Is literature becoming irrelevant?

 kw: book reviews, collections, short stories, poems, sketches

I am a little less than halfway through reading Pushcart Prize XLVII: Best of the Small Presses (2023), edited by Bill Henderson and others.

The series used a few logos in early years, and then settled on this one, presented in various background hues ranging from yellow through earth tones to red.

When I encountered the 2014 edition I liked it rather well and posted a positive review. I was still positive a couple of years later. This time, not so much (so far). Of the 28 pieces I have read (or passed over) so far, only one made me react, "I'm glad I read this": "Dear Friends" by Mary Rueful, originally published in Sewanee Review. I call it an annotated list of friends, a series of vignettes that explore numerous dimensions of friendship.

I almost rejected the entire volume based on the first half-dozen lines of text in the first piece, which I decline to name. Sadly, I read too fast to have stopped earlier, because it almost immediately takes the reader into a realm no person of conscience willingly visits, with an image that is hard to forget. It is a sad fact of the human condition that a vicious, corrupted mind such as the author's can even exist.

A goodly number of the pieces are "poems". So far, what I have seen (and skimmed through) have neither rhyme nor rhythm. They consist of slightly evocative prose broken into lines. If the language were more poetic I might call such a piece a poem, but they are junk.

Many of the pieces are aimless stream-of-consciousness bits of one or a few pages, that start and end nowhere, with nothing learned along the way.

One imaginative piece, "Mantis" by Gina Chung, tells of love almost found and then lost, in the character were a praying mantis, who is accustomed to devouring suitors during copulation. The "one that got away" is her only regret. It's a useful allegory of a certain kind of relationship…

A number of pieces portray gay men or women, closeted or out. "The Kiss" by Kate Osana Simonian treats of a relationship between two lesbians who attend a religious school; one is fully out, the other so closeted that her orientation is unknown, even to her best friend. A drama production enwraps their drama. The writing is overdone, with attempts to build tension in a Hitchcockian way that is more annoying than useful.

"Back" by Banzelman Guret is moderately dystopian science fiction, exploring an extreme development of gig work while the protagonist is dealing with his father's OCD and institutionalization.

These few out of 28? If these are "the best", literature is coming on hard times. Maybe in the next few days I'll find another story or two that make me glad I found them.