Oscar Wilde and the Stereotype
Each semester, I ask my freshmen writing students what at first seems like an obvious question: “What is a stereotype?” Students tend to love the word. They use it all the time. They talk about challenging stereotypes, resisting stereotypes, and being stereotyped. And yet, I’ve never once had a
Round-Down: Penguin Random House Launches Its New Website
It has been a little less than three years since the Penguin-Random House merger announcement was made, and the new company, Penguin Random House, just recently launched its new, joint website. The site is clean, highly functional, and features a home page that encourages engagement with PRH’s many excellent authors and
The Funniest Writer You’ve Never Read
The funniest writer you’ve never read is a deceased Canadian named Mordecai Richler. The author of ten novels, a short story collection, and several books of essays, Richler was—and is—hugely famous in Canada. That he is not well known in this country is possibly a product of our curious
“Beruffled Little Wet Apron” or “Vast and Prodigious Cadence of Water”?: Bicycling at Niagara Falls
As a child in the Midwest, I was shocked to find out that my parents hadn’t honeymooned at Niagara Falls, which I’d thought was sort of a requirement. It turned out that they’d instead spent three days in Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain country. Niagara Falls seemed even
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Thank You For the _______” by Becky Adnot-Haynes
Some stories get their complexity from the weaving of plot twists, some from the myriad of possible outcomes facing a character making a tough decision. Some—Raymond Carver’s “Fat” for instance—gain their complexity by the layering of different stories on top of each other. Becky Adnot-Haynes, in “Thank You For
“She did not let go until her story had been told”: An Interview with Sandy Longhorn
Sandy Longhorn is the author of three collections of poems, Blood Almanac (Anhinga Press, 2006), The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths (Jacar Press, 2013) and The Alchemy of My Mortal Form (Trio House, 2015). She teaches at Pulaski Technical College in Little Rock, Arkansas, and co-edits Heron Tree, “a
Literary Blueprints: The Temptress
If the Byronic Hero is the bad boy of literature, then the Temptress is his female counterpart. The Literary Blueprints series looks at dangerous ladies and their wanton ways. “She looked slick as hell; polished, neat, and with that feminine deadliness that can drive you nuts. They work on
Ploughshares Spring 2015: An Extended Introduction by Guest Editor Neil Astley
Why is it that most American poets know very little about contemporary poetry from Britain and Ireland? A good number of them are published in Britain; they give readings at festivals in the UK and Ireland where they’re able to meet and hear the work of their British and
Round-Down: Is the “Most Challenged Books of 2014” List Real?
As anyone ever tasked with disciplining a child (or heck, even anyone who has ever been a child) can attest, telling someone they are forbidden from accessing something only makes that person more likely to want that particular thing. Case in personal point: when I was about thirteen, my
Impossible to Pin Down: Truth & Memory in Nonfiction
Nonfiction as a genre confronts the discordance between memory—a slippery, subjective entity that can be the antithesis of truth—and actuality. Roy Peter Clark writes of the “essential fictive nature of all memory.” Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, editors of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman