Mr. and Mrs. DoctorJulie IromuanyaCoffee House Press, 2015288 pages Buy: eBook Job Ogbonnaya is a liar—or, depending on your taste, a dreamer. After his brother Samuel dies in the Biafran war, Job becomes the hope of his family. They send him to school in America to become a doctor. Job flunks out but keeps planning to…
Maxine Kumin, a longtime friend of Ploughshares, passed away on February 6th at the age of 88. She published first with us in Spring 1974. It was an excerpt from a journal about raising horses and living in the country, which she continued to do for the rest of her life. In the piece, she…
Halloween is one of the few holidays where you can take your introverted reading habit and turn it into a public spectacle. So, get those brows up in the air, squeeze in that monocle, and start puffing on your bubble pipe: here are some literary costume ideas. FROM MIRIAM COOK (Marketing Assistant) The Headless HorsemanFrom…
Equal DangerLeonardo SciasciaNew York Review of Books Classics, October 2003152 pages$14.00 [Editor’s note: Every few months, Akshay Ahuja will dig into the archives for an old book that has either fallen out of favor or never received the recognition it deserves. Feel free to add suggestions for future rediscoveries in the comments.] Detective novels, despite…
Before we move on to things literary, I think we should begin this Independence Day week with Fozzie Bear singing “America the Beautiful,” which my mother incorrectly identified as our national anthem during her citizenship exam (she still passed). Actually, I kind of wish it was our national anthem—I prefer its focus on the extraordinary…
Today is June 19. For those that don’t know, this is a holiday celebrated in some parts of America as Juneteenth. Also known as Freedom Day, it marks the day that the Union army arrived in Texas in 1865 and actually enforced the Emancipation Proclamation, more than two years after it was declared. Juneteeth, famously,…
[Editor’s note: Every few months, Akshay Ahuja will dig into the archives for an old book that has either fallen out of favor or never received the recognition it deserves. Feel free to add suggestions for future rediscoveries in the comments.] The Phantom Carriage Selma Lagerlöf Norvik Press, July 2011 122 pages $24.95 The only…
A Catalan roommate of mine once told me about La Diada de Sant Jordi (or the day of St. George), which is the closest that her part of Spain comes to our Valentine’s Day. Boys give roses to the girls, and girls give books to the boys. Well, St. George apparently made all sorts of…
Thomas Lee is the first winner of our Emerging Writer’s Contest. His story, “The Gospel of Blackbird,” appears in the current Alice Hoffman issue, and he is also one of our new guest bloggers. We sat down and spoke with him several months ago about balancing work and writing, the Korean-American community, and the inspiration…
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