Deep, deep down in the southernmost part of South Texas sits the city of Brownsville. The landscape is home to countless ranches, endless dry brush, and thousands of recent migrants to the US from Mexico. Brownsville is seventy miles south of where the US Border Patrol operates one of its busiest traffic checkpoints, in Falfurrias,…
Peter Ho Davies, The Fortunes, a novel (September 2016, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Gail Mazur, Forbidden City (April 2016, University of Chicago Press). Alan Shapiro, Life Pig, poems (September 2016, University of Chicago Press). Alan Shapiro, That Self-forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration, essays (October 2016, University of Chicago Press). Gerald Stern, Divine Nothingness, poems (May 2016, Norton)….
Ann Beattie recommends Forty Martyrs by Philip F. Deaver: “These are grown-up stories about grown-ups. Subtly linked and beautifully written, their subject is loss (and possible redemption), played against a backdrop of Everywhere, America, that, in his hands, isn’t.” Robert Boswell recommends Calle Florista by Connie Voisine: “This is a remarkable book by one of…
It’s thought that when Cervantes embarked on Don Quixote, he intended to write a short novel. Henry James’ short stories had a way of growing into novellas and novels, a fate he fondly cursed. With Chekhov, it was the other way round: life was too short for the novel. (Though perhaps just long enough for…
The first time I met Tom Sleigh, he was stealing my suitcase. I had just gotten off a charter bus in Mérida, Mexico, where I’d be spending a week at a conference, and in the rush and shove of passengers, I lost sight of my black roller among the pile into which the driver was…
Often, when I’m writing, I open up my Internet browser onto poems I’ve found to be particularly instructive or compellingly enigmatic, poems that connect me with the reasons and, indeed, the questions about why I write and return to poetry as a reader, a parishioner, a believer. I’ve collected these poems via links I’ve emailed…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Ramona Ausubel with the fifth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her short story “Fresh Water from the Sea,” which appeared in the Summer 2015 issue, guest-edited by Lauren Groff. The $1,000 award, given by acclaimed writer and Ploughshares advisory editor Alice Hoffman, honors the best piece of fiction…
Martín Espada, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, poems (W. W. Norton, January 2016) Thomas Lux, To the Left of Time, poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April, 2016) Gail Mazur, Forbidden City, poems. (University of Chicago Press, March 2016) Gary Soto, You Kiss by Th’ Book, poems (Chronicle Books, Spring 2016)
Peter Ho Davies recommends Angels of Detroit by Christopher Hebert: “A rust belt epic by a writer of distinctive vision. More than a dozen years in the making—I saw the earliest iterations in workshop and have never forgotten them—it’s been worth the wait.” Jane Hirshfield recommends Practicing the Truth, by Ellery Akers: “Practicing the Truth…
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