White Like Me
Ploughshares
by Danny Cherry Jr.
2w ago
When you have a gun pointed at you, there’s an odd calm that washes over. Time slows and your movements become languid; all you can do is pay attention to the black eye of the barrel as it stares at you. You become oddly aware of your body: your heartbeat, where your fingers and toes are. You stand still, and in the first few seconds your brain’s too slow or maybe you’re too stupid to be afraid, not fully grasping that the holder of the weapon is just one sneeze away from their trigger finger applying the five pounds of pressure required to make sure you need a closed casket. Five pounds of p ..read more
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Language and Trauma in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Ploughshares
by Sarah Appleton Pine
1M ago
“‘Have you ever made a scene…and then put yourself inside it?’” the narrator’s mother in Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, asks her son as she colors in a Thomas Kinkade house. She continues, “‘Have you ever watched yourself from behind, going further and deeper into that landscape, away from you?’” In response, the still young narrator thinks, “How could I tell you that what you were describing was writing? How could I say that we, after all, are so close, the shadows of our hands, on two different pages, merging?” The landscape, as well as the mother-son dynamic, th ..read more
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Sentinels of Grief in The Friend
Ploughshares
by Laura Haugen
1M ago
It is true what Joan Didion said about losing a loved one: “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” Life changes; the loved one is gone, and with that person a trove of shared moments, conversations, questions, unfinished business, the possibility of a future together. Life changes irrevocably in the ordinary instant, and yet for the bereaved, moving into that altered life is at first an impossible task. The bereaved must change too, but it is not an instantaneous change, and the circumstances leading up to it are seldom ordinary. The unnamed narrator in Sigrid Nunez’s much-celebr ..read more
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Women in Myths
Ploughshares
by Sarah Appleton Pine
2M ago
In such ancient stories as The Odyssey, women, who are often archetypes and who typically exist in the margins, are enlivened when their stories are told by contemporary writers, freeing them from their limited roles (mother, wife, evil temptress bent on bringing about the downfall of men). Retellings of these stories, too, are rich with contemporary themes that contribute to the reader’s understanding of the weight of their release, such as the injustices and double standards women face in a patriarchal society. Retellings by Margaret Atwood (The Penelopiad), Madeline Miller (Circe), and Col ..read more
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Enduring Love
Ploughshares
by Claudia McCarron
2M ago
Lately, my mom has been telling me that family are the people who have to love you no matter what. As my siblings and I grow up and start the messy process of building our adult lives, it’s easy to let childhood-long resentments boil over into conflict and blame—we don’t have dependence on our parents and a shared house to tie us together anymore, and the urge to cut our losses and sever ties can be strong. But, as I’m reminded when I’m at my ugliest, what would be the point of family—or the point of love—if we didn’t strive to forgive and connect, in spite of the hurt we heap on each other ..read more
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Memory, Mediocrity, and Gentrification in Zone One
Ploughshares
by Zeena Yasmine Fuleihan
2M ago
Although it was published almost a decade ago, Colson Whitehead’s 2011 Zone One feels like a novel born out of our current pandemic. After an unidentified plague sweeps the globe and turns those infected into zombies, civilian sweeper units are tasked with eradicating the remaining zombies in Manhattan, or Zone One, after the military’s larger-scale operation. An over-300-page book depicting only three days of real-time action, Zone One focuses much less on the traditional zombie novel gore and suspense and much more on the extended introspection of its central character, Mark Spitz. Most of ..read more
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The Threshold of Memory and Return
Ploughshares
by Zeena Yasmine Fuleihan
2M ago
Iman Humaydan’s Other Lives, translated from the Arabic by Michelle Hartman, follows Myriam as she makes her way back to Lebanon after leaving, first to Australia and later to Kenya, during the Lebanese Civil War. Trapped in a marriage of convenience to an English man and tormented by the disappearance of her young lover and her aborted child, Myriam finds herself in a state of perpetual sadness and exhaustion, and repulsed by stability. She is plagued by traumas from the war, her personal life, and the lives of her family members before her: after her brother, Baha’, is killed by a bomb in t ..read more
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“We’re standing on the edge of the cliff”: An Interview with Lauren Groff
Ploughshares
by Jason Katz
3M ago
In early 2019, I attended the first meeting of Miami artist Xavier Cortada’s Underwater Homeowners Association, initiated to make citizens of South Florida aware of the elevation at which their homes sit, and their potential exposure to rising sea levels. The Underwater HOA, a “participatory public art project,” kicked off in the last days of 2018 with the installation of yard signs designed by the artist indicating how many feet oceans would need to rise before marked properties were submerged. The thrust of the project is that we should be aware of both our neighbors and “the chaos to come ..read more
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The Double’s Extreme Break
Ploughshares
by Sarah Appleton Pine
3M ago
“It is painful, almost intolerable reading,” Russian literary and political historian D.S. Mirtsky wrote in 1927 about Fyodor Dostoevsky’s second novel, The Double. Published in 1845 just three months after his first novel, Poor Folk, which was received with rave reviews, The Double was a critical flop from which Dostoevsky’s career didn’t recover until after he was arrested, sentenced to death as a scare tactic, then exiled to a prison camp in Siberia for four years. Mirtsky, however, like other readers who aren’t Dostoevsky’s contemporaries, noticed in The Double not a failure but “a perfec ..read more
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The Power of Sentences
Ploughshares
by Cynthia R. Wallace
4M ago
Midway through Louise Erdrich’s novel The Sentence, published in November, its protagonist Tookie has a conversation with the owner of the Minneapolis bookstore where she works about how a book killed one of their devoted customers. The bookshop owner, Louise, doesn’t quite catch Tookie’s drift and resorts to a literary platitude: “Books aren’t meant to be safe. Sadly, or heroically, depending on the way you look at it, books do kill people.” But Tookie isn’t satisfied. She pushes still further: “What I’m trying to say is that a certain sentence of the book—a written sentence, a very, very po ..read more
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