The Fall 2008 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by James Alan McPherson. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

Guest-edited by James Alan McPherson, the Fall 2008 issue of Ploughshares features stories and essays by authors such as Alex Rose, Mary Swan, and M. G. Stephens. In the Introduction, McPherson writers about his choices for the issue: "If there is a common thread in the stories here, I think it must be the communal effort to gain perspective on the highly complex areas of our fuzzy and fragmented American reality."