There are many different ways to respond to the weather that is bearing down on this part of the world. Alcohol is an old strategy; SAD lamps are a newer one. For our money, nothing beats books. Here is a wintry mix of our literary strategies for getting through the season: ANTI-BEACH READS If summer…
Tolstoy: A Russian Life Rosamund Bartlett Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, November 2010 560 pages $35 Tolstoy biographers almost have too much material to work with. Unlike Dickens, Tolstoy didn’t burn any of his 8,500 letters; unlike Hardy, he didn’t destroy large portions of his diaries. Instead, he carefully preserved all his papers, especially the ones recording…
We are happy to announce that Christine Sneed has won the twenty-first John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her short story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). The $1,500 award, named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares…
Until recently, Kate Flaherty was our Senior Reader for fiction. We sat down and talked to her over e-mail about literary magazines, reading slush, and her own work. Ploughshares: Tell us a little about your literary life – what were the first important books for you, when did you start writing? Kate Flaherty: Wow. Those…
Collected Poems A.S.J. Tessimond Bloodaxe Books, November 2010 256 pages $24.95 Wallace Stevens wrote that “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.” That mischievous “almost,” of course, can be interpreted in many ways, and poets have always had different attitudes about how much of a fight verses should put up before they begin…
A Riot of Goldfish Kanoko Okamoto (Translated by J. Keith Vincent) Hesperus Worldwide, January 2011 114 pages $15.95 David Mitchell, in his fine introduction to this slim volume of two novellas, writes that author Kanoko Okamoto’s great theme is the “frustrated striving for aesthetic perfection.” Certainly her novellas have that quality, something like Hawthorne’s tales…
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