If you’ve seen older issues of popular science fiction magazines—think from the 1930s to the 1960s—you’ve seen cover art of half-naked women being abducted by aliens or saved by a ‘handsome’ white dude in a spacesuit. (If you’re lucky, maybe you’ve even seen a cover with both at the same time!) Done up in garish…
Over the past three and a half months we’ve introduced the first ever Ploughshares Fantasy Blog teams and analyzed their selections in the draft—and now it’s time to test the team-building skills of our Fantasy Blog Managers in brutal competition… But before we do that, the commissioner thought it would be fitting to give this…
A few years ago, Rosencrans Baldwin blew my mind with his Slate essay “Somewhere a Dog Barked.” Because he was dead right: In nearly every literary novel, that phrase appears. Did I have it in my own fiction? Absolutely. Did I also have the habit of punctuating tense scenes with distant sirens? Oops. Since then,…
In our Roundups segment, we’re looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009. We explore posts from our archives as well as other top literary magazines and websites, centered on a certain theme to help you jump-start your week. Summer is here, and it’s the perfect time for family picnics,…
For songwriter Vienna Teng, the secret seems to lie in her variety of influences. While I combed through your fabulous feedback (!) on What Poetry Can Learn from Pop Music last month, I connected with Teng for my ongoing interview series, “Hey Guys, Other People Read Too!“ A Taiwanese-American songwriter, Vienna’s chamber-folk style has led her to Letterman, the CBS Saturday Early Show,…
Over the past few months, the Myth of the Literary Cowboy has explored how and why Willie was spot on when he observed that our “heroes have always been cowboys.” White hats, singers, anti-hero gunslingers, poets, pop music subjects—the role of the cowboy is part of the collective American pop culture conscience. What is left for the…
The Other Typist Suzanne Rindell Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, May 2013 368 pages $25.95 The Other Typist, a crime mystery nestled inside a lovely period piece, is the story of Rose Baker, a stenographer at a Manhattan police station in the early 1920s. Rose is particularly well-suited to her job: an unflappable, meticulous person, she was…
I have a problem: I’ve already read Lonesome Dove. And Lonesome Dove is the most totally absorbing wonderfully awesome novel on the planet. So nothing else really compares. Hence, my problem. I’ve tried to address this problem by waiting a lot of years and then reading Lonesome Dove again. I first read it in fourth grade, when I…
“I prefer to dream that the polished surfaces feign and promise infinity . . .” —Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” You walk through the front doors of a building that resembles more a contemporary art museum than a repository of books. Instead of a librarian at a front desk, and rows and rows…
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