Now approaching its third decade, The Pushcart Prize is one of the grand institutions of the American literary scene, but it never fails to surprise, delight, and provoke readers. The short stories, essays, and poems are selected from literary magazines and small presses across the country, and represent the most exciting and innovative writing in America today. Over two hundred distinguished contributing editors helped pick more than sixty selections reprinted from scores of presses in Pushcart Prize XXIX. An index to the series and lists of hundreds of outstanding presses and authors are also included.

The most honored literary series in America, The Pushcart Prize has been selected several times as a notable book of the year by the New York Times. Pushcart Press and The Pushcart Prize were named among "the most influential in the development of the American book business over the past 125 years" by Publishers Weekly.

As the consolidation of commercial publishers continues, the small presses capture and encourage what is truly lasting and important in our literary culture. For new writers, the small presses are where they will almost always get their start. The Pushcart Prize serves as their inspiration and source book, with listings of hundreds of presses. Among writers discovered in the Pushcart editions are John Irving, Mary Gordon, Rick Moody, and many more.

For the 2003 edition, The Pushcart Prize presents scores of brilliant short stories, poems, and essays selected from hundreds of presses and literary journals with the help of over 200 distinguished contributing editors. This is a stunning presentation of new and celebrated authors, picked from almost 8,000 nominations.

This 25th edition is by way of being a celebration of this vital series--one of the most fascinating pieces in the collection being, simply, a list in the back of the book of "Presses featured in the Pushcart Prize editions since 1976." Their very titles give an idea of the breadth, excellence, and sheer weirdness of the Pushcart project. You'll find Black Scholar, Prairie Schooner, Revista Chicano-Riquena, North Dakota Quarterly, and something called, rather evocatively, Lucille.

This year's collection, as befits a silver anniversary edition, is full of uncompromising work from writers both well known and unknown. It starts off in an elegiac mood with "The Anointed," a lovely, melancholic story by Kathleen Hill that recalls Alice Mattison and was also collected in the 2000 edition of the Best American Short Stories. Things get a bit hotter with Sharon Doubiago's poem "How to Make Love to a Man": "Remember like gripping / a tennis racket." Just to keep things au courant for 2000, there's "Two Prayers," a short, sharp shock of a story by Paul Maliszewski, collected from Dave Eggers' hip-to-be-square magazine-in-a-box McSweeney's. The elegant memoirist Patricia Hampl wanders through a minefield of memory, mother, and the meaning of writing. In fact, much of the writing collected here reflects on writing: Seamus Heaney asks, "What good is poetry?" and Beth Ann Fennelly reveals "the irony of metaphor: / you are closest to something / when naming what it is not." Not much has been left unnamed in 25 years of defiantly brainy story-mongering. --Claire Dederer

As the consolidation of commercial publishers continues, the small presses capture and encourage what is truly lasting and important in our literary culture. For new writers, the small presses are where they will almost always get their start. The Pushcart Prize serves as their inspiration and source book, with listings of hundreds of presses. Among writers discovered in the Pushcart editions are John Irving, Mary Gordon, Rick Moody, and many more.