The Pushcart Prize XLV: Best of the Small Presses 2021
Review of the annual anthology edited by Bill Henderson
Hidden gems are strewn throughout this collection. Look carefully.
My favorite stories —
The Master’s Castle by Anthony Doerr
The Red One Who Rocks by Aamina Ahmad
Fall River Wife by Peter Orner
The Samples by Kristopher Jansma
Howl Palace by Leigh Newman
The Missing Are Considered Dead by V. V. Ganeshananthan
Laramie Time by Lydia Conklin
Turner’s Clouds for Plumly by David Baker
Give My Love to the Savages by Chris Stuck
Freak Corner by John Rolfe Gardiner
It’s Not You by Elizabeth McCracken
And above and beyond everything else, the brilliant and inspiring essay
A Beloved Duck Gets Cooked by Lydia Davis
Memorable quotes —
from Freak Corner, about sign language and the deaf
“Were you aware that people can have ideas before they have the words to express them? … Is eternity on both sides of us?” p. 392
[sign language] “was actually a complete language with a grammar beyond shapes and gesture, hidden in the fourth dimension of timing.” p. 396
“… American Sign Language had its own grammar… Gayle’s best-known work… circled the globe with a jolt for the word’s majority, ‘sadly poorer, for the limitations of their spoken languages.’”
from A Beloved Duck Gets Cooked
“A third thing the stories [by Russell Edson] showed me, both the brilliant ones and the faltering ones, was how you could tap some very difficult emotions and let them burst out in an unexpected raw sometimes absurd form — that perhaps, in fact, setting oneself absurd or impossible subjects made it easier for difficult emotions to come forth.” P. 378
“… A good poem is bound to offer you something surprising in the way of language and thinking, even if some of its meaning eludes you.” p. 380
“The most pressing question, of course, is one that would take us, if we pursued it, straight into the realm of translation theory and all its intriguing conundrums. Can you say the same thing in radically different ways? If you write it so differently, are you in fact, saying the same thing?” p. 386
