Editor's Note, Spring 2000

Remember F. X. Toole? His story about a boxing cut-man was one of four first-times-in-print last spring. Well, Nat Sobel, the New York agent notoriously assiduous in scouring litmags for talent, saw the story, contacted Toole...and sold a collection of his stories, first to Secker & Warburg in London, and then to Dan Halpern, who once edited a wonderful litmag, Antaeus, and whose Ecco Press is now an imprint at HarperCollins.

The New York Post's Media Ink columnist reported that the "Irish storyteller...is pulling in just under $100,000 for the book, following in the footsteps of Angela's Ashes." This Postman also reported that Toole, 70, "had his first short story published in an obscure West Coast literary journal called Zyzzyva."

I e-mailed said columnist to let him know that, first of all, ZYZZYVA is always all caps italic. And, secondly, that I doubt very much if anybody outside New York even reads his paper, much less his column, whereas ZYZZYVA has a subscriber in Mississippi and two in Tennessee, to name just two states of this great union. He dared not riposte.

As for himself, Toole drove up from Hermosa Beach recently to visit the Bay Area with his son. He had baked a gooseberry pie for the occasion--one of the things I'd liked about his story was its hero's fondness for pie. It was a delicious pie, with an exquisite crust, and it was fun to share the excitement with a man who wrote his first unpublished novel in 1958 and whose ship has come in at last.

Discovery is always fun, especially when some measure of fame follows, as it has for Jon Billman, Po Bronson, Lewis Buzbee, Joshua Clover, Peter Coyote, Chitra Divakaruni, Forrest Hamer, Karen Karbo, Alvin Lu, Jess Mowry, Yxta Maya Murray....

And do you remember Frances Mayes, in Winter '93, her random, rather poetic notes about an Italian fixer-upper? In due course, there followed Under the Tuscan Sun, but, alas, no panettone has come my way.