Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
Women in stories often get punished. In fairy tales, it’s often for greed or pettiness or vanity or a slew of other reasons. But the heroines of fairy tales also get punished.
Since Chad Post, founding publisher of Open Letter Books, created The Three Percent blog in 2007, the term the “three percent” has become a household one to highlight the percentage of translated books published in the United States.
The scariest part of the proposed cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities is that people seem to have accepted them already.
Monica Youn’s poems are precise, sharp-edged and fleet-footed; they always seem to be moving in three different directions at once. She is the author of three books of poems: Blackacre, Barter, and Ignatz, and her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. A former attorney, she now teaches at Princeton and in the MFA program at Warren Wilson. We caught up via email at the start of the new year to talk about the similarities between poets and lawyers, her latest book, and what might be her next one.
Choi In-Hun’s novel The Square is a modern Korean classic that might be called a bildungsroman of ideology. Originally released in 1961, the Dalkey Archive Press translation by Kim Seong-Kon was released as part of the Archive’s Library of Korean Literature in 2014.
It’s snowing again, and the world contracts, like my heel’s screws in the cold. The sky and ground reflect one another, white-gray, and the space between the two becomes more tangible, more intimate in the precipitation’s revelation of how far it has to go.
In nonfiction, our winner is Mimi Dixon for her essay “Breath.” The nonfiction judge, Dinty W. Moore, writes that “Breath” is “an exquisite memoir essay filled with gorgeous detail, breath, music, wisdom, and surprise. Though I never met the author’s father, by the end of this graceful, intimate essay I, too, miss his presence in…
Among the long list of German words that lack a direct English translation, there’s one I’m particularly fond of: nestbeschmutzer. It translates roughly to “one who dirties their own nest” and can be used in the context of a whistleblower, but most often means a denigrator of one’s own country or family.
This ability to slip in and out and between voices has been crucial for my style of work. I’ve always been involved in multiple projects at a time, and while I typically finish translating one book before moving on to the next, there are always edits coming back from authors, or small rush jobs to fit in, and as in life, nothing is neat and clean and separate.
No products in the cart.