One of the best poetry presses around, Copper Canyon Press has been a roll of late with literary prizes: Ted Kooser’s Delights and Shadows winning the Pulitzer and W. S Merwin’s Migration: New and Selected Poems nabbing the National Book Award. John Marshall, the book critic at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, offers a nice profile of the press. (Via Galleycat.)

Many New York houses in their high-rent skyscraper offices in Manhattan would consider it a very fine year indeed to have won a Pulitzer or a National Book Award. That both awards were won in a single year by a tiny non-profit, poetry-only press in a humble abode in the distant Northwest is a literary coup of the first order.

The New York Press has released their annual “50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers” and two writers made the list: James Frey (no surprise) comes in at #6 and Jonathan Safran Foer at #28:

This very paper dubbed him [Safran Foer] not just a bad author, but a vile one. Everything but the box office was illuminated for the big-screen bomb of his first book. Both 2005 efforts came crashing down like the towers he writes so badly about.

As part of the ongoing long, strange trip of being nominated for a half dozen Ellies, I was interviewed today for “The Book Show” with Ramona Koval on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Koval says:

Few things spark the public imagination like a ‘dark horse’, a rank outsider that pips the favourites at the post. Well, the high-stakes world of American magazine publishing could be about to see an upset. A small literary journal, called the Virginia Quarterly Review has upstaged the likes of Harpers, The New Yorker and National Geographic by receiving six nominations for the upcoming National Magazine Awards in the US.

Only the Atlantic Monthly snared more nominations. However, such unexpected plaudits for a relatively little-known and decidedly non-mainstream publication (though old and revered) sent journalists and industry observers scrambling in an attempt to figure out who or what the Virginia Quarterly Review was. In an observation from Meghan O’Rourke on the Slate Magazine website: ‘It was as if a scrappy farm team had demolished the Yankees in an exhibition game’.

If you want to hear the interview, you can stream or download the audio here.

Via BoingBoing, humorous blog maintained by Chaucer, who answers readers’ questions.

My dog is a retriever, but he won’t chase a ball. Every time I throw a toy across the room, he climbs in my lap and licks my face. I know he needs exercise—what do I do?
Pinned To The Floor

Ma Cher Pinnede to The Floore,
By my feithe, firste y oght to praise yow for yowre carefulle husbandrie and governance of yowre hounde. Ther arn sundrie folke who fede ther houndes with rosted flessh, or milk and wastel-breed and reken litel of the helthe of the dogges in question. Yowre care maken myne eyes to watre with teres, so like it is unto my love for litel Lowys my sone.

Via Bookslut, the Mobile Register interviews Bret Lott, editor of the Southern Review.

Q: Who are some of the contemporary Southern writers that you are excited about?

A: There’s a young poet named Beth Bachmann who teaches up at Vanderbilt about whom we are quite excited—we published a clutch of fine poems of hers last year, and she has written a wonderful essay reviewing recent poetry that will appear shortly. There’s also a new kid out in Texas, Lee Norment, whose first published piece was in our pages last year. As a literary journal, I think it’s our duty, our calling, if you will, to find those brand-new writers out there whose voices haven’t yet been heard.

So it’s been a pretty good week for all of us at VQR. As if six National Magazine Award nominations weren’t enough (and believe me, they were), we got word that Tom Bissell’s and Morgan Meis’s travel piece “After the Fall” (from the Fall 2005 issue) has been selected for Best American Travel Writing. This is in addition to selections for Best American Mystery Stories and Best American Poetry. To cap it off, Meghan O’Rourke, the culture editor at Slate (and poetry co-editor at Paris Review), wrote a fantastically flattering piece about us. All of this led Sarah Askari at mnspeak.com to describe VQR as “hotter than the stack of gasoline-doused issues of McSweeney’s burning in my fireplace.”

Update: Slate.com has posted a podcast of Meghan O’Rourke discussing VQR.

Cultural (dis)Connections: Memoirs of a Surrealist Scholar, by Renée [Riese] Hubert. Black Apollo Press. March 2006. $21.

