Yeah. I’ll admit it. I read Houghton-Mifflin’s Best American Short Stories every year.

This series began in 1915. I’ve been reading it faithfully since, I think, 1984. I still remember the total shock I felt when I first wandered into, and got ambushed by, a Raymond Carver story. That was in one of these books. Cynthia Ozick, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, T. C. Boyle — I met them all here. I love it that the book’s appearance has never …

I received in the mail a copy of a bright yellow-and-orange book I’d never heard of, The Impossible Will Take A Little While, edited by a hardworking political journalist named Paul Rogat Loeb.

This a source book of political hopefulness, if such a thing can actually exist in these times. Indeed, it seems one must put on a mocking voice to even whisper of hope for mankind in the era of suicide bombers.

So I feel some admiration for the courage of …

A couple of weeks ago we were reprimanded by a friend of LitKicks for neglecting to mention Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday. I tried to weasel out of this by claiming that we boycott birthdays at LitKicks, but the truth is we just forgot.

If you also sometimes miss an important literary birthday or anniversary, we have the answer for you. If you’ll please scan your eyes a few pixels to the right, you’ll notice a new daily feature, Today In Literature. …

The literary centerpiece of today’s New York Times Book Review is a two-page spread of poetry reviews. Ten books are meticulously considered, bestowing much-needed attention on authors like Adrian Castro, Arthur Sze and Patricia Ferrell and small presses like Graywolf, Sarabande and Copper Canyon.

As a guy who loves poetry, I should be pleased by this, but something about the format doesn’t work. Each review by Joshua Clover and Joel Brouwer is fairly well-written, but together they add up to a dreadfully boring page, …

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books and stories are overlooked masterpieces. The novels are rarely taught in schools, and the short pieces never turn up in anthologies. Despite this, Doyle’s work had as wide a scope and vision as any literary novelist’s in any age.

Like Herman Melville, Doyle struggled his whole life to break free of the chains of his literary success. Doyle even famously killed off Sherlock Holmes, in the hope that readers would finally agree to read about other characters. …

Since my invitation to last week’s National Book Awards ceremony was apparently “lost in the mail”, I had to content myself by watching the proceedings on the BookTV cable network last night at midnight.

The event seemed to have been recorded with a single videocamera, and was edited down to an hour. I don’t know what happened to the part at the beginning where Billy Crystal acts out scenes from each of the five nominated novels, because the broadcast began instead with a …

The pre-Thanksgiving New York Times Book Review is fairly packed with good stuff — a cornucopia of good writing on worthwhile topics. Sometimes they get it right.

Young lit-darling Curtis Sittenfeld has the thorny task of reviewing Julia Briggs’ Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, and she executes the job with skill. Her review is well-organized and informative as it leads us through a series of interesting observations. Hmm, maybe I’ll check out Prep after all. Or maybe I won’t.

A few pages …

When I heard that distinguished American poet W. S. Merwin had been honored at last night’s National Book Awards ceremony, I could not help remembering the first time I heard this poet’s name. This mystical poet was the central figure in an astonishing battle over a 1975 Halloween party that began as a Buddhist-themed celebration and descended into a nightmare of drunken debauchery, violence and forced nakedness. The controversy, now largely forgotten, occupied the poetry community for several years in the late 70’s, …

If 50 Cent’s book From Pieces to Weight only made you hungry for more from the world of gangster street thug rap literature, prepare to feast. In a deal with MTV/Pocket Books, Fiddy is launching a new unit, G-Unit Books. The series of novellas and graphic novels, set to hit the market in 2007, will focus on “the truth about The Life; the sex, guns and cash; the brutal highs and short lives of the players on the streets” and will …

When Ernest J. Gaines was growing up, it was against the law in Louisiana for a black person to walk into a public library.

At the age of fifteen, Gaines left his home in Point Coupee, Louisiana to reunite with his mother and stepfather in California, entering his first library when he was sixteen. He attended San Francisco State University and later won a writing fellowship to Stanton University. Gaines has won numerous awards, has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and recently retired from …