It was an especially exciting week at Lookout HQ with the launch of Clare Beams’s story collection, We Show What We Have Learned, on Tuesday. The Lookout team has been hard at work on this amazing book for quite some time, and it’s been fun to see it getting the attention it so deserves. Here are a few of the special places you can read more about it.

The story “All the Keys to All the Doors” was featured in Electric Literature‘s Recommended Reading this week, with a fantastic introduction from Megan Mayhew Bergman: “Upon reading her, you make it to the third or fourth paragraph and realize this is not the restrained narrative you expected, that there is a cutting strangeness and profundity afoot.”

Clare got a bunch of love in Pittsburgh, the town she calls home, including this interview in the Pittsburgh City Paper, this review in the Pittsburgh Tribune, and a packed release party at the White Whale Bookstore.

And if you haven’t heard by now, she also got love from O, The Oprah Magazine, where it was featured as one of “10 Titles to Pick Up Now.”

This coming week, Wilmington will host its own special launch party for Clare as part of Writers’ Week on Monday night. To read more about it–and the other fabulous writers coming to Wilmington including Mei Fong, Maurice Manning, and Chinelo Okparanta–check out this article from Encore.

Speaking of hometown love, Wilmington’s Salt Magazine did a fabulous profile on Lookout and Honey from the Lion, saying, “The care and adoration lavished on a Lookout book is obvious…. French flaps, beautiful graphic design, and tailored page layouts are the hallmarks of a book that someone cares about…. At Lookout, each book radiates that level of care.” And Parnassus Books created this roundup of “Small Presses: Little Gems With Big Impact,” calling out Lookout books by Clare Beams, Edith Pearlman, and Matthew Neill Null. (Thanks, you guys!)

There’s good news for other Lookout authors, too! Matthew Neill Null’s novel, Honey from the Lion, has been named a fiction finalist in the 2016 Massachusetts Book Awards from the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and has sold to Albin Michel for publication in France in 2018. Oui oui!

And Ben Miller, author of the memoir River Bend Chronicle, accepted the Cornell College Leadership & Service Award for “contributions to American literature.” Ben’s acceptance speech is funny and inspiring, and we’re so happy for him.

And there are book launches in the world of Ecotone contributors to boot! Melissa Range’s new poetry collection, Scriptorium, hit the shelves this month. Chosen by Tracy K. Smith for the 2015 National Poetry Series, it’s now available from Beacon Press.

Issue 21 contributor Safiya Sinclair’s book of poetry, Cannibal, which came out last month, got a shout out on Lenny: “Her stanzas will revive you and leave you transformed.”

This is the post that nearly launched a thousand books. We hope your reading all the great new literature you can handle–thanks for checking out ours!

Friends, it’s been an incredibly busy week here at Ecotone and Lookout HQ. The last week of classes! Finishing up edits on Lookout’s new story collection! Getting ready to upload Ecotone’s fall/winter issue! Buying holiday trees! Our contributors have been busy too. In the spirit of the honoring the busyness in all of us, this week’s roundup is coming at you rapid fire. Ready, set: literature!

Ecotone contributor Jeff Sharlet and collaborator Neil Shea announce a new project with Virginia Quarterly Review: #TrueStory, which will build on the experiments with “Instagram journalism” Neil and Jeff have been making. They start with a dispatch from Meera Subramanian. Each week there’ll be a new selection of reported stories, and they’re looking for submissions. The work will also be published online at VQR, and select essays will appear in the print journal.

In other submission news, submissions are open for the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Contest from the North Carolina Writers’ Network, and first-place winners could potentially see their essays on the pages of Ecotone.

If you’re in the area, Lookout’s debut novelist, Matthew Neill Null,  will read from Honey from the Lion at his alma mater Washington and Lee on December 7 at 7 p.m.

Up for a laugh? At the Rumpus, Lookout author Steve Almond very comically shares his “fan mail” (See those quotes? This mail is full of loathing and violence!) from Against Football and then responds to them.

New work is out from a bunch of Ecotone contributors: Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. has a lovely poem featured on Women’s Voices for Change. Jamie Quatro has a new short story in the Oxford American. Matthew Gavin Frank had part of his new book (about Chicago pizza!) featured in Longreads last week. 

Good news abounds too! Ecotone contributor Toni Tipton-Martin fetched some glowing words from the New York Times for Breaking the Jemima Code. And both Lookout author Edith Pearlman and Ecotone contributor Lauren Groff made the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2015.

And unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve already heard about Claire Vaye Watkins’s amazing essay on the Tin House blog. But if you just crawled out, head on over.

Bam! A slew of amazing reads to keep you busy in your down time. Thanks for taking the time to check in. We hope your week ahead is filled with busyness and rest in perfect balance.

It’s been a week of more rain, inter-cranial pressure changes, and discussions about how to pronounce Joaquin. But also lots of literary goings-on!

We enjoyed a fantastic discussion late last week between Michael Taeckens and Belle Boggs, about the promotion for her story collection, Mattaponi Queen, and forthcoming book, The Art of Waiting. (You can read her essay, “Imaginary Children,” in Ecotone 17 for a sneak peek of her new book!) The discussion revolved around the perfect cover design (witness Belle’s first cover here, one of Michael’s favorites), whether to hand out character-themed jam at readings or not to, and how to be yourself on social media. We’re so grateful to Michael for all we learned from him as UNCW’s first visiting publishing professional this semester.

Speaking of social media, Ecotone got Instagram! Follow us @EcotoneMagazine (and Lookout’s as well, of course, at LookoutBooksuncw).

