At two o’clock in the morning, no one is to blame. We’d been watching CNN, one scene of disaster leading to the next, the reporter in front of what might have been a new anthrax outbreak giving way to the military analyst in the studio with new developments in Kabul, when William put his hand…
Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best short story and poem 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…
Turned from the camera’s eye, hovering, between river & bridge, the hung woman looks downstream, & snagged in the air beside her, the body of her young son. They are tassels on a drawn curtain; they are the closed eyes of the black boy who will find them while leading his cow to the riverbank;…
My whole life, it always made me crazy when people weren’t sensible. Dancers, for instance, have the worst eating habits. I can’t begin to say how many anorexic little girls I used to have to hold up onstage, afraid they were going to faint on me any minute. I myself was lean and tight and…
Last autumn I found myself talking about my new novel at a fundraiser for a college library. Only after I’d committed to doing this did I discover that I was following a man who had written a popular book about the human genome project and preceding a woman who had written about recent war crimes….
freedom is what you can buy with a song. after the song has been soldered into your lungs. after the song has beaten its way inside your dreams. after the song has snuck its way into your bed. after the song has knuckled you under. after the song has festered and blossomed and festered again….
Priscilla’s father comes to visit unannounced and buys her golf shoes, tight Guess? jeans, and a steak, medium rare. She pushes the pink plastic “medium rare” marker into the coin pocket of her jeans and forgets about it until the day after he dies, several months later, when she will find the thing on the…
More Awards Our congratulations to the following writers, whose work has been selected for these anthologies: Best Stories — Alice Mattison’s “In Case We’re Separated,” from the Fall 2001 issue edited by Donald Hall, will be included in The Best American Short Stories 2002. The anthology is due out this October from Houghton Mifflin, with…
A spring wind hustles hundreds of pages into the street, discarded leaflets like pieces of a shredded textbook under the feet of high school students let out for lunch. A young woman bends and grasps a flier: sliver of promise, passport to enter through the golden arches, gateway to the west, up escalator to immediate…
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