Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about anthologies. We at Lookout have been working hard for the past several months on upcoming Ecotone anthology, Astoria to Zion: Twenty-Six Stories of Risk and Abandon from Ecotone’s First Decade. Then, just last week, my undergraduate publishing section read two examples of successful book proposals, both of which happened to be for anthologies of essays. What I find most fascinating is the oddly specific subject matter some editors undertake when compiling an anthology. Who knew there were enough stories, essays, and poems out there in the world about these subjects? Who knew there was a demand?
1.Baseball: A Literary Anthology, ed. Nicholas Dawidoff

Published in 2002 by Library of America, this is the anthology springs to my mind when I think of oddly specific subjects; in college, my boss was looking to make an anthology of baseball poems, and I remember being surprised to hear there were enough poems about baseball to anthologize—although some would undoubtedly say it is the Most American of Sports! and thus a prime subject for poesy. Robert Frost, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Roth, and John Updike, among others, are anthologized here.
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