Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
Imitating the voice, form, and tone of St. Augustine, Natalie Carnes invokes him as interlocutor, honoring his text’s merits while challenging the blind spots inherent in its masculine perspective. In so doing, she enriches our understanding of human nature and the nature of the divine, revealed in the intimacy exchanged between mother and child.
While Amy Tan’s fiction has always been informed by the experiences of those around her, her 2017 memoir turns inward, highlighting how much of her creativity stems from the lives that came before her.
In Gonzalez’s book, we see characters going out to eat with each other, enjoying “junk” food that may be bad for them because it is the food they know, the poison they enjoy. In a world that poisons them daily, enjoying a meal with a friend is the best way to chase their struggles away.
Do the people of Devon Walker-Figueroa’s 2020 collection love to learn? Do we watch them learn in change while reading this book, and do we, in the process of reading these poems, learn anything?
Jesmyn Ward connects her Black characters to climate change, present in the shape of Hurricane Katrina, by using the sound of the storm to explore their lived experience. It is the oral tradition alive on the page.
Adnan’s rejection of boundaries of time, geography, and standard logic echoes the very nature of two of her works: one written in English, one translated from French, one intentionally written as a collection, one pulled together from many years of disparate writing.
Uwem Akpan’s story of an Annang narrator working in the “white bubble” of New York publishing is a story about storytelling—and not just the stories that make it past the gatekeepers to publication, but also the stories that are passed along in the conversations, letters, phone calls, photographs, and videos.
So many refugees who are separated from their homes by seas and oceans and rivers, gravitate towards water; so many of them look up at the stars and wonder about the stories we don’t know. Reading Eric Nguyen’s novel, I think about how water can both separate you from and be your home.
Hanif Abdurraqib bases much of what he writes on the things he loves, whether that be music or literature, basketball or sneakers. It’s through his love that he is able to reveal insights into artists and performers themselves, as well as the way that history links to the present—both in his own life and in the wider world.
No products in the cart.