Article

  • What You Will Do (Emerging Writer’s Contest Winner: NONFICTION)

    In nonfiction, our winner is Jacob Newberry, for his essay “What You Will Do,” about his experiences in Israel and Palestine. The essay, Ploughshares’ Editor-in-chief, Ladette Randolph, writes, “is the story of Newberry’s own well-intentioned but misguided determination to resolve the differences between the Palestinians and Israelis (one shopping trip into Palestine at a time). It…

  • Retelling

    The sun was nothing more than an orange the day Lisa ran for the ice cream truck. It was small and even if it held sweetness, even if it seeped Vitamin C, it couldn’t stop the car from barreling down Mott Avenue, couldn’t shine enough to show the driver the eight-year-old girl dashing in front…

  • You Are a Prince

    You are a wretch and a leech and a dirty old man and have been trying to push inside me for years. Well, come on then. There’s something about the plum warm air. Usually at this time of day I don’t want to see people. Usually when I’m on the old swings I think about…

  • Strawberries

    In the days before the wedding, as caterers and florists and seamstresses and bakers and even sommeliers and fromagers and charcutiers made appearances at the Maison ClosDennis, there were two of us who were irrelevant to the preparation of the proceedings. One of them, and this anyone could have predicted, was me, the boyfriend of…

  • Wake

    for my mother, Veronica Cazier (1955-1991) The undertaker gripped my hand. I said I wanted Dairy Queen. I touched her cheek because I needed proof—and after, Dairy Queen. It’s what I asked for every day: to go to Dairy Queen. Worse than dead, she wasn’t quite herself. I pictured Dairy Queen. I’d finished second grade…

  • About Ladette Randolph & John Skoyles

    Ladette Randolph is Editor-in-chief of Ploughshares and the author of three books of fiction: two novels—Haven’s Wake (forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press, spring 2013) and the award-winning A Sandhills Ballad (University of New Mexico Press, 2009)—and the short story collection This Is Not the Tropics (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). Randolph is on the…

  • Introduction

    Given all of the anxiety about the future of literature in an electronic age, one thing that seems unlikely—despite the fears otherwise—is that as a culture we will stop reading. Rather, we seem to be reading (and writing) more than ever. By some counts, there were over four hundred thousand books published in this country…

  • Ode to the Messiah, Thai Horror Movies, and Everything I Can’t Believe

    When I decide to go to hear Handel’s Messiah in London           at the composer’s parish church, my husband says he’d rather see a Thai horror movie, so we plan to meet later           at our favorite Moroccan lair that serves huge platters of olives and fried goat brains, but here I am sitting in the pew…