It was a straw light, a blond light, a water light in the window when I looked outside and saw it was still daylight, flooding the hot, white room of her death that had been the hot, white room of her maternal loneliness. The heel of my hand hard on her sternum as her heart,…
Even in this broken country, the women wanted to go shopping. The men arranged to have a guide from the hotel take their wives into town. The men were used to indulging the wives; the wives were used to being indulged; everyone was used to everyone else’s behaving in agreement with generally held, old-country expectations….
In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled. I’ve been pushed from my own rooms by my own things. I now live in the belfry, batty as a spinster aunt, with just a little circle of stained glass as my window out. I pick petals…
When I woke, makeup-smeared and sallow, everyone was gone. Greasepaint smooth in the new line of my cheek and corset-bruises on my hips, first warm day of the year. A false eyelash settled like a moth on my collarbone. They loved me on the high wire last night in my spangled tights all done up…
Is poetry ruining my life, I wonder, upstairs in a house with more windows than walls where I am trying to write or read it. Downstairs “Lady in the Dark,” complete with dialogue, too loud, and the purr of my husband’s snore. I feel a fume coming on, kindling for an inferior rage that will…
The Look2 essay series, which replaces our print book reviews, takes a closer look at the careers of accomplished authors who have yet to receive the full appreciation that their work deserves. Reviews of new books can still be found on our blog at http://pshares.org/ If literature were politics, Jaimy Gordon would be the…
Roy and Jimmy Boyle were shooting pool on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Lucky’s El Paso when Mooney Yost, a Lucky’s regular, came in and sat down on a bench near the boys’ table. Yost was about fifty years old, a fin and a sawbuck hustler who was always kind to Roy and his friends….
Today I bow to the power of negative space, the beauty of what’s missing—the hard work of yard work made harder without you, while the stiff kiss of acorns puckers the ground. I am a fool. Even as the red impatiens wither and brown, they are still lovely. I feed the gaping mouths of lawn…
In fiction, our winner is Jasmine Sawers, for her story, “The Culling.” Ploughshares fiction editor Margot Livesey writes: “From its opening paragraph, when the midwife sees a lantern flickering in the distance, ‘The Culling’ transported me. I admire the vivid use of detail, and I particularly admire how much the author omits, creating a sense…
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