Winter 2004
New Series · Volume XXVI Number 1

about the cover

Our cover design by Nanette Black features Windows, 1999, a photograph by Diane Deaton. Much of Deaton’s work focuses on “abandoned places,” including this photo taken outside of Hackettstown, New Jersey—an old house with a door that no longer has steps leading up to it. A resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Deaton’s work can be seen online at www.absolutearts.com/d/dianedeaton.

editor's notes

What will follow is a series of celebratory announcements. But as I write these notes we have received the unhappy news of George Plimpton’s death. And so it seems fitting to pause, to interject a salute in his memory. Urbane, self-deprecating, fun, and very, very funny, George Plimpton was a marvelous writer and, as editor of the Paris Review, one of the most influential figures in American literature for the last generation. George was a most welcome guest at last autumn’s Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. He enjoyed the food and drink, enjoyed the company—and the rest of us enjoyed the wit of his remarks. Preparations for a fiftieth anniversary gala for Paris were well advanced at the time of his death. The event must now be bittersweet, but there is all the more to celebrate in his personal achievements and those of his magazine.

During the winter of 1994 The Kenyon Review skated perilously close to extinction. A financial crisis nearly forced us to close our covers once and, I suspect, for all. At the last moment, thanks to the leadership and generosity of a few people who would go on to be trustees of a newly incorporated Review, that closure was avoided. But drastic cuts in expenses had to be made, among them switching from four-color covers to the black-and-white duotones that have since become such a striking signature for the magazine, and, more dire, retreating from quarterly publication to thrice per year.

The Best of the Kenyon Review, an extraordinary compendium of stories, poems, and essays from across sixty-five years, has just been released as a trade paperback from Sourcebooks, Inc. Although intended for bookstores and general readers across the country, this volume will also appeal to teachers in high schools and colleges who have used KR in their classes. The anthology will provide a stable text that they can use from year to year, featuring great work from the twentieth century as well as exciting, recent material as well. It is a first effort at mining some of the great riches of the KR archives. Two more volumes are under contract. Great expectations.

While in the mode of happy announcements, let me say that Joyce Carol Oates is the recipient of the 2003 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. On November 11, at a splendid dinner at Daniel in New York, E. L. Doctorow, last year’s honoree, presented Ms. Oates with the award on behalf of the Kenyon Review Board of Trustees. It hardly needs to be said that Joyce Carol Oates has been one of the most significant and distinguished voices of the last thirty years and more in America. Her range of subject, genre, voice, and mode are to my mind unequaled. What is also true—and too rarely noted—is that Ms. Oates has been a loyal and generous supporter of independent literary publishing, not only of this magazine but of many, many others. Few authors of her fame continue to publish work in literary journals or to be an advocate for their importance to the national culture. She didn’t win this prestigious award because of that loyalty and commitment. But they are worthy of acclaim as well.

I’m also pleased to announce that Randall Mann’s first book of poems, Complaint in the Garden, has been selected by David Baker for the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry, and will be published in the spring by Zoo Press. This is the third such prize. The first two poets so honored, Beth Anne Fennelly and Christopher Cessac, have seen their careers flourish, and we are proud to be part of that happy growth. This series reaffirms an essential part of KR’s mission: to discover and publish exciting, talented new voices—the authors who will be among the most distinguished of the coming generation, along with those who already have achieved such acclaim. We will feature several of Randall Mann’s poems, along with an introduction by David Baker, in the Spring 2004 KR.

~David H. Lynn