The Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses 2024 Edition

by Bill Henderson (editor)

Winner of High Honors from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pushcart Prize XLVII includes over 60 stories, poems and essays from dozens of small literary presses . In last year’s Pushcart Prize, editor Bill Henderson noted that the Pushcart Prize, “the small good thing, has evolved into an international prize drawing nominations from small presses around the globe.” As always, the selections are made by a distinguished panel of Guest Editors and hundreds of Contributing Editors. The list of authors selected and encouraged over the decades, is immense. (An index to previous volumes is included in each edition.)

The Pushcart Prize won the NBCC Sandroff Lifetime Achievement award, The Poets & Writers/ Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers citation and was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the seminal publications in American publishing history.

560 pages, Paperback

Published December 5, 2023

About the author

Bill Henderson (born April 5, 1941) is an American author, editor and publisher best known for his memoirs and the Pushcart Prize series.

Reviews

[Bryan Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Pushcart anthology is a book I look forward to every year. Usually, I weave its short stories, essays, and poetry in with other books that I’m reading, but this year I just consumed it cover-to-cover. Maybe it’s because in this dawning age of AI writing (distributed plagiarism) it feels reassuring to see working writers publishing their truth and beauty in small presses, where the real stuff is. It’s not commercial. It’s not particularly profitable. Its utility is arguable (though I’d be willing to argue it), but it’s the way we make meaning, and there’s absolutely no faking it.

[Eleanor · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of good work that just isn’t for me. But there were a few standouts:
“Sunny Talks” by Lydia Conklin
“The Future is a Click Away” by Allegra Hyde (I immediately put her short story collection on hold at the library!)
“Tender” by Sophia Klahr
“Making Sausage in the Time of Revolution” by Claudia Serea
“Goat” by Meg Gabbert
“It is Once Again the Season of Corn” by Onyekachi Iloh
Basically the last 80 pages of nonfiction (“Dear Damage” onward) were bangers

[Nita · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, who is the a$$-hat who green-lighted a DECKLED EDGE for an ANTHOLOGY?! Do you know how tedious and complicated it makes the process of advancing to the next piece you want to read?! (I rarely read short stories past the first paragraph because most of them smell like they really wish their story had been published in The New Yorker and all of its dusty Upper East Side short-story sensibilities... Last year's Pushcart had the A+ story by Sanam Mahloudji in it but in the past fifteen years no other story has grabbed my interest.) Never mind how deckled edges make it more difficult for people with fine motor challenges, which is an ironic barrier this most recent Pushcart has created given how horny the editor/s seem to be to make their grandchildren think they're cool ... which gets me to my real disappointment with this year's collection:

The incestuous nature of the Pushcart nomination process x the biased final selection process has normally not impacted the quality of the final book, but the latest edition had way too many pieces that smacked of "ooh, if I include this the kids will like me" in the vein of Marc Maron's rants against "anti-woke" comedians. Thou doth proteth-teth et. al. from the mouths of aging straight white men. I'm not saying it's not great that gatekeepers are trying to be more open-minded about what constitutes quality lit, but it doesn't do a service to writers who aren't male and aren't white to give out blue ribbon anthology spots to writing that simply doesn't exhibit a level of technical acumen that one would expect from a reasonably decent high school senior's expository prose, because you pepper the sample and poison availability bias. i.e. if all a person has read by a brown girl are the shitty memoir essays in a Pushcart, you'd be forgiven for thinking that brown girls are shitty writers of memoir essays.

I don't care how interesting or unique your personal life story is; there are foundational basics you should master in order to honor your story the way it deserves to be honored, let alone have that thing published in a lit mag, nominated, and then given a Pushcart.

Are editors the world over afraid of giving guidance and feedback for fear they will be pilloried and cancelled by the foamy-mouthed twitter/litter-sphere hordes? It's possible, and it's "wicked-y wicked-y wack" because that reticence is going to compound and create an idiocratic world, where no one comes close to ever achieving their potential because these so-called gatekeepers shivering in their impostor-syndrome boots lack the courage to say, "Hey, there's a lot of potential in this piece. But I want you to go read a dozen other pieces and notice how they have structured their work, paced their narrative, arranged their language to as to maximize clarity. And if, after that, you can still defend whatever the hell is going on in the last third of your piece here, then put this piece in a drawer and repeat the exercise in twelve months so you can get clear-eyed distance on the story you're trying to tell."

Disappointing.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a HUGE fan of the Pushcart Prize and anxiously await its publication each year, but this was not my favorite edition. My top five:

*The Future Is a Click Away by Allegra Hyde
*La Boheme by Clifford Thompson
*Jorie, Jr. by Michael Czyzniejewski
*A Most Generous Offer by Joy Guo
*the one by Julie Hecht, only because I love her voice so much

[Gabi Yeary · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this for class, and it actually has quite a few solid stories!! very good if trying to inspire abt what to write. solid choice!!

[Karen Carlson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was a good year, particularly for "weird" fiction - unusual structures, not-quite-realism content - and "green" nonfiction.

Sor summary and individual entries on each prose piece, see my blog posts at A Just Recompense.