Any plans for more special volumes like "Writing New York" or "Writing Los Angeles"?
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1euphorb
This is a question for David Cloyce Smith.
LOA's first special publication was Writing New York in 1998, and the fourth was Writing Los Angeles in 2002. I remember at the time anticipating similar volumes for other cities, but there have been none (although Americans in Paris, published in 2004, is somewhat similar).
I am wondering whether there are any plans for future similar volumes. Certainly Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington, D.C. have rich and distinctive literary traditions that would lend themselves to very nice anthologies, and perhaps other cities as well, such as Miami, or perhaps some regional anthologies.
LOA's first special publication was Writing New York in 1998, and the fourth was Writing Los Angeles in 2002. I remember at the time anticipating similar volumes for other cities, but there have been none (although Americans in Paris, published in 2004, is somewhat similar).
I am wondering whether there are any plans for future similar volumes. Certainly Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington, D.C. have rich and distinctive literary traditions that would lend themselves to very nice anthologies, and perhaps other cities as well, such as Miami, or perhaps some regional anthologies.
3DCloyceSmith
Just noticed this thread, which I somehow overlooked last month.
There are currently no "city" anthologies in production. More than a decade ago, the editors looked into several other collections for each of the cities listed above, and a couple of states to boot, but nothing came of them.
The first two anthologies were specifically designed, in part, as an attempt to present literary traditions to regional audiences. Once the demise of local booksellers set in for good, the costs of clearing the rights for and producing such anthologies outweighed their potential sales. The New York anthology was a huge hit particularly because it sold in massive quantities in NYC bookstores and fancier gift shops--most of which were gone a decade after we published it. Few booksellers outside New York stocked it (even B&N and Borders rarely carried it outside the metro area), and it didn't do that well online, either. A relatively inexpensive paperback edition was used for several years as a textbook (really!) by a number of NYC schools and universities, but that waned as well and now the book is out of print.
The idea has occasionally been revisited, and the concept hasn't been ruled out for good. If regional bookstores resume their suspended comeback once they start to reopen after the pandemic, then I would imagine that proposals for such books might be considered more seriously, but they would probably have to be shorter than the LA or NYC behemoths in order to be feasible.
--David
There are currently no "city" anthologies in production. More than a decade ago, the editors looked into several other collections for each of the cities listed above, and a couple of states to boot, but nothing came of them.
The first two anthologies were specifically designed, in part, as an attempt to present literary traditions to regional audiences. Once the demise of local booksellers set in for good, the costs of clearing the rights for and producing such anthologies outweighed their potential sales. The New York anthology was a huge hit particularly because it sold in massive quantities in NYC bookstores and fancier gift shops--most of which were gone a decade after we published it. Few booksellers outside New York stocked it (even B&N and Borders rarely carried it outside the metro area), and it didn't do that well online, either. A relatively inexpensive paperback edition was used for several years as a textbook (really!) by a number of NYC schools and universities, but that waned as well and now the book is out of print.
The idea has occasionally been revisited, and the concept hasn't been ruled out for good. If regional bookstores resume their suspended comeback once they start to reopen after the pandemic, then I would imagine that proposals for such books might be considered more seriously, but they would probably have to be shorter than the LA or NYC behemoths in order to be feasible.
--David
