Misc.

  The Look2 essay series, which replaces our print book reviews, takes a closer look at the careers of accomplished authors who have yet to receive the full appreciation that their work deserves. Reviews of new books can still be found on our blog at pshares.org. The small tasks of daily life may sometimes be…

  In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled. Dirt rounds the ridges under my fingernails, making crusty silver moons. I try to clean up before I go out, but once I’m settled at the restaurant, I look at my hands and start to pick…

In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled.   The way my husband tells the story, I slipped on the ice, got a concussion, and when I woke up, said, “I want to learn to play the accordion.” It is true that, after a concussion,…

As you head south and east, with your back to the sea, the city of Alvito draws you uphill along ever-smaller roads, tightening spirals and switchbacks that soon have you confused over what’s the approach and what the close-clustered town itself. Around just which curb-hugging rise and turn did you finally arrive? Nothing so defines…

  In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled. I’m what surfers call a goofy foot. I surf with my left foot back. The etymology of goofy foot is disputed, but consensus points toward the cartoon character Goofy, who surfed with his right foot forward…

Early in his career, Robert Duncan introduced himself to two editors by writing, “all that I aspire to do is communicate somehow my psychic experiences—as the young druid poets and those who wore the cloak of blue feathers in Ireland and all poets must do.” In comparison, contemporary cover letters seem positively self-effacing. On trips…

  In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled.   As a student in Tokyo in the 1980s I would often go to the local Shinto shrine just to listen to the quiet. Small and undistinguished, a gap between concrete commercial buildings, the shrine was…

  The Look2 essay series, which replaces our print book reviews, takes a closer look at the careers of accomplished authors who have yet to receive the full appreciation that their work deserves. Reviews of new books can still be found on our blog at http://pshares.org.   Devastating partings—man from woman, person from place—haunt the…

  In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled.   For my family, Plan B wasn’t the fallback plan for when life went awry. Life was already awry, and they’d already seen their hopes and ambitions compromised. So Plan B—what they would do if they…