Uncategorized Archive

The Modern-Day Myth of The Good Life

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What makes these “Back to the Land” social media influencers so much like Helen and Scott Nearing is that both talk about the self-sufficient life as if it is something that is achievable to everyone. But what each of these people fail to say is that behind every “good

Trump Sky Alpha by Mark Doten

Mark Doten’s novel opens with the fictional Trump making a bad decision. All over the world, the internet has gone down. When it comes back up, for reasons no one quite understands, he uses the nuclear codes.

(My) 10 Rules For APIA/Hapa Fiction: A Brief Ars Prosae Asianae

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Like the Bechdel Test, these ten rules should be treated as the first critical lens that APIA readers (can) use to call out and contest orientalism in publishing while also serving as a mandatory metric by which all readers (can) hold APIA writing accountable as well as the presses

The Weather We’re Having

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The calamity of weather disaster in literature offers more overt indications of those who are vulnerable and exposed. From Shakespeare’s encroaching storms to Richard Wright’s floods, from Zora Neale Hurston’s hurricane to Haruki Murakami’s quakes, we learn that we have to keep our eyes on the skies and our

The 2016 Ploughshares Count

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Every year at the open of the annual AWP Conference, we publish our gender statistics, taking a cue from VIDA’s important work. While we don’t collect demographic information on any of our writers, we publish the gender statistics of those whose gender identities we can find documented elsewhere (their

I, Gambler

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Much like the games they glamorize, gambling narratives are fraught with risk. They risk losing the reader in the minutiae of strategy and tactics.

Plurality Trumps Homogeneity: Listening to Different Voices Makes Us Great Again

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From its bloody beginnings to its glorious establishment, America has always been a country of immigrants, of diverse groups, of different skin tones and dialects, of the tired and poor. What made America great, and what could make America great again, is this multitudinous quality, this possibility, this richness

Trump’s Words Helped Him Win—And That’s Troubling

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The effects of this year’s presidential election, exhausting and exhaustive as it was, will reverberate locally, nationally and globally for decades. This is true of all presidential elections, but the contrast between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could not have been more pronounced.

A Blackout By Any Other Name

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A year and a half ago, most of Turkey lost power. 80 of its 81 provinces, excluding Van, suddenly had no electricity. Since power outages in Istanbul are fairly frequent, that morning as I was out helping my then boyfriend get a tax number in central Istanbul, the lack

Round-Up: Ahmed Naji, Katherine Dunn, and More

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From a protest over the imprisonment of an Egyptian writer to the first ever female-led crime writing festival, here are the latest literary headlines: PEN America is teaming up with writers across the globe to protest the “unjust imprisonment” of Egyptian writer Ahmed Naji. Last week, at least 120 prominent