The Language of Flowers Vanessa Diffenbaugh Ballantine Books, August 2011 336 pages (includes appended floriographic dictionary) $25.00 Victoria Jones, the troubled heroine of Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s debut novel, has just been emancipated from California’s foster care system, after a childhood surrounded by “too many children and too many bottles of beer.”
New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin issued the first of the New Directions anthologies, which introduced readers to the early work of William Saroyan, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, John Hawkes, Denise Levertov, James Agee, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others. New Directions recently celebrated 75 years, and I…
In this week’s reviews on the blog, Claire Blechman calls Ned Zeman’s new book, Rules of the Tunnel, “a very L.A. memoir.” (“In the Manhattan version,” she adds, “we’d be spending lots of quality time in the patient-writer’s head.”) Julia Lichtblau seems to be getting at the same issue, sort of, in her review of…
I’m going to be talking to a few authors whose first books I admired and see what they’re working on in terms of a second book. One of the things that interests me here is how writers move from a shorter form to a longer one. Talking about the process while in the process is…
Literary Brooklyn, The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life Evan Hughes Henry Holt and Company, August 2011 352 pages $17.00 This post was written by Julia Lichtblau. Pick a published writer these days, and odds are strong their bio mentions Brooklyn. Historically, too, there’s a long list of major American writers…
This week in our free Ploughshares contest, we’re featuring our Summer 1980 issue, guest edited by Gail Mazur and featuring an interview with Robert Pinsky, work by James Tate and Marianne Boruch, and a Richard Wilbur essay on Elizabeth Bishop. To win this issue, comment below detailing why you love any of the issue’s contributors….
The Rules of the Tunnel: A Brief Period of Madness Ned Zeman Gotham Books, August 2011 320 pages $26.00 You’re Vanity Fair Senior Editor Ned Zeman. And you’ve been very depressed. You’ve gone through six therapists, done a stint at Maclean, and finally ended up taking the treatment of last resort: electro-convulsive therapy. Then you’re…
Molly Gaudry is the author of We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards for Poetry and has been shortlisted for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. She runs Cow Heavy Books and is the founder of The Lit Pub, one of the most ambitious literary enterprises I’ve come…
It’s been almost six months now since we started reviewing books here on the Ploughshares blog, and having wobbled down the path this long we’re finally feeling ready to throw off our training wheels. That means over the next six months you can expect to see some changes in the reviews we publish. For a…
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