November 13, 2015
Our first nominee for this year's Pushcart Prize is Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi's story "dissolving newspaper, fermenting leaves" (35.1). Read the excerpt below, then purchase a subscription to Pleiades here. Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi dissolving newspaper, fermenting leaves To persuade her cricket to eat, Margaret Morri cooked every recipe she'd learned when she’d cooked for her family in Venice. As the rest ...
October 13, 2015
On Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015) Jonathan Franzen is America’s worst good writer. His latest novel, Purity, is really pretty bad—a dyspeptic, lumbering, over-determined, exhaustingly derivative picaresque and/or Bildungsroman—and not much better than Freedom, his previous cart pulled by too many horses. Fraught with conspiracies beyond belief, the semi-real interior lives of ...
August 24, 2015
by Rebecca Makkai Barnes Harlow was actually Jason something, but no one dreamed of calling him that. He was Barnes Harlow when he was robbed of the Daytime Emmy, he was Barnes Harlow all twelve years he played Dalton Shaw, Esq., and he was Barnes Harlow when, in that guise, he married Silvia Romero Caldwell Blake, poisoned his mother-in-law, opened a restaurant, burned down that restaurant, was drugged by Michaela, and ...
July 10, 2015
Pleiades intern Allina Robie recently had the opportunity to interview Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler regarding his current project, The Best Small Fictions of 2015, for which he served as guest editor. The result of that interview is below. Three stories from Pleiades are appearing in The Best Small Fictions of 2015: "Wimbledon," by Seth Brady Tucker; "s c a l e," by Michael Martone; and ...