Madville has made our nominations for the 2025 Pushcart Prize. The prize will be awarded in several categories for short pieces. It was a hard decision, because we published such amazing work this year. The Pushcart Prizeaccepts six nominations per small press or magazine and “any combination of poetry, short stories, essays, memoirs or stand-alone excerpts from novels.”
Our editors weighed in on their favorites, and this is what we chose:
“James and Jim Ponder Enough” by Jim Minick from his poetry collection The Intimacy of Spoons (Madville 2024).
I went to Frankfurter Buchmesse to represent Madville Publishing for the first time this past week. According to Wikipedia, “The Frankfurter Buchmesse is the world’s largest trade fair for books, based on the number of publishing companies represented. It is considered to be the most important book fair in the world for international deals and trading.”
I left the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport on Saturday, October 12 and arrived in Frankfurt on Sunday October 13. It’s a 10-hour flight and you lose seven hours traveling west to east to get there. This is what I wrote that Sunday as I sat for another eight hours waiting for check-in time at the hotel:
“I’m sooooo-o-o tired… I haven’t slept a wink.”—John Lennon
I binged the entire fourth season of True Detectiveon the plane, the one with Jody Foster and Kali Reis. I knew I should try to sleep, that it would be morning when I arrived in Germany, but I wasn’t tired then. It was afternoon back home. The series was almost as good as the first season with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. I was blown away in that storyline by Matthew McConaughey’s performance that spanned 17 years. He displayed an incredible range. This fourth season I just watched with Jody Foster and Kali Reis was good, but I think the strength of this one was the story more than the acting. Don’t get me wrong, the acting was fine, but if the story hadn’t been strong, it wouldn’t have been special.
I spent the entire time puzzling at the piercings in Kali Reis’s cheeks wondering if the two sides connect like a bit with a chain running through her mouth. Of course that sent me on a search for information about Kali Reis. Did you know she was a professional boxer? That would explain why her character gets to beat some men all the way up in the show. It was good to see a bad ass woman taking the fight to the misogynistic bastards. But I liked the resolution. If there hadn’t been a good ending, it would have spoiled the show for me. That’s what happened in the second one. I didn’t see the third. But without a compelling finish, I leave a miniseries feeling disappointed—like I wasted my time.
So, I watched this series while flying over the ocean from Dallas to Frankfurt in preparation for my first trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair—the largest in the world, and the place to be if you want to sell foreign publishing rights. I’m nervous because I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m sure I’ve already missed a trick or two by not scheduling meetings yet. Still… Steps one and two are completed. I rode the airplane here and found my way to the hotel. Only trouble is that I arrived at the hotel at nine o’clock in the morning and can’t check into my room until four p.m. and I haven’t slept at all. Now I need to try and stay up all day so I can sleep tonight.
The FrankfurterBuchmesse
To say this fair is huge is an understatement. Here are some photos with captions that may give you an idea of what it’s like. We made some great new friends and hopefully some important business connections. As for foreign rights deals? We’ll see. That part of the trip was more of a learning experience!
Our friends, Jade and Wilnona, the “And I Thought Ladies,” took six or our recent titles to the London Book Fair this year. These are some of the pictures they sent back. We expect a few more, so check back! We wish we could have joined them. It looks like they had a really great time in our tiny 2 meter by 2 meter booth.
Here is an article we just read that does a great job of describing the experience of the London book Fair. That NYT Piece about LBF??
We had a smaller showing at this year’s AWP conference. Kim didn’t attend, having begun her college career in Missouri, she could only think of the weather and the unpredictability of flights in early February in Kansas City. But of course, Madville has a number of authors who have no such aversion to the cold or fear of driving on icy roads, and they did attend and represented Madville happily.
