Letter from the Editor

Ron Kolm

Let me begin this ‘Letter from the New Editor’ by remembering and saluting Barney Rosset, the founder of Evergreen Review.  There would be no Evergreen or Grove Press without him; but it goes much further: There wouldn’t be anything even vaguely approaching an avant-garde in America without his taste in writing.  My own literary sensibility would be 180 degrees different if he had not put his indelible stamp on the culture.  I was a young conservative college student working part-time in a bookstore in Reading, Pennsylvania, when I stumbled upon New Directions, City Lights Books and, most importantly, Grove Press.  Hubert Selby Jr., Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Bertolt Brecht (the Manual of Piety is still one of my favorite books of poetry): these are the authors that changed my life.  I subscribed to Evergreen Review – every issue, with its mixture of stark black and white photos and quality writing, was a fierce wind of freedom knocking at, then smashing down, the walls of 1950s conformity. Barney maintained that balance right up to his passing, and beyond; we are in the process of publishing every piece he accepted.  I’d also like to state here that in my opinion this country has slid back into a faux-50s; there is a fear of being different again, you can see it in the faces of people you pass on the street – so it’s important that we continue onward in the tradition he blazed; running fiction with a bite to it, non-fiction that actually informs, and poetry that grabs the reader by its clarity.  Making good writing is a political act.  I’d like to thank the Publisher, Astrid Rosset, Contributing Editors Jim Feast and Mia Yun, Managing Editor Aliya Tyus-Barnwell, and the Fiction Editor Anjelica Young, for their support and unflagging energy.