Contributing Editor Sydney Lea’s New Essay Book What’s the Story to Launch November 12

Sydney Lea & granddaughter Cora

Numéro Cinq‘s prolific and indefatigable Contributing Editor Sydney Lea has a book launch Phoenix Books in Burlington, Vermont, on Thursday, November 12. (See details below.) I want to make a big deal out of this not just because Syd is on the Masthead and all but because we actually published several of the essays in the book in the magazine. We were all present at the birth, so to speak.

The book is called What’s the Story, an essay collection. And you’ll get the flavour of the collection if you read some of the pieces we published. These include “Sex and Death,” “Mrs. Ragnetti and the Spider,”“Short Sad Story,”“Catch,”“The Couple at the Free Pile,” “The Serpent on Barnet Knoll,” “River, Stars, and Blessed Failure,” and “Thank You Note.” They are surprising, even sometimes shocking, brief, aching, funny, and nostalgic — for all that is deeply felt, real, awkward, companionable and human.

THE BOOK: What’s the Story by Sydney Lea (Green Writers Press)

SYDNEY LEA is Poet Laureate of Vermont. He founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it till 1989. Of his nine previous poetry collections, Pursuit of a Wound (University of Illinois Press, 2000) was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, was co-winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize. In 1989, Lea also published the novel A Place in Mind with Scribner. His 1994 collection of naturalist essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home, was re-issued in paper by the Lyons Press in 2003. His selection of literary essays, A Hundred Himalayas, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2012. In 2013, Skyhorse Publications brought out A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters and Wildlife, and Four Way Books published his eleventh poetry collection, I Was Thinking of Beauty. Lea has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, and has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont and Middlebury Colleges, as well as at Franklin College in Switzerland and the National Hungarian University in Budapest. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other periodicals, as well as in more than forty anthologies. He lives in Newbury, Vermont, where he is active in statewide literacy and conservation efforts.

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