The Fall 2002 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Margot Livesey. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different and personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

Acclaimed novelist Margot Livesey (Criminals, Eva Moves the Furniture) compiles this fiction issue of Ploughshares. In her Introduction, Livesey looks at whether reading fiction in the face of the world's problems is simple escapism. "One of the principal virtues of reading fiction," she argues, "has always been that--more than biography or memoir, more than history--it allows us to pour our own inchoate lives, our own confused and confusing experiences, into those of another, and in so doing to begin to organize that experience, and to have a larger life. Reading good fiction is opposite of escapism."

Featuring authors like Haruki Murakami, ZZ Packer, Ron Carlson, and many others, this fiction issue is an opportunity to pour ourselves into several unforgettable lives.