The Pushcart Prize XLII: Best of the Small Presses, 2018 Edition

Henderson dedicates this year’s intelligent and earnest anthology to “Barack Obama.... Not the politician, not the President—the writer, who respects what words mean and can do.” Some selections are explicitly political, such as Erica Dawson’s witty, vicious anti-Trump poem, “Condition.” Many pieces describe longing for a person or bygone world, as in Delancy Nolan’s “Everything You Want Is Right Here,” a brutal, melancholy short story of a husband and wife’s struggle to stay close in a casino community marooned in an apocalyptic wasteland. The most successful essays mix erudition with emotion, as in Philip Connors’s tenderly observed “Burn Scars,” an elegy for a friend and an account of their work as fire lookouts. George Saunders’s essay “Taut Rhythmic Surfaces,” on the prose of James Salter, is another highlight. Across the anthology, the nonfiction and poetry achieve an impressive consistency, with evident craftsmanship and occasional moments of brilliance. The fiction, however, varies wildly. There’s a vast chasm between Blair Hurley’s elegant “The Home for Buddhist Widows,” and Joyce Carol Oates’s coarse, experimental “Undocumented Alien (Very Rough First Draft Report, Project JRD).” The editors have assembled an array of illustrious writers with a deep respect for language. (Nov.)