Truth lies within a little and certain compass. –Viscount Bolingbroke It took my Aunt Toby twenty years to profit enough from fictohistoriographia to give up teaching, to release the two of us from New York, to realize her dream to buy a house on Lake Piscataqua in New England. But at last, the year…
The Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction Ploughshares is pleased to present Elise Juska with the third annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her short story, “Transfer Station,” which appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Major Jackson. The $1,000 award, given by acclaimed writer and Ploughshares advisory editor Alice Hoffman, honors…
File 2011/Electronic Copy of Revenant Composition, “The Ghost Writer,” in Word DOCX (Former Sex: Female; Deceased: circa 2011) The word ghost derives from the Anglo-Saxon gast, breath or spirit. So to “give up the ghost” is to die. At the same time, in being relinquished by the body, the ghost escapes the confines of mortality:…
I was flattered when asked to guest-edit this issue of Ploughshares. I am proud to offer these stories. When selecting them, I was looking for range and adventurousness. I did not want stories that read or looked alike. These range from so-called mimetic to so-called meta. I do not like such labels and I hope…
He surprised himself by claiming his father’s old nickel-finish Colt revolver. There was no battle to be fought here—no one else wanted the thing; no one wanted any of the guns that now were lined up in the cabinet (they couldn’t sell them, a legal issue, something about permits, which everyone agreed, though annoying, sounded…
For four days I’d been sitting at a conference table with engineers from the different outfits that had been pulled together for this project, and across the table was a guy who I’d bonded with after I saved his hide on some controls issues and he saved mine on some line specs. Since then, we…
She wasn’t surprised to end up in his office, but she’d always thought it would be about her son, not her daughter. There was a lesson in it: Instead of worrying about the ones who didn’t fit in, you should worry about the ones who seemed to fit in too well. “It’s not uncommon,” he…
In this borrowed house I keep my doors unlocked. A day in the middle of days where if not for worry I’d be alone. I’m cold as vodka. I dress myself back to warmth. Two dogs curl asleep downstairs. One gets up to align an invisible orbit then falls, graceless thud against hardwood. O marriage…
John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Lysley Tenorio with the twenty-third annual John C. Zacharis Award for his short-story collection, Monstress (Ecco 2012). The $1500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction. This year’s judge was…
No products in the cart.