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One of Americas most honored poets, Anthony Hecht, died last week in his home in Washington, DC. He was 81 years old. During his long career as a poet, Hecht received the Bollinger Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Hard Hours. His other books include “Flight Among the Tombs” […]

Literary awards may generate little stir here in the United States, but the Man Booker Prize draws Oscar-like attention in Great Britain and the other Commonwealth nations. The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst, was this week’s surprise winner, a dark horse that oddsmakers (yes, they actually do a brisk business on this) had dismissed […]

In August of 1998, Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais sat down with Ernest J. Gaines on the campus of the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette. The results of their conversation were published in The Missouri Review 22:1 (1999) and we’ve now added the interview to those available online. Among the topics of conversation: the […]

The finalists for the National Book Awards have been announced and already the complaints have begun. In fiction, where for the first time in the award’s 55-year history, all of the finalists are women, evidently there are those who believe some of the selected books have not been popular enough (in other words, have not […]

With the deadline for our annual Editors’ Prize contest rapidly approaching (Friday! Friday! Friday!), Anthony Varallo, who has managed the contest for the past four years, offers us, “Last-Minute Changes, 1994-2004: A Celebration.” It is both a call for reflection upon fate and a voice of encouragement for those among you who have not yet […]

The Swedish Academy has announced Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek as the winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature: “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.” Jelinek, the first woman since 1996 to […]