Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, 2020 Edition

Henderson’s sprawling, trenchant anthology opens with a fitting dedication to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose “risky publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl” in 1956 marked an “essential legacy” for small presses. With fiction, poetry, and essays, the writers showcase a willingness to “write above the fray in a society most comfortable with palatable mediocrity,” as Ottessa Moshfegh declares in her essay, “Jailbait,” about her experience navigating the fraught sexual ground between her as a young woman and a famous male writer. In “Braindrain,” C Pam Zhang imagines a startling phantasmagoria of disembodied border crossings, while Danez Smith offers a hymn of outrage at racial profiling with “Say It With Your Whole Black Mouth.” Other entries are more understated. Ben Shattuck’s story, “The History of Sound,” features an older man’s elegant remembrance of an affair with another man who shared a love for Scots-Irish ballads in 1917; the protagonist in Mary Miller’s “Festival” considers the consequences about remaining quiet about the truth; and stories by Ryan Eric Dull and Malerie Willens explore the humanity beneath the euphemistic language of the workplace. While Tony Hoagland’s essay, “The Cure for Racism Is Cancer,” falls short with tone-deaf generalizations, the anthology’s only real embarrassment is its riches. Readers will delight in this exciting mix of established and emerging authors working at the top of their game. (Dec.)