Charles Simic, who published his first poems in the Winter 1959 issue of Chicago Review, was named U.S. poet laureate today. Read the announcement in the NYT or check out “Stone”, a poem the magazine published in 1967. (Photo by Alexandra Daley-Clark.)

Update: Simic’s two poems from the Winter 1959 issue are now available in PDF at Chicago Review. And here’s a squib from an interview I did with Chicago’s WBEZ about the issue.

Marilynne Robinson’s review of Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees gets the cover of this week’s Washington Post Book World. The Post also features a funny interview of Dillard by Daniel Asa Rose. For more reviews of the novel, click here.

Alan Shapiro was recently interviewed on WUNC’s The State of Things. Shapiro is the author of Tantalus in Love and The Last Happy Occasion and translated The Oresteia.

The Maytrees, Annie Dillard’s new novel, is out. An ever-expanding list of reviews follows. Annie read a passage of the novel for NPR and talked a little about the book (whose original subtitle was “A Romantic Comedy about Light Pollution”) in a Publishers Weekly interview. She did another interview with the Washington Post’s Daniel Asa Rose. A chapter of the book originally showed up as “The Two of Them” in the Nov ‘03 Harper’s.

Here’s the list of reviews:

+Washington Post Book World (by Marilynne Robinson)

+New York Times

+NYT Book Review

+Boston Globe

+LA Times

+SF Chronicle

+Slate

+BookPage

+Publishers Weekly

+New York Observer

+New York Daily News

+Miami Herald

+Seattle Times

+Cape Cod Times

+Cleveland Plain Dealer

+Chicago Tribune

+USA Today

+Hartford Courant

+San Diego Union-Tribune

+Washington Post (where Annie runs neck and neck with Toby Keith)

Buy it from your local independent bookstore or support this site by ordering a copy from Amazon.

Wu Ming’s new novel Manituana has just been published in Italy. Readers of Italian can download the whole book and readers of Italian or Spanish can visit the book’s website. This can’t be the first book to have its own trailer, but it’s the first I’ve seen.

You can download the rest of Wu Ming’s books at their website, including my translations of their stories “In Like Flynn” and “The Emperor’s Three Hundred Woodcutters”. You can also find an interview I did with the group for Chicago Review’s 60th anniversary issue.

This 272-page double issue includes:

LISA ROBERTSON SPECIAL FEATURE

With two long poems, two essays, an interview by Kai Fierle-Hedrick, a checklist, and critical essays by Benjamin Friedlander, Christine Stewart, Jennifer Scappettone, and Joshua Clover.

POEMS

Stephen Collis, Rosmarie Waldrop, Rusty Morrison, Genya Turovskaya, Karen Weiser, Jacqueline Waters, Cesar Vallejo, Friedrich Hölderlin, Gnoetry & Eric P. Elshtain, Peter Gizzi, Michael Kindellan, and John Matthias

FICTION

Pamela Lu

ESSAYS

Stephen Rodefer, Calvin Bedient, and Eliot Weinberger

REVIEWS
Timothy Yu on the Future of Asian American Poetry, Norman Finkelstein on Donald Revell, Dustin Simpson on Forrest Gander, Leila Wilson on Eleni Sikelianos, Ihor Junyk on Hannah Krall, Martin Riker on Patrick Ourednik, Paul Merchant on Alan Halsey, and V. Joshua Adams on Bin Ramke.

A NOTE on Gnoetry and the period style.

Order it here.