---

---

---

[Final Issue] ▪  [King's Council Table of Contents] ▪  [First Review]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction to The King's Council, by Bill Bukovsan

 

 

So here we go, Benjamin, with our little experiment in collaborative criticism. The idea is to work our way through the 2007 Pushcart winners, discussing what we like and don't like about them; since the Pushcarts are taken by many writers (and editors!) to be the preeminent awards for American literary fiction (and essays, and poetry) published in so-called "little" magazines—of which The King's English, obviously, is one—this exercise might reasonably be expected to lead us toward a feel for the current zeitgeist of the American literary scene—and give us a chance to discuss how we feel about said zeitgeist.

 When we first started tossing this idea around, I read through the 2006 Pushcarts (because, well, I thought that'd be the volume we were writing about, but I'm afraid time moves more quickly than I do) and was struck by the immense quality of some of the work—Gregory Blake Smith's "Presently in Ruins" and John Fulton's "Hunters" come immediately to mind, but there were others as well. Still, I must admit that I experienced my fair share of disappointing moments in the course of reading through the volume, along with an overarching sense of sameness: it felt like most of the stories were geared toward a particular sensibility, a readership that could be counted on to savor a peculiar, attenuated species of regret. (Come to think of it, I recall that, back when I was but a lad, I would occasionally take a Pushcart anthology down from the shelves of my local public library, read a few pages, feel this same atmosphere of rueful nostalgia wafting up to me from the paper, and quietly put the book back where it came from. Then I'd go looking for some Faulkner I hadn't yet read.)