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Origin Stories: Fiction by Prompt
How do great authors begin their fiction? With a line or a character, a memory or a mission? This year, as Ploughshares’s unofficial origin-story archivist, I’ll investigate. Because I’m a teacher, I...
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Origin Story: Tony Tulathimutte’s PRIVATE CITIZENS
Tony Tulathimutte’s debut novel, Private Citizens, charts the spectacular floundering of four recent college graduates. His eye is so sharp, his characters so recognizable, and his truth so pitiless...
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Origin Stories: Amy Gustine’s YOU SHOULD PITY US INSTEAD
Amy Gustine’s debut collection, You Should Pity Us Instead, is an unsentimental exploration of people in distress. I recently asked Gustine where she drew her inspiration. She told me that stories...
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Origin Stories: Kathryn Davis’s DUPLEX
Duplex begins with a suburban street, a woman walking her dog, fireflies prickling in the gathering dark, boys playing stick ball, and headlights rounding the curb. Totally normal, except that the dog...
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Origin Stories: Don DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD
UNDERWORLD’S prologue takes its title from Pieter Bruegel’s THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH. Novelists, like paranoiacs, see connections where other people don’t, which is to say that both are always trying to...
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Origin Stories: Matthew Neil Null’s ALLEGHENY FRONT
You just don’t see enough literary fiction about bears. If, like me, you prefer your nutritious reading with a side of mauling, you should pick up Matthew Neil Null’s Allegheny Front. Erudite,...
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Origin Stories: Zachary Tyler Vickers’s CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR MARTYRDOM!
In the first story of Zachary Tyler Vickers’s remarkable new collection, Congratulations on Your Martyrdom!, an origami hobbyist with pathologically stubby fingers is stuffed like the roadkill he...
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Origin Stories: Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels
I was on book three of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet when I told a friend that Lila, the book’s second protagonist, is one of the most amazing literary creations I’ve ever read. “But she’s not a...
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