Opening chapter of The Condition, by Jennifer Haigh To be published by HarperCollins in May 2008 Summer comes late to Massachusetts. The gray spring is frosty, unhurried: wet snow on the early plantings, a cold lesson for optimistic gardeners, for those who have not learned. Chimneys smoke until Memorial Day. Then, all at once,…
For awhile the house sagged on itself, then new people moved in with teacups that chink in a different key from the teacups that lived here before. There is an innocent pouring of coffee, a holding themselves apart, a surreptitious glance into my garden as though I grew rare greens. How hard will they struggle…
Each day she woke before dawn and walked the grounds of the American hospital. She didn’t go far. She kept to the footpaths that encircled the main hall, past the evergreens and the timber cottages now used as additional wards for the wounded. It had once been a Japanese vocational school for the arts, and…
I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk… —Robinson Jeffers The squirrels are up to their nuts in pecans, And the largesse of the trees Has made them careless in their comings and goings, Their carryings and buryings. Every few blocks there’s one Who zigged just when he should have zagged;…
Perhaps the purpose of leaves is to conceal the verticality of trees which we notice in December as if for the first time: row after row of dark forms yearning upwards. And since we will be horizontal ourselves for so long, let us now honor the gods of the vertical: stalks of wheat which to…
Fall 2007 KAREN E. BENDER is the author of the novel Like Normal People (Houghton Mifflin). Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, The Best American Short Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Choice (Macadam Cage), and teaches creative writing at the University of North…
Adler, Professor of Rabbinics (Emeritus), was annoyed that the young man sitting next to him was interfering with his sleep. Through slitted eyes he watched him, plugged into his music, listlessly turning the pages of a magazine, giving out somehow all the traits Adler had come to dislike in the young—vanity, narcissism, the insouciant attention…
Brick laid down, scritch of the trowel’s downward stroke, another brick set then the flat side of the trowel moving across the top of the course of bricks. My father stepped from the car in his brown loafers, the rest of him is fading but not his loafers, the round spot distended by his big…
Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best poem and short story published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, which are wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners—each of whom receives a cash prize of $600—are selected by our advisory editors. The 2007…
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