The Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses

This generous anthology of the year’s 71 Pushcart Prize winners, featuring stories, essays, and poetry originally published in 53 small presses, highlights new voices as well as familiar names. Among the standouts are Joyce Carol Oates’s disturbing and raw “Mick & Minn,” about a pair of foster parents who consider adopting a newborn baby rescued from a public restroom after their hopes for a child of their own were dashed. Mary Gordon offers a comparatively sunnier domestic snapshot with “Day Care,” told from the perspective of a toddler who’d rather spend the day with her parents than go to day care. By turns funny and sobering, Gregory Tower’s “Riding in Cars with Joy” portrays younger writer Virginia’s obsession with author Joy Williams, whose mystique is described by the narrator, Virginia’s boyfriend: “I was into Kmart realism. Virginia was into magical realism. But Joy Williams wasn’t into anything.” “For Acie,” a sensual poem by Kate Delay, responds to the recent passage of anti-LGBTQ legislation in Atlanta by resistinbg homophobia (“Could the earth hate its fruit”), and Farah Peterson’s essay “Alone with Kindred” offers surprising insights on interracial marriages in literature, popular culture, and her own family. This is a treasure trove of literary delights. (Dec.)