My girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend recently sent me a link to an article entitled “8 New Punctuation Marks We Desperately Need.” As is often the case with my girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend, I couldn’t quite tell if she was joking. Further complicating the matter was the fact that the article came from CollegeHumor.com, a decidedly unserious website—and yet I found myself…
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, centered on a certain theme to help you jump-start your week. This week we have posts on getting rejected. In baseball, if you get out seven times…
Um, the answer is this guy. Hey Writing World, meet Amos Heller: The much-loved, many-fanned bass player for Taylor Swift. (And, ahem, for Ellery.) I’m introducing you to him because—(#truth)—Amos’ literary prowess would put many of us to shame. When I first I got to know Amos, he was always making reference to some great book or author of…
[Editor’s note: this post was contributed by Joshua Garstka.] The Fall of the Stone City Ismail Kadare (translated by John Hodgson) Grove Press, February 2013 168 pages $23.00 Gjirokastër was not as wise as it should have been. Or perhaps it was wiser. It came to the same thing. Just before World War II,…
Back in December, before an afternoon showing of The Hobbit, I got my first glimpse of the trailer for the big budget adaptation of The Lone Ranger. Sitting there enjoying my smuggled in Diet Dr. Pepper was not the first time I’d run across the film—I had read some early reports on it over the…
It’s a digital age, but we’re still mad for paper! Even as readers embrace the connectivity and convenience offered by iPads and Kindles, there are still many good reasons to celebrate a book’s physicality. In Ploughshares’ Book Arts series, we’ll be looking at some of the artists, curators, and craftspeople who work to keep things…
For six seasons now, television viewers have been transfixed by advertising phenom Don Draper’s troubled smolder as he winds his way through Manhattan’s boardrooms, bedrooms, and bars. Each episode is loaded with literary jewels for writers to fawn over: the elegant use of space (that office elevator really knows how to open and close a…
On long car rides with my father, you could count on hearing three questions: What kind of cow is that? What kind of roof is that? Is the moon waxing or waning? My answers were always as follows: a Holstein, a mansard, and waxing? (I never did work out which was which.) Why these three questions among the…
Novelists have been using the suburbs as tender meat for skewering for nearly a century now. Longer, perhaps, if you consider a book like Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, the 1899 novel where we see most of the feelings of desperation and imprisonment that will grow, both in the real world of the suburbs and even…
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