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Round four of our free Ploughshares contest! This week, comment to win a copy of our Spring 1987 issue, guest edited by Derek Walcott and featuring work by Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney, and many more. For those of you that don’t know the drill: comment in our response section below telling us why…

Norman Lock (illustrations by Sasha Meret) Spuyten Duyvil Press, April 2011 166 pages $16.00 On the surface, Norman Lock’s recent book, Pieces for Small Orchestra, is a collection of two novellas and two stories. Really, it’s a book of many books, all doling out the life (and dream-life) of Alessandro Comi, and showcasing everything that…

This is a story I love because my grandmother might have loved it—though perhaps for some of the wrong reasons. Brodkey’s character (like Brodkey) is a high school boy born into a life of education and privilege but taken down a peg by the death of his father. He and his mother and beautiful older…

Many years ago, my mother took me to the Library of Congress to hear Galway Kinnell read.  She had written her Master’s thesis on Kinnell, a thesis I’d read a time or three, so we were looking forward to hearing the living voice. The living voice said a number of things that day; one of…

A Riot of Goldfish Kanoko Okamoto (Translated by J. Keith Vincent) Hesperus Worldwide, January 2011 114 pages $15.95 David Mitchell, in his fine introduction to this slim volume of two novellas, writes that author Kanoko Okamoto’s great theme is the “frustrated striving for aesthetic perfection.” Certainly her novellas have that quality, something like Hawthorne’s tales…

I am a poet without a kind.  I write formal poems in an age of free verse (not to mention poetry in an age of prose!), but I don’t feel kinship with the most visible formalist movements.  The divide I feel goes beyond subject matter and worldview, though these do play a part – they…

Once again, we are delving into the annals of Ploughshares history for our contest. This week, we’re featuring the Sherman Alexie issue from Winter 2000. All you need to do to win this wonderful issue is provide a comment in the response section below detailing why you love Sherman Alexie or any of the issue’s…

The Pun Also Rises John Pollack Gotham Books, April 2011 240 pages $22.50 I’ve long loved wordplay, and long been puzzled, too, that many in the literary community don’t—especially, it seems, in my peculiar branch of it in Boston. Aren’t writers meant to be passionate about words and all their uses? Aren’t nuance and double…

I came to Kate Braverman through her story “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” which appears in the collection Squandering the Blue and was chosen for the Best American Short Stories in 1991. In 1991 I was still in college, which is to say a tiny, evangelical college in a tiny, Protestant evangelical town in…