LAR’s 2010 Pushcart Nominations: Nonfiction

Each year, it’s our difficult task to nominate six pieces from The Los Angeles Review for the Pushcart Prize. We love each story, essay, and poem we’ve published in 2010–all 164 of them; selecting a mere two pieces from each genre is a difficult undertaking. But, as always, it’s our honor to present work from LAR to editor Bill Henderson and the Pushcart Press, one of the strongest defenders of the small press and the literary magazine, and we welcome the chance to bring well-deserved attention to our contributors. This year, Nonfiction Editor Ann Beman has made the following selections:

Timothy L. Marsh for “How to Make White People Happy” in LAR Issue 8. “Like a lot of Indonesians, Ketut’s life began with the kind of cards that couldn’t easily beat a fold.” The piece evokes a Graham Greene novel, Paul Theroux on a low-snark day, William Least Heat-Moon’s descriptive prose. In telling the story of one Indonesian man, Tim Marsh strikes a keyboard of universal chords. Every note is properly tuned; every light-hearted sentence sings with weight, substance, gravitas.

Jeremiah O’Hagan for “Pink, White, Blue” in LAR Issue 7. In a triptych of short-short nonfiction pieces, this young writer shows us the colors he’s made of. He writes as if stabbing a penlight inward, revealing pocket flashes of his heart, gut, and soul.

Issue 7 and 8 are available for purchase here.