Reading Archive
The Poetry of Place: Origins
When I was a teenager I read T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound obsessively. (And yet somehow managed not to have a girlfriend. Go figure.) Eliot and Pound might seem stodgy and academic to most but for me—growing up in Fresno, California—they represented a larger, better world. Ivy League schools.
Postcards from Unexpected Places
Like long handwritten letters and atlases, postcards descend from another world now deemed impractical. They belong to the world of Denis Breen in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Loyal Blood and his travels across the American West in Annie Proulx’s Postcards. Ruth, in Lorrie Moore’s story “Real Estate,” finds the
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Men and Women Like Him” by Amber Sparks
In “Men and Women Like Him” (Guernica), Amber Sparks explores dark tourism from the perspective of a time traveling tour guide who must ensure that historical tragedies don’t change—even when those tragedies become personal.Sparks drops us right into scene in the first couple paragraphs, letting the action and scenario
What’s Self-Love Got to Do with It?
Two years ago a generous woman handed me a spare key to the private office where she conducts her psychotherapy practice. I’ve since spent most weekends and some Jewish holy days, hours both glorious and mundane, in this Greenwich Village brownstone where I read and write and fret and
Origin Stories: Fiction by Prompt
How do great authors begin their fiction? With a line or a character, a memory or a mission? This year, as Ploughshares’s unofficial origin-story archivist, I’ll investigate. Because I’m a teacher, I started by looking for stories that grew out of writing assignments. Here’s what I found. 1. Amy
What Happens When We Read: The Mind’s Eye and How it Works
Reading is a cognitive experience and written language can elicit in the brain an array of sensory perceptions. A description of an apple pie once made me put the book down so I could bask in its warm smell. But what the brain does most readily is see. It’s
Say Ni Hao to Asia’s Literary Exports
You’re on a search for a bountiful, constantly renewing source of Asian literature. There’s a caveat: the authors must currently reside in their native countries and write of lives not clichéd by Western media. They must show India beyond its poverty or China beyond censorship. They must reveal Japan
The Humanities Are Not In Crisis: Two Writers Whose Pens Shape the Arab World
I just got back from MLA 2016, the annual Modern Language Association conference in which every year (every city) you’ll hear a variation of this same question at least five times a day: Are the humanities still relevant? That is, of course, the general anxiety that underwrites so many
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “The Matchmaker” by Karen Palmer
In “The Matchmaker” (James Franco Review), Karen Palmer stays tight to her characters’ moment-by-moment experiences, which helps the potentially polarizing events of the story elude simple definitions. What’s revealed is the tragedy of a mental institution unable to adequately serve the population it’s responsible for. In the opening few
A Recommendation
Just west of Houston, before you reach Texas’ most remarkable stretch of nothing, there’s a crumbling Latin diner I take my kid brother on Fridays. It is refreshingly un-Yelpable. The family’s owned it forever. They’re almost native in their darkness, and when I order two beers, they’ve pitched us