Translated from the Korean by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton 1 An ordinary-looking man was not what I expected. He was of average height, at five feet six inches, and had a compact build. His body was marked with scars and blemishes but bore no tattoos. I detected none of the anxiety and fretfulness that convicts…
They met on the night train to Budapest and seemed drawn to each other by the fascination with how different they were—her from Brussels, a place he’d only seen on the map, and him from Draper, Utah, a place she’d clearly never imagined was on any map. That’s why I wanted to get away from…
Edward Hirsch,100 Poems to Break Your Heart (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021) Lloyd Schwartz, The View from Somerville: An anthology of student poetry, (Cervena Barva Press, 2022)
Robert Boswell recommends I Have Her Memories Now, by Carrie Grinstead (Howling Bird Press, 2022); and It Falls Gently All Around, by Ramona Reeves (University of Pittsburg Press, 2022): “Two new story collections by remarkable young writers.” Peter Ho Davies recommends Who You Might Be, by Leigh N. Gallagher (Henry Holt and Co., 2022): “A…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Christie Hodgen with the fourth annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for her short story “Bush v. Gore,” which appeared in the Fall 2021 issue, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors, honors a short…
In his essay “Cante Moro,” Nathaniel Mackey describes a kind of singing that has “a sound of trouble in the voice. The voice becomes troubled.” The quality he identifies here, via the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, “is something beyond technical competence or even technical virtuosity. It is something troubling. It has to do with…
Gabrielle said I was always pining over a white girl, which wasn’t true, except for that night, when I was in fact pining over a white girl named James. Though none of us were girls anymore. Gabrielle and I were twenty-nine. That’s what I hated about being close to someone who had known me since…
1 So this your real, ehm, body? The real you? No silicone for Ms. Velvet Lace? I say it’s really me, of course. I say it pleasant as can be, like I’m still working the register at Key Food, even though these men don’t look like nobody I know or want to know. It’s two…
Hannah didn’t realize her father was a person who needed to be married, like a philopatric sea animal, until after the divorce. “He’s a nurse shark,” her mother explained. “No matter what, they always go back to the Dry Tortugas.” Hannah didn’t know what her mother meant, but she suspected her father now preferred his…
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