Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
Roxane Gay’s Hunger and Melissa Febos’s Abandon Me both deal with longing to be understood and fighting the instinct to try to disappear. Both also use repetition as a literary device to achieve a lyricism, rhythm, and resonance that build power.
Literary fiction in 2017 expounded on the gritty realities that the Trump Administration obscures. Socially relevant fiction this year resonated with readers hungry for truth.
Roxane Gay is America’s favorite “bad feminist.” She is often read as a black feminist, but her Haitian roots rarely get more than a passing mention. And yet, Haiti is the unseen backdrop to Gay’s memoir Hunger: a fierce, black, female, fat narrative.
The myth of Rosie the Riveter is as well-known as her bandana-clad hair and stoic flexing. As a way to supplement male industrial labor resources depleted by World War II, Rosie represented the potential for women economically left behind since the Great Depression to gain financial power over their lives.
Who says a good beach read can’t also be a book that packs some punch? Here are four of this summer’s best.
My creative writing students want to talk about the business of literature. They want to talk cover letters, agents, MFA programs, fellowships.
On Twitter, people keep saying this “isn’t normal.” In this story, the villain is an exception to the rule of normalcy. Maybe, I thought, that story is easier to tell than the real one.
From Roxane Gay pulling her book from Simon & Schuster to a list of NEA funded projects, here’s the latest literary news.
1. I didn’t start writing lyric essays until I found out I had cancer. The melanoma buried in my right cheek was at first missed, and then misdiagnosed in its severity. Clark’s stage IV, they told me. Likely in my lymph nodes, but they wouldn’t know until my third surgery, the excision and biopsy. 2….
No products in the cart.