MASTHEAD Guest Editor Mark Doty Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Gregg Rosenblum Assistant Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Associate Poetry Editor Susan Conley Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Editorial Assistants: Kris Fikkan and Kathleen Stole. Staff Assistants: Eson Kim and Tom Herd. Fiction Readers: Nicole Hein, Kris Fikkan, Darla…
Leonard Michaels, The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995, a memoir: This frank, resonant collection of journal excerpts reveal more than a man, but also an era, going from Greenwich Village, where Michael’s first wife, Sylvia, committed suicide at the age of twenty-four, to upstate New York and Berkeley. (Riverhead)
While Wanda had an abortion, I had lunch with her mother. “Please,” Wanda had said, swathed in large paper napkins, “just get her away from here.” Then she closed her eyes, and her boyfriend, Ramon, nodded, so I took Wanda’s mother to a Chinese dumpling shop. Once there, she told me the old story about…
It’s probably a shame to say so, at least at the outset of an introduction to this issue of Ploughshares, but I may not be a particularly good or efficient reader of other people’s fiction. By nature I am somewhat distractible. And although my distractibility is matched at times by my ability to concentrate, these…
Alberto Ríos, The Curtain of Trees, stories: In nine moving tales, Ríos brings us small-town life along the Arizona-Mexico border. The collection presents a dark worldview, but it resounds with Ríos’s characteristic tenderness, compassion, and power. (New Mexico)
for Gabriella There had been a cricket in the basement when I dreamt you were an unopened envelope on my chest. I heard on the radio how silverware suddenly tarnishes in a drawer before disaster, tornadoes, sudden changes in weather. The voice on the radio, on the lookout, she said, “It’s beautiful . . ….
Let me ask you, have you ever, you know, faked an orgasm with me?” Frank asks Lise. They’re in a crowded restaurant just off Madison. Lise looks up from her softshell crabs to see if the diners at the nearby tables are staring. This question is unlike Frank; it’s direct and uncharming. “Well, when we…
Dan Wakefield, How Do We Know When It’s God?, memoir: Ten years ago, Wakefield, then an atheist, had a religious reawakening, which resulted in Returning: A Spiritual Journey. He follows up on his spiritual progress in this heartfelt, important book. (Little, Brown)
At night you wake, not to seek me but to come to your self, a small song— here is your hand on the wall in the squares the porchlight makes. You are the day’s hard rain. It becomes you (and all the clouds in the pond). Tonight the fox is struck, the steeple reaches up…
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