security Number.

Lawrence Weschler, contributing editor to VQR, has been named the Artistic Director for the Chicago Humanities Festival. The Festival runs annually in November and its theme for 2006 will be “Peace and War: Facing Human Conflict.” Weschler, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, currently heads (and will continue to run) the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. Weschler’s most recent essay in VQR is an examination of the graphics of the Polish Solidarity movement.