Do it instinctively, like washing your hands or fumbling for your glasses on the night table in the morning, even though, for a small ritual, it is complicated, a minefield of subtleties, an act of aspiration, self-hatred, theatrics. Stand before the full-length mirror on your closet door. You are dressed already, though your hair is…
It is perhaps the height of optimism to try to structure an issue of a literary magazine around some single subject or theme. There is clearly the notion that, floating around out there, waiting to be beckoned, are the requisite ten or twelve or fourteen fine stories which will exactly fit, which will make an…
There is something very reassuring about Sue Miller. At forty-nine, she is a strong, vibrantly intelligent woman at the height of her career. The author of three best-selling. critically-acclaimed novels — The Good Mother, Family Pictures, and the recently released For Love — she is poised, confident, and affable. She is a soothing presence, by…
My bathroom mirror is a window with a sash I could throw open if it were not painted shut. Above it hangs a transparent pane high enough to frame the sky. Usually I forget this, as in the evening while putting on my makeup I am surprised by a streak of orange or zigzag of…
My husband often traced what he called the minor flaws of my character to Kansas City, Missouri-a city he placed in the dead middle of the Midwest, a “stunningly homogeneous” town, he liked to say, where it must have been horrifyingly easy for me to grow up believing untruths about the world. Often enough I…
Cohen Awards Each volume year, the best poem, short story, and nonfiction piece published in Ploughshares are honored with the Cohen Awards. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners are selected by our advisory editors — comprised of current and former guest editors. Each winner receives a cash prize of $400. The awards…
The captain said over the loudspeaker, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Los Angeles. There is no hope.” Each step a search for balance with my friend, here for the first time, beside me in his loose pants and splayfooted saunter, gliding over the sidewalk slabs uprooted by trees or earthquakes on which I’ve stumbled all…
The advice note, dropped on my father’s desk in the first week of September 1955, lay unread for a week. My father was away from home, resolving a dispute over burial sites in Manchester. He was a synagogue troubleshooter, the Red Adair of Anglo-Jewish internecine struggles, and it was his job to travel up and…
Cohen Awards Each volume year, the best poem, short story, and nonfiction piece published in Ploughshares are honored with the Cohen Awards. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners are selected by our advisory editors — comprised of current and former guest editors. Each winner receives a cash prize of $400. The awards…
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