BOA Blog

To celebrate WXXI Rochester Public Radio's "Summer Book Week," BOA Editions was invited to the "Connections" show with guest host Scott Fybush and two other Rochester-based independent publishers, Open Letter Books and RIT Press, to discuss the current and future states of book publishing. In a fascinating hour-long discussion on the literary scene in Rochester, as well as the importance of mission-driven independent publishing, BOA Publisher Peter Conners had some fun things to say about Rochester as a city of readers: "Rochester is really a sexy city in a lot of ways because people who read are sexy," he says....

Kirkus Reviews has only rave things to say about James McManus' new collection of linked stories, The Education of a Poker Player. In a new *starred* review, Kirkus offers a thorough account of the new book and its merits: "McManus’ writing is deceptively artless: mundane details related in Vince’s slowly maturing voice track the unexceptional life of a middle-class Irish-American Catholic family in a Chicago suburb, with the obligatory JFK portrait on the wall and the obliging production of numerous offspring. Yet the author gradually forms these common facets of simple people into a sharp, intimate portrait of an intelligent,...

Robin McLean is taking the country by storm with her "Sidewind Across America" tour for her new BOA book Reptile House. The national reading community has welcomed her with open arms, which is demonstrated by her most recent interviews with New Hampshire Public Radio and Late Night Library. For The Bookshelf, NHPR's series on authors and books with ties to the Granite State, All Things Considered host Peter Biello interviewed McLean on elements of her new book, her personal inspirations, and her life before becoming an award-winning author, comparing her distinctive voice to that of Flannery O'Connor. First a lawyer and then a...

According to a new review from the Common, Robin McLean’s story collection, Reptile House, "opens at an end—when a freeze of apocalyptic proportions devastates the town of Easter, (“Cold Snap”)—and ends at a beginning—when an unhappy man’s wife gives birth to another baby (the title story)." The review continues, "this sort of upset runs rampant throughout McLean’s debut work. McLean’s surreal tales about ordinary characters deliver emotional truth in poetic language. Concrete and surreal, they spill beyond the conventional short story forms." "A book for lovers of language, Reptile House won the 2015 BOA Short Story Fiction Prize, sponsored by...

When you think of BOA its age may be the last thing you consider. The late poet, editor, and translator A. Poulin, Jr. founded BOA on July 4, 1976, which means that on July 4, 2016, BOA will mark 40 years as a publisher of poetry and literary fiction. In those 40 years, BOA has earned an esteemed reputation as an award-winning not-for-profit publishing house. This has been achieved by a staff and board with a strong sense of mission to bring high quality literature to the public. The fact of “40 years as an independent publisher” is remarkable and deserves celebration.  The terrain for publishing poetry and literary fiction is fraught with all kinds of challenges; hardly the least of these is the marketplace itself. As...