Green Hills Literary Lantern

News About GHLL People

 

 

 

Brief Tracks, a posthumous volume of verse by our longtime friend Jim Thomas, and edited by GHLL's Joe Benevento, is now available from Truman State University Press. Click here for more.

 

 

 

 

This book represents Jim Thomas's fine poetic legacy, and a testament to a high aesthetic and craft he maintained in his work for an entire career . . . these poems stay with you, like good friends, and they show you the poet's fine-tuned ear and affinity towards the natural world, family, and the preservation of memory through the poetic inclination. If the poems themselves feel brief and to the point, it's only the poet's great sense of cutting to the chase . . . to the things that matter and crystallize in a life well lived, well loved, and well spent. Brief Tracks is this poet's gift and our inheritance.
 

—Virgil Suárez, author of Guide to the Blue Tongue and 90 Miles

 

 

 

 

 

 

Walter Bargen, Missouri's Poet Laureate, has a new volume coming out from BkMk Press (UMKC):

Days Like This Are Necessary will be available from the BkMk catalogue soon.

History is not a nightmare from which Bargen is trying to awake;it is a sea of contingency, and limitless possibility into which Bargen dives headlong.

                                                                            -Gary Young

 
...these poems are not staged shockers...They contain genuine feeling and each is a subtle, cautionary deliverance.

                                                                            -Paul Zimmer, The Georgia Review

Louis Phillips' collection of short fiction, The Bus to the Moon and Other Stories, is now available.

Will Nixon has a new book out, My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse.

Tim Marsh has been selected for a fellowship and residency at the Vermont Studio Center, beginning September 25th. The center is located in the northern Green Mountains in the town of Johnson. His contribution to GHLL XX, "Discovery Channel" was the piece the jurors based their decision on.

Keetje Kuipers has been awarded a Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford and will be moving to San Francisco. Her manuscript has been awarded the A. Poulin Jr. Prize and was published by BOA Editions in Spring 2009.

GHLL founding editor Jack Smith has won the George Garrett prize in fiction. His novel Hog to Hog was released by Texas Review Press in 2009:

A dark comedy written in rollicking prose, Hog to Hog deals with excessive development in a relatively pristine Midwestern rural area. The spoils of misadventure go to the top polluters, like Dick Columbus, who makes money for the state’s coffers with his Wheeleroo!, an ATV mega event that runs roughshod over the local nature sanctuary. Columbus wins a seat in the state Senate. Bernie Sapp, the novel’s protagonist, lacks political savvy and power and ends up in one of Columbus’s pet projects, the newly constructed prison. With a culture based on plunder and socio-economic injustice, the ordinary man’s American Dream turns into the American Nightmare.

"Jack Smith's stunning first novel, Hog to Hog, proves William Styron's thesis that 'only a great satirist can tackle the world's problems and articulate them.' The pace is feverish, with non-stop action revealing new heights of national folly, greed, and excess. Bernie Sapp, Smith's protagonist, is by turn a fearful, angry, arrogant, acquisitive, horny, and touching Everyman as he scrambles avidly for his slice of the pie. Smith's prose is crisp and acerbic, his themes reminiscent of Heller, Southern and Nathaniel West: surely this is what black humor is all about."

    - Geoffrey Clark, author of Wedding in October and Jackdog Summer

"Boisterous and compelling, Hog to Hog is often a funhouse mirror reflecting American materialism, greed, and crassness. Jack Smith's spot-on dialogue will make you laugh; this award-winning tale, the taller it grows, will convince you to treasure it as good old satire."

    - Mark Wisniewski, author of Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman and All Weekend with the Lights On
 

Speaking of Mark Wisniewski, GHLL congratulates him on the appearance of his story "Straightaway" in the 2008 Best American Short Stories.  His story originally appeared in Antioch Review

Some of My Best Friends and Other Fictions, Joe Benevento's first collection of short stories, is now available from Lewis-Clark/Sandhills Press.

Gary Fincke's tenth full-length collection of poems—The Fire Landscape— was published by the University of Arkansas Press, August, 2008. Garrison Keillor read a poem from the collection—“The Sorrows”—on The Writer’s Almanac.

Mark Fabiano (An Arrangement of Blue and Green) has a story in the Atlantic Monthly's   Special Fiction Issue. 'We Are All Businessmen' appeared in August 2008. Mark was awarded a $10,000 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in Fiction for 2008.

Barry Kitterman has a new novel from SMU Press in May 2009. Click here for details.

Nancy Cherry's "Yearly Trek to Bear Valley" (volume XVIII) has been selected for the "Best of the Web" anthology.

Read the Writer's Digest article from our founding editor, Jack Smith

GHLL editorial board member Robert Garner McBrearty, of Louisville, CO, is the winner of the annual $15,000 Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award.  His entry to the competition was noteworthy for its blend of pathos and humor, according to the Sherwood Anderson Foundation.   McBrearty submitted three short stories from a new collection of stories in progress.  Some stories from the new collection in progress have been previously published in the North American Review, Story Quarterly, and Narrative Magazine. 

DeWitt Henry, one of GHLL's favorite authors, has a new volume of narratives, essays and meditations. Click here to read about Safe Suicide

Midge Raymond's short-story collection, Forgetting English, received the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and was published by Eastern Washington University Press in the fall of 2008.