Posts by author
P.E. Garcia
-
The Birds and the Bees and Aristotle
To many a browser upon a bookstall, the name Aristotle in the title meant—nudge nudge wink wink—a book about sex. For the Public Domain Review, Mary Fissell examines Aristotle’s Masterpiece, a 17th-century sex manual that made the ancient philosopher’s name a dirty…
-
The Real True Detective
Before True Detective, the TV show, there was True Detective, the pulp magazine with stories like “Sex Monster At Large” and “I Hit Her with the Bowling Pin.” True Crime looks at the life and death of the graphic publication.
-
How Emily Bell Became an Editor
I knew I didn’t want to be a writer, but I thought I might want to work with writers and with brilliant minds who changed the way I thought about the world. Callie Collins interviews Emily Bell for Midnight Breakfast about her road…
-
The Strange Life and Literature of Lucia Berlin
We have, most of us, known at least some part of what she went through: children in trouble, or early molestation, or a rapturous love affair, struggles with addiction, a difficult illness or disability, an unexpected bond with a sibling,…
-
Rescuing Asian Art from American Artists
Generations of American writers have approached Asian cultures with the best of intentions but repeatedly missed the mark. How can we rescue Asian artists and thinkers like Hokusai from our own desire to experience them as foreign? How can we…
-
Go Refund a Watchman
After all of the hype and controversy surrounding Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, some readers found themselves a little bit disappointed when they read the actual book. One book store in Michigan has started offering refunds for regretful readers.…
-
Ukrainian Literature, At Last
Ukrainian literature—or Ukrainian culture more broadly—employs the words “last” quite often: last territory, last bastion, the last issue of a magazine, the last books of a bankrupt publisher, the last Ukrainian-speaking readers, writers, translators. At Electric Literature, Natalka Sniadanko discusses…
-
Machiavelli: Prince of Comedy
You could argue that Machiavelli’s entire worldview was comic, but comic in a peculiar way: ironic, wry, a little melancholy, punctuated by an earthy vulgarity that, these days, would get him thrown off a university faculty in a minute. The…
-
The Literary Zombie Dream Team
At Ploughshares, Matthew Burnside assembles a literary dream team for the impending zombie apocalypse.
-
Claudia Rankine Takes the Stage
My stage adaptation of Citizen is not a play. In addition to winning the National Book Critics Circle for poetry, Claudia Rankine’s modern genre-bending classic Citizen is now being adapted for the stage. Melville House has the whole story.
-
The Old Sad Soak
The Old Soak is a hauntingly one-note character, and one wonders exactly what about his alcoholism made him such a bankable franchise. Imagine the pitch meetings that followed: “He’s a lush, see? He wants to booze it up, but he…
-
Poetry Shark
I like to joke that I’m like a shark—my writing has to keep moving or it will die. Ploughshares interviews Jehanne Dubrow about her latest poetry collection, The Arranged Marriage, and her shark-like writing process.