I bargained with God once—even wanted my poor mother—in a flooded cave in central Florida. Let me out. Let me finish my book. For about three electric seconds the fanged rock through which I crawled yielded like warm flesh. * Another time, I got lost inside a shipwreck, in the North Channel between Lakes…
It always seems wrong to me that Kawabata Yasunari’s strange and wonderful fiction is left out of the ongoing conversation about the future of the novel. The debate in the U.S. is often framed in terms of fiction vs. nonfiction (David Shields, Sheila Heti), or realistic vs. metafiction (Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Milan Kundera,…
During my first weeks as managing editor for Ploughshares, Seamus Heaney’s transatlantic writing issue, 6/1, arrived from the printer, ready to be bagged and mailed to subscribers. Michael Mazur’s monotype portrait of Heaney had appeared on the cover of 5/3, accompanying an interview by issue editor Jim Randall, just as Heaney began his decades of…
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…
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/ I. In her 1977 novel, Quartet in Autumn,…
In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled. I’ve been pushed from my own rooms by my own things. I now live in the belfry, batty as a spinster aunt, with just a little circle of stained glass as my window out. I pick petals…
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/ If literature were politics, Jaimy Gordon would be the…
She swims in open water, the alternate self. There is no boat. She is alone. There is no predicting the conditions. Some days, the water is flat and still, her strokes pushing through a membrane of surface warmth and into a chill beneath. Some days, the waves are so vast they lift her high on…
In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extra-literary passions, and the roads not traveled. My father always wanted me to go into real estate. It was in the family: pioneer land swaps and strategic purchases during the Depression kept the Svobodas solvent. My father would stand at the edge of one…
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