Round-Down: What the [Redacted]? Clean Reader App Cleans Up Literature
Many parents want to expose their children to great literature but find themselves facing a dilemma—often these books, for their more mature content, contain profanity. It can be a difficult thing to broker, the desire to introduce strong work at a young age with the desire to avoid
Language Could Kill You: Adichie, Code-Switching & the Biafran War
Language plays a crucial role throughout Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels, but nowhere is it more decisive than in the author’s second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Written against the backdrop of the Biafran War, two wealthy sisters return from England to a nation on the cusp of
Naming as Paying Attention
Names can be hard for the tongue to wrap its head around. I say this with the conviction of my full being as a male, a poet, a twin, and a slight stutterer. (Of course I stutter. My brother and I lived our early lives assuming that the world,
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Interiors” by Andrea Maturana
Boredom could be defined as a lack of interest in the surrounding world, and as such, not a particularly fun state of mind to be in, nor a compelling trait for a protagonist of a short story. But Andrea Maturana’s short story “Interiors,” (A Public Space 22, translated from
Do-Overs: A Little Leary
Fox’s Empire really wants you to know it’s so King Lear. In the pilot, Lucious Lyon—music mogul, owner of Empire Entertainment and father to three sons—gathers his kids in the board room to talk about how he won’t be able to run things forever. “What is this? We
Social Media and Literature
I seem a little less in love with literature because of social media. My apologies to the Ploughshares staff who have to Tweet about this post, but it’s true. For a few months I was an intern for an online literary magazine, helping with their social media. I’d done
Round-Down: Saludos to the Spanish-Speaking Reader
Those in the U.S. who speak Spanish in the home can rejoice: now, more easily than ever in this country, Spanish speakers can also find books in their lengua materna—and not just translations from English to Spanish. Real, authentic stories from all over the Spanish-speaking world are in demand
The Contemporary Epic
I promised you Lonesome Dove, but we’re going to start with Derek Walcott’s Omeros, because this is a family of contemporary epics. Giant, sprawling books, full of gods and families, generations and cycles, books that seem like they go on forever and seem like they should. And where
The Formal Imagination of Oulipo
Founded in 1960 by a collective of French mathematicians and writers, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), or Oulipo, was established to identify new forms of writing using numerical and alphabetical constraints. Early member Georges Perec, for example, structured his novel Life A User’s Manuel according to
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “The Radical” by Brock Clarke
A few weeks ago I wrote about the risky ending of Mary Helen Specht’s “Night Island,” and how her switching perspectives at the end turned a potentially good story into a great one. In “The Radical” (The Cincinnati Review 11.2), author Brock Clarke also take his story to