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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…

A guy named Rob told me about noodling. I hadn’t known him long; he was a friend of a friend. We were drinking on a roof, which we did often in those days, in early 2000, outside Boston. This particular roof, a thin, slanted affair with a twenty-five foot drop to a driveway below, probably…

Clean Kate Northrop Persea Books, August 2011 64 pages $15.00 With intense clarity of image and spare language, Kate Northrop’s poems immediately lure you into intimacy; placed in a present, visual moment, and often addressed in second person, you are the one who is seeing.

This week’s free Ploughshares contest features our Spring 2005 issue, guest edited by Martin Espada and featuring work by Melissa Bank, Robert Creeley, Adrienne Rich, and a Pablo Neruda poem translated by Ilan Stavans.   In order to win this issue, leave a comment below detailing why you love Martin Espada or any other of…

The Seamstress and the Wind César Aira New Directions, June 2011 144 pages $12.95 César Aira is a deconstructed Kafka; a compact, comprehensible Roberto Bolaño obsessed with the frightening nonsense of civilization. The latter comparison terrifies academic readers, because if Bolano is made compact and comprehensible, how can they pretend to be the only ones who…

Lookout Books, the literary imprint at UNC Wilmington, was founded by Emily Louise Smith, director of The Publishing Laboratory, and Ben George, editor of Ecotone. Lookout gained national attention when their debut title, Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision, landed a cover review in the New York Times, with Pearlman going on to win the PEN/Malamud for…

Sometimes the right thing simply happens at the right time, and everything falls into place so beautifully that it’s almost impossible to remember how you existed beforehand. So it was for me when I was accepted to Yaddo last fall, and ended up in a wonderful group of people. Among them was Curtis Harnack. *…