Last month, during an OA trip to New Orleans, we met up with Richard McCarthy at the downtown Crescent City Farmers Market. Amid the stalls offering local goodies—from Ponchatoula strawberries to Gulf shrimp to goat cheese—we chatted with McCarthy about his work as executive director of Market Umbrella, a nonprofit whose mission is to “cultivate the field of public markets for public good.”
Mark Spitzer—novelist, poet, Managing Editor of THE EXQUISITE CORPSE, and writing professor at the University of Central Arkansas (home of THE OA and THE EC)—is also a self-proclaimed “gar nut.” In his newly released book, SEASON OF THE GAR (published by University of Arkansas Press), Spitzer’s passions collide as he turns his pen on the object of his affection—the garfish, or what he terms “America’s most misunderstood fish.”
A first book composed of three novellas might be an unusual formula for literary success, but it appears to be working for Josh Weil. In the eleven months since his debut collection, THE NEW VALLEY, was released, Weil has earned the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and been selected as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” emerging authors.