Renée Hubert’s friend and colleague Marjorie Perloff seems to have started it all: her Vienna Paradox (New Directions, 2004) was, to the best of my knowledge, the first memoir by an immigrant Jewish (and, above all, perhaps, female) humanist to make good in the post-World War II American university. Both books are exceptionally rich in concrete particulars—evoking formative (even determinant) persons, places, and things des deux mondes et autres. Both trace the development of identity and method, as well as style, within the generally nurturing, if at times irrationally limiting, precincts of Columbia, Harvard, The Catholic University of America, and Stanford. But these parallel lines ultimately diverge. Perloff takes an Olympian view, ruminating about the impact of exchanging cultures and cultural change upon a socio-political and educational elite. For her part, the terre-à-terre Hubert focuses on personal quests, as a poet whose scholarly endeavors were consubstantial with—and as original as—her own lyrics. Hubert also shares more of her private experience, for example: her legendary marriage to 17th-century French scholar Judd Hubert; their intellectual collaboration as critics of artists’ books; their devotion to an adoptive daughter; and the temperamental factors that established affinities or chasms between them and their exquisitely portrayed colleagues. Cultural (dis)Connections is in its own way an artist’s book: it invites close and repeated reading for the pleasures and insights it uniquely affords.

In the wake of the National Magazine Award announcement, much of the media has reacted with no small amount of puzzlement over our wealth of nominations. The New York Post hailed our six nods as “the biggest surprise of the day,” Women’s Wear Daily has dubbed us “this year’s dark horse,” and the New York Times marveled that we were “right behind The Atlantic.” Media Bistro’s FishBowlNY blog couldn’t conceal their confusion, headlining their announcement, “Atlantic Monthly, VQR (Huh?) Lead National Mag Award Noms.” And Gawker.com huffed “What the f**k is The Virginia Quarterly Review? How did it end up with six finalists? Have any of you ever read it? Have any of you ever heard of it?” While laboring in relative obscurity, we’re gratified by the response—even if it is tinged with shock. (Can we point out though that we did get two nominations last year if anyone was paying attention?)

But we reserve our biggest thanks for Bookslut. Jessa Crispin has been pimping us to anyone who will listen for over a year. But today she won our hearts forever by simply declaring us, “the best f**king magazine on the planet right now.” Where can we pick up that trophy?

Wow! Everyone in our office has been trying not to hyperventilate. The finalists for the 2006 National Magazine Awards (the magazine world’s equivalent to the Pulitzers or the National Book Awards) were announced today and VQR garnered six nominations! Pretty unheard of for a magazine our size. The Atlantic Monthly led all magazines with eight nominations, then came us, followed by GQ, Harper’s, National Geographic, New York, and The New Yorker with five nominations each. Pretty heady company. We received a nomination in the General Excellence category for magazines with circulations under 100,000 (which we fit well under). Also nominated in this category were Aperture, The Believer, Legal Affairs, and ReadyMade.

And congrats go out to our writers whose work was chosen as finalists:

• Sven Birkerts, for Reviews & Criticism, for his essays “Humboldt’s Gift” (Summer issue) and “A Weekend at Montauk” (Winter 2005 issue),
• Pauline W. Chen in the Essay category for “Dead Enough?: The Paradox of Brain Death” (Fall 2005 issue),
• Martin Preib in the Essay category for “The Wagon” (Summer 2005 issue),
• Isabel Allende in Fiction for “The Guggenheim Lovers” (Summer 2005 issue; sorry, not available online),
• Brock Clarke in Fiction for “The Ghosts We Love” (Summer 2005 issue),
• Alan Heathcock in Fiction for “Peacekeeper” (Fall 2005 issue),
• R.T. Smith in Fiction for “Ina Grove” (Fall 2005 issue),
• And Joyce Carol Oates in Fiction for two stories, “So Help Me God” (Winter 2005 issue) and “Smother” (Fall 2005 issue). (Incredibly, Oates had another story nominated, “High Lonesome” published in Zoetrope: All Story.)

Winners will be announced on May 9 at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.

Other perspectives on the AWP Conference in Austin:

- Sycamore Review.
- C. Dale Young (a contributing editor to VQR).
- Iambic Cafe.
- Notes from Evil Bender.
- The Virtual World.
- fade theory.