Lookout and Ecotone authors have been in the news nearly as much as Hurricane Joaquin this week!

Lookout’s debut novel, Honey from the Lion, has been all over the South, from our home state of North Carolina, to the book’s backdrop, West Virgina. Wilmington’s own Star News called it “a masterful effort, an evocation of a vanished time and place” in this review. The Charleston Gazette Mail says Honey “reads like a thriller, a sweeping epic, and historical fiction at its best.” We couldn’t agree more.

Ecotone contributor and neighbor John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote a fun rock ‘n roll investigation for the Paris Review. Kirkus Reviews 2015 Book Finalists longlist includes Ecotone contributors Lauren Groff and Jim Shepard. We owe congratulations to Ecotone poet and essayist Lesley Wheeler, whose new collection of poetry, Radioland, is available, as of yesterday, from Barrow Street Press. And our own Binocular Vision appeared in the New York Times this week, in this meditation on the intersection of motherhood and gadgetry.

“I was waiting out my twin sons’ soccer practice, reading Binocular Vision, a collection of short stories by Edith Pearlman, on my iPhone. The boys were dribbling their way around cones; I was in the gym bleachers, moved by Pearlman’s meditations on mortality, having a bit of a moment in an unlikely place.”

We hope your week is filled with only the best kinds of storms and unlikely realizations: ones that bring much-needed rain and understanding.

(And: Joaquin. There, we said it one more time!)

This week, as you all know by now, was publication week for Honey from the Lion! We’ve been shipping books, publicizing, and getting ready for Matt’s book tour. Big thanks to a grant from South Arts for helping us make these workshops and panels, as well as a special visit to Hawbridge School, possible. You can find all event dates and details for the tour here, but if you’re in North or South Carolina, you can find him whirlwinding over the next couple of weeks in these cities:

Friday, September 11, 7 p.m., Scuppernong Books, Greensboro, NC
Saturday, September 12, 2:30 p.m., Bookmarks Festival, Winston-Salem, NC
Saturday, September 12, 7 p.m., Malaprop’s, Asheville, NC
Sunday, September 13, 3 p.m., University of North Carolina Asheville, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
Monday, September 14, 5:30 p.m. panel, 7 p.m. reading, Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC
Tuesday, September 15, 6 p.m. workshop and book signing, Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, Southern Pines, NC
Tuesday, September 15, 6 p.m., Fiction Addiction Southern Storytellers event (ticketed), Greenville, SC
Wednesday, September 16, 3 p.m., Hub City Bookshop, Spartanburg, SC
Thursday, September 17, 7 p.m., Main Street Books, Davidson, NC
Friday–Saturday, September 18–19, Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Discovery Show, Raleigh, NC

In case you missed any of the goings-on around the book this week, here’s a quick recap: find excerpts of the novel at At Length and American Short Fiction, and find interviews from Kirkus and Tin House’s the Open Bar. And tune in on Thursday, September 17 at noon to hear Matt on the State of Things from WUNC.

We’ve been working long hours to get all preorders mailed. If you’re one of our lucky customers, the books are on the way thanks to the hard work on the Lookout staff (Megan and Morgan seen here; overhead ladder shot courtesy of Liz).

In other news, Ecotone contributors are all over the web this week. Claire Vaye Watkins and Lauren Groff talk about their new books on Salon with Alexandra Kleeman, Helen Phillips, Matthew Salesses, and Steve Toltz. One of the most fun interviews we’ve read in a while. Kazim Ali wrote this open letter to contributor Aimee Nezhukumatathil in response to this week’s Best American Poetry scandal. And Toni Tipton Martin got some attention from the New York Times for her book The Jemima Code.

That’s the news for the week! On this September 11 we hope you are surrounded by those you love and words that bring you comfort and connection.

Many Ecotone contributors have been busy launching books this fall, and we love to see their names on best-of lists! Claire Vaye Watkins and Lauren Groff made Bustle’s list of most anticipated fall books, Lauren’s book was featured again on Electric Literature, and Luis Alberto Urrea’s new book got a nice review in High Country Times. 

Contributor Toni Tipton-Martin’s fantastic new book, The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks is the new selection for the Bitter Southerner’s Well Read Book Club. Toni has amassed an amazing collection of cookbooks by little-known African American cooks—one of which was featured in Ecotone’s sustenance issue—and her book explores what they have to say about our culture. Toni was also consulted in this NYT piece about food and race in the South.

In event news, Ecotone contributor Randall Keenan will discuss Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me at Durham’s The Regulator Bookshop next Tuesday, which is also the official launch for Lookout’s sixth title, Honey from the Lion by Matthew Neill Null! (But if you can’t wait until then to start reading, At Length magazine published this stunning excerpt from the novel.) Tonight at 7 p.m., Matt joins host Jenny Zhang and writers Leopoldine Core, Doreen St. Félix, Alice Kim, and Anna North for Alienation Produces Eccentrics or Revolutionaries at Housing Works Bookstore Café. You won’t want to miss his first official reading from Honey from the Lion. And on Sunday, he will launch the novel in his hometown of Provincetown at Tim’s Used Books. Next week, Matt kicks off his tour of the Carolinas, thanks in part to a grant from South Arts. He’ll be giving public readings and teaching historic fiction writing workshops along the way. Check out the events page on his website for dates, times, and details.

Shelf-Life: “National Book Critics Circle fiction prize goes to Edith Pearlman”

Short story author Edith Pearlman took the big fiction prize at the National Book Critics Circle awards last night for her book Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories.

Congratulations Edith! We are so proud of you.

Read more.