September 2015

Roger Rosenblatt to Receive 2015 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement

Roger Rosenblatt, author of Kayak Morning and Making Toast among numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, plays, and award-winning journalism, has been selected as this year’s winner of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. Rosenblatt is known and loved for probing the human condition with a wry sense of humor and a penetrating point of view in his seventeen books and six off-Broadway plays. “Roger Rosenblatt has been one of America’s most distinguished writers and essayists for four decades,” said KR Editor David Lynn. Rosenblatt will be honored at the award gala in New York City on November 5. Click here to read more about the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.

Why We Chose It

BY HILARY PLUM, BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Lindsay Turner’s review of Etel Adnan’s, To look at the sea is to become what one is, appears in KROnline.

I’ve been a book-review editor with the Kenyon Review for over two years now, and just as I should be getting used to the work, everything becoming routine, the opposite has been happening. Lately I’ve been realizing anew how unlikely and remarkable each review—each brief meeting of writer and reader—is. As an editor, I do a little light matchmaking, setting up a reviewer with a book. The result can’t help but surprise: each reviewer places each book in a hard-won and intensely lived canon of her own years of reading and writing. The book assigned has entered a conversation that I couldn’t quite have anticipated. Continue reading “Why We Chose It.”

Join us at the Kenyon Review Literary Festival Featuring Roger Rosenblatt

Please join us for a joyous celebration of reading and writing at this year’s Kenyon Review Literary Festival! On Friday, October 2, the Literary Festival kicks off with readings by GLCA prize winners Tarfia Faizullah and David James Poissant. On Saturday, October 3rd, award-winning writer Roger Rosenblatt, recipient of the 2015 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, will deliver the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture. The exciting month-long leadup to the festival began with our Knox Reads! giveaway of over 200 free copies of Rosenblatt’s Kayak Morning, at the Mt. Vernon Farmers’ Market and First Friday Mount Vernon. In September, Kenyon College faculty will lead discussions of the book at Paragraphs Bookstore and the Mt. Vernon Public Library. Throughout the month, enjoy posts from KR bloggers offering their thoughts about Kayak Morning on our site. Read the first post in the blog conversation here.

KR Reading Period Begins September 15th

Kenyon Review will begin accepting submissions online on September 15, 2015 and the submissions period will continue through December 15, 2015. Short fiction, poetry, drama, essays, and translations will be accepted for both the magazine and KROnline from a single pool of submissions. Click here to access our submission guidelines.

Sept/Oct issue now out!

In the Sept/Oct 2015 issue you’ll discover exciting new poems by Kazim Ali, Brenda Hillman, John Kinsella, the winners of the 2015 Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, and more; dazzling fiction from Joyce Carol Oates, Linda Woolford, and Keya Mitra; and provocative nonfiction by Amy Wright and David Wojahn. Grab a print copy today! Or check out our Kindle Edition! Subscribe and get a full KR issue for only $0.99 a month. Or purchase single issues for only $3.99 Subscribe or order the new issue today!

The Poetics of Science: Call for Submissions

How does science inspire the literary imagination? Can science writing be literary? The Kenyon Review is seeking poetry, fiction, essays, and drama that respond to issues in science, ecology, or the environment for a special issue to be published in September 2016. Feeling inspired? KR is now accepting submissions for this special issue. Read more about the call for submissions here.

New in KR Podcasts

In this month’s podcast, Carl Phillips talks to Contributing Editor Andrew Grace about his writing process, whether or not one should want to be called a “poet’s poet” and, by acting for the past five years as judge for the Yale Younger Poetry Prize, what he’s learned about the next generation of poets. Download the podcast.

From KROnline: Beg Borrow Steal

BY MAURICE CARLOS RUFFIN

The first thing Pop do when he get home from Angola Prison is shove you and your little sister out the front door. He don’t even say hi. He just tell Mama to please give him a dollar for you to get huckabucks. Mama tell him he got nerve telling her what to do with her dollar when she been trying to pay the bills all by herself for twenty-three and a half months and five days.
Continue reading this story on KROnline.

Hidden in the Distance: Reading Calvino Reading

BY MICHAEL WOOD

From The Kenyon Review, New Series, Spring, 1998, Vol. XX, No. 2

Italo Calvino once wrote that he “spent more time with the books of others than with my own.” He added, “I do not regret it” (Literature 341). That must be an unusual remark for a writer to make, even (or especially) a writer who worked in a publishing house.
Continue reading this essay.

From the KR Blog:
Sugimoto’s Movie Theaters

BY BRIAN MICHAEL MURPHY

August 25, 2015

In her book, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources, Nadia Bozak argues that cinematic history and theory can and ought to be “reappraised in light of the emerging ascendancy of environmental politics.” Read the rest of this blog post.

A Micro-Conversation with Kathy Fagan

Kathy Fagan’s poem “Widows and Brides” appears in the Sept/Oct 2015 issue of the Kenyon Review

What was your original impetus for writing “Widows and Brides”?

I started with the words of the women trying on wedding dresses in a Filene’s Basement dressing room, but it was years before I could use them. When I randomly ran across the Panella press release, I remembered visiting the earliest version of Livia and Augustus’s rooms made public in Rome. And at the time I was also reading Toklas’s letters. I knew these events spoke to one another, so at some point it became about how to collage them in a way that surprised me and enlarged my original impulses. Read the rest of the interview.

SEPTEMBER 2015
CONTENTS
KR Award for Literary
     Achievement
Why We Chose It
Literary Festival
Start of Reading Period
New Sept/Oct Issue
The Poetics of Science
KR Podcast
From KROnline
From the Archive
From the Blog
KR Conversations

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