So—Eric Nelson is an agent with the Susan Rabiner Literary Agency.His own blog, “How to Think Like Your Agent,” is full of quick, no-nonsense advice. Here, he lends our readers a special dose of it: how to get an agent, from an agent’s POV. Check out his words to the wise below, then bookmark his…
When I was a kid, I would spend hours drawing maps of fictional towns. Sometimes, it would start with a river running down the page; other times, a mountain. Each street I added carried a name. Construction would continue over time: homes, schools, hospitals, even sport stadiums (Melville, home of the Whalers). Businesses would come…
Nothing hits the literary palate with quite the delightful punch of a well-spun revenge story. Not the third-act, Scooby-Doo reveal that a killer did it all for revenge, or even the author’s personal vendetta against some person(s)—no, I’m talking of revenge plots where the actions unfurls around a quest for comeuppance. The Elizabethan revenge tragedies…
Man vs. SkyCorey ZellerYesYes Books, March 201376 pages$16.00 Corey Zeller’s Man vs. Sky is what happens when you bust your fist through the gut of elegy, grab on, and turn it inside out. In memory of the poet’s dear friend, Jeremy Quezada, this collection of prose poems delivers the musical harmony of Zeller’s poetic intuition coupled…
This guest post was contributed by Ethan Rutherford. —Andrew Ladd, blog editor. I recently moved, and while unpacking my books I stumbled upon an old issue of Ploughshares—Fall 2007, guest edited by Andrea Barrett. I don’t always keep my old literary journals, but I’ve kept this one because it included a story by a good…
In our Writing Lessons series, writing students—and this month, writing instructors!—will discuss lessons learned, epiphanies about craft, and the challenges of studying and teaching writing. This week, we hear from Sara Nović, a teaching fellow at Columbia University. You can follow her on Twitter @novicsara. —Andrew Ladd, Blog Editor There comes a time in all writing courses when…
Ever since I began writing this “Episodia” series, I’ve wanted to write about “Breaking Bad.” It’s a show I’ve loved from the moment Walter White and his pseudo-slacker ex-student Jesse Pinkman made their first batch of crystal meth in a rundown RV in the desert. When I first heard of the show, I didn’t want…
The ‘Writers and Their Pets’ series began with my own desire to celebrate my dog Sally, and over the coming months I will also invite other writers to share with the rest of us the details of their lives with beloved pets. We also ask contributors to the series to tell us about their favorite pets from literature….
We have a winner for the first ever Ploughshares Fantasy Blog competition! After a three-week slog that saw The Holden Caulbabies and What the Chuckin’ Buk?! tied after two weeks, the winner, by the slim margin of two votes, is The Holden Caulbabies and manager Michael Nye! Editor: Dave Eggers Fiction Writer: William Faulkner Cultural…
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