Pushcart Prize L: Best of the Small Presses

The essays, poems, and stories in this dazzling anthology of Pushcart Prize winners explore a fascination with technology’s darker side and anxieties about being made obsolete. Sarah Green’s poem “Tinder,” composed of lines taken from men’s profiles on the app, crafts a chilling view of online dating (“You remember Prince Charming? Yeah, that’s not me”). Stephen Akey’s essay “The Department of Everything” takes a nostalgic look at his Brooklyn librarian job in the 1980s, when patrons would call with questions that are now generally handled by search engines. The protagonist of Nadir Jabur’s story “The Uber Men” loses his journalism job to AI and becomes a food delivery driver. Kim Samek covers similar ground from an abusrdist angle with “Easement,” in which the narrator is hired through a “task website” to make prank calls for no reason other than to “disrupt the peace.” The pieces are frequently mesmerizing, and the recurring themes create an intriguing sense of continuity. Not only does this collection fascinate, but it testifies to the riches on offer from small presses and literary journals. (Dec.)