Ben Fountain, Danielle Evans, Jamie Quatro, Michael Knight, Kaveh Akbar, Mary Ruefle, Stephanie Danler-I could keep going, but forget the big names for a second and let me tell you about Sidik Fofana, whose debut fiction (“The Okiedoke”) in the Winter issue was so good that they had him back again in the Fall issue (“The Rent Manual”). John Jeremiah Sullivan’s two-part essay on the origin of the word “blues” should win a National Magazine Award. Speaking of translation: Peter Cole’s Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is an excellent introduction to an extraordinary body of work, and surely one of the best books of the year. Now listen: they published a story of mine so forgive the inside baseball/own-horn-tooting (or don’t forgive it that's fine, too) but as far as I'm concerned the renaissance and relaunch of The Sewanee Review is the best thing that happened in literary magazines in 2017, full stop. Two of my favorite poetry collections of 2017 were published by Tavern Books, out of Portland Oregon: Elsbeth Pancrazi’s Full Body Pleasure Suit, a glorious mindbender, the latest entry in their stellar Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series and Yannis Ritsos’ Monochords, 336 one-line poems written in the summer of 1979 and presented here in a newly revised translation from the Greek by Paul Merchant.
