Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
The house is often used as a symbol of security in literature, and a ruined home can speak to what a given writer thinks we need protection from. Both the threats to security, and the emotional impact of a literary ruin shift with the writer and her cultural moment.
Certain writers—often those writers who are said to “transcend their genre”—combine action-filled plots with complex character development. How do they stop the action in, say, a zombie apocalypse, so that the characters can become intimate and so the reader can grow to care about their inner lives?
Books by Kevin Brockmeier—focusing on the horror of surviving seventh grade—and Buddhist psychotherapist Mark Epstein dissect the trauma of everyday life.
Poetry’s bread and butter is the interior; it goes where movies want to go, but can’t, by the nature of the form. So when a poem wants to respond to a film, how does it make use of this tension, and alchemize it into art?
“Weak expression Poor artistry,” reads the fictional note in red pencil on Constantine Cavafy’s sheaf of poems sent to the poet Jean Moréas in Ersi Sotiropoulos’s 2015 novel, translated by Karen Emmerich.
Yiyun Li’s new novel uses conversation as the mode to better explore her narrator’s grief.
Daisy Johnson’s new retelling of the Oedipus myth molds the story’s original questions into new shapes: What does fear look like? What produces it?
In wondering why victims stay in abusive relationships, people often ignore the more pressing question: why don’t abusers stop abusing?
Silence is, necessarily, a fact of life for Brand, the protagonist of Stewart O’Nan’s 2016 novel, who has emigrated illegally to Palestine from the Soviet Union where he survived Gulag camps, and who has since become a member of the Haganah, a Jewish organization working to liberate Palestine from Britain.
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