PUSHCART PRIZE XLV

The venerable prize volume adds another year without getting crusty.

Nominations for the Pushcart Prize are open to small, independent literary presses—magazines and book publishers now online as well as print—anywhere in the world. That said, several journals are near constants, such as McSweeney’s, with a standout contribution in Luis Alberto Urrea’s short story “The Night Drinker.” It begins as a piece of near-future apocalypticism, with the world engulfed by rising seawater (“in that tide came garbage and dead creatures and black waves”), that takes a near-idyllic turn as Mexico City returns to its erstwhile, pre-Columbian role as one of the world’s great metropolises, and that then ends on a note of horror (with Urrea nodding at H.P. Lovecraft, “that old racist”). No less foreboding, though without the ghastly resolution, is Elizabeth McCracken’s “It’s Not You,” from Zoetrope: All-Story, in which a hotel-room assignation goes awry in a fog of alcohol and miscalculation: “It is the fear of judgment that keeps me behaving, most of the time, like the religious,” says her narrator. “Not of God, but of strangers.” One such stranger is the “radio shrink” who observes of the narrator’s day drinking, “Hair of the dog,” to which she replies, “Hair of the werewolf.” Jane Hirshfield, a familiar presence in Pushcart, turns in a lovely but pensive poem that comes from a culinary anthology but centers on the darkness of living on “an earth where loss // is so all present / that we drink it without thinking / blue-white in its early morning glass.” Yet another standout is a story by Austin Smith, better known as a poet, about an Amish man who works out his grief for the loss of two children by making a break for the world of the English (“He was weeping, but there was no beard to catch his tears”)—a Rumspringa from which he won’t return. Or will he?

Forty-five years on, the Pushcart annual is as strong and wide-ranging as ever.