Peter Stine

Doug Hagley

A special issue featuring the "best of writers" Witness is a literary magazine that, over the course of its twenty years of publication, has earned a reputation as "the writer's literary journal." It publishes, with very little fanfare and lots of word-of- mouth recommendation, the very best writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. This special issue, The Best of Witness, 1987-2004 is now in book form, and contains the best pieces that appeared in the journal from 1987 until 2004 as chosen by editor Peter Stine. Contributors include Robert Bly, Stuart Dybek, Barry Lopez, Thomas Lynch, Joyce Carol Oates, Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest Williams, among others.

The Best of Witness, 1987-2004

Thomas Jefferson Lyon

Outside, where the wind is blowing, we see the world on nature's terms, and we see that it is severely endangered. Turning inward, we seek a sense of connection with nature that could perhaps help us through the current environmental crisis. In this book, some of the most observant Americans of our day explore these outer and inner worlds in powerful pieces that show the vitality and range of contemporary nature writing. John Hay's “A Faire Bay,” an original collection of thoughts on the pollution of the Chesapeake, opens the book, and Edward Hoagland's “A Year as It Turns,” a group of short seasonal pieces that originally appeared as editorials in the New York Times, serves as the conclusion. Some of the other authors represented here include Rick Bass, Marcia Bonta, Charles Bowden, Jean Craighead George, Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, and Terry Tempest Williams. Whether swimming with dolphins in the Florida Keys or stalking deer with the mountain lions, these authors experience and reflect on the terms nature sets and the terms we set for nature. With them, we discover the importance of the jack pine in the Boundary Waters, uncover the hidden beauty of Sonoran cacti, explore the very alive world of a Pennsylvania winter, visit the startling silences of the Canadian River Gorge in the Southwest, experience the breathtaking world of life on arctic ice, and view Venus at daybreak from the Grand Canyon. These are stories of place, and of family and friends, both human and nonhuman. They are tales of understanding and coming to terms with the world around us.

Contemporary Voices

On Nature's Terms

Essays on the works of Isaac Babel, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka and Joseph Conrad in the context of revolution and war

Essays on Isaac Babel, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka and Joseph Conrad

The Art of Survival

The Sixties is a powerful literary anthology written by women and men who witnessed and participated in that revolutionary decade in U.S. history. Their essays, fiction, and poetry capture the complexity of events, providing personal, reflective, and diverse testimony on a decade driven by an obsessive will to change. John Lewis's experiences with SNCC or Rosellen Brown's at Tougaloo College are moral light years removed from P.J. O'Rourke's hilarious encounter with the Balto Cong in Baltimore. It requires mind expansion to imagine Peter Najarian's first exposure to the counterculture in San Francisco as contemporaneous with Richard Currey's initiation into killing in Vietnam. Maxine Hong Kingston's depiction of head-adventurers in the Bay Area forms an unlikely parallel with Tom Hayden's experiences in the streets of Chicago in 1968. Charged with folly and tragedy, the 1960s also saw daring and unacknowledged heroism on many fronts. This volume explodes any simplification about the decade and rekindles in us a sense of wonder about our recent past.

The Sixties

America's fascination with sports is the topic of this literary anthology. Through their fiction, poetry, and essays, nearly forty writers reflect on sports as an illumination of our ordinary lives, rather than as a livelihood, a world of celebrities, or a means of escape. As Siv Cedering, Maxine Kumin, and John Ed Bradley demonstrate, often the concerns we bring to sports are profoundly personal. Our performance both as participants and spectators is a way of marking our past - our moral urgencies, our lost childhood, our role as parents, our pursuit of excellence, our fear of failure, our very identity and place in the chain of generations. Sports inevitably graze and illuminate our culture as well. Heather Ross Miller's memories of half-court women's basketball become a powerful metaphor for sexual attitudes during the 1950s. George Garrett's reflections on college football during World War II provide images that symbolize an era, and Neil Isaacs' delightful essay on major-league batboys chronicles the American Dream.

Peter Stine

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