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Cover art for End of American Magic by Christopher Locke

End of American Magic

End of American Magic by Christopher Locke Salmon Poetry / Dufour Editions, Sept. 2011 76 pages $21.95 Arthur Miller may have pronounced the American Dream dead in Death of a Salesman, but Christopher Locke’s new book of poetry, End of American Magic, implies such a pessimistic assessment isn’t wholly accurate.  Like Miller, Locke puts the reader on…

Cover art for short story collections Cathedral by Raymond Carver, Rock Springs by Richard Ford, and The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

My Anthology

After kindly reading some of my paeans to my favorite stories, people have asked me what the rest of my anthology would look like. To limit myself, I’ve decided to only include stories released since 1980, which seemed like a nice, round year, and I would argue that the modern era began with “The Miracle…

Cover art for Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Blue Nights

Blue Nights Joan Didion Alfred A. Knopf, November 2011 208 pages $25.00 This post was written by Jaya Aninda Chatterjee. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” wrote author and cultural critic Joan Didion in The White Album, her chronicle of the revolutionary politics of the 1960s and ’70s. “We interpret what we see, select…

Cover art for The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem

The Ecstasy of Influence

The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. Jonathan Lethem Doubleday, November 2011 464 pages $27.95 Have you ever found, after a long trip with a friend, that you’ve grown tired of their voice? That approximates how I felt after reading Jonathan Lethem’s most recent collection of prose, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. Not that I…

Photograph of a golden spiral-shaped art piece

Innovators in Literature: Instant Replay, Part 2

For my last ever Ploughshares blog post (double sniff!), I bring you Part 2 of the Innovators in Literature Instant Replay. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to “Innovators in Lit,” read and commented on the interviews, and helped spread the word. After talking to 15 amazing literary innovators, I can’t help but feel that the future of…