I say, to the children, in their tinted goggles and their helmets and their puffy jackets and pants and their tiny boots locked into their tiny skis, I say to them, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we got him.” The children look at me, look at each other, look back at me. They are five years old….
“Success is never so interesting as struggle.” —Willa Cather My sister was like a mother to her boyfriend’s four girls from the age of seventeen until she was twenty-two. Her boyfriend, José, was one of the local drug dealers. He went to the Nebraska State Penitentiary for two years for dealing methamphetamines. When José…
Malcriado Mom pried off a press-on nail and dropped it into her purse. I watched: The bag rattle as our cab flew over another pothole on our way to the airport where we were dropping her off. Mom bragging to the cabdriver about how this was going to be my first time staying in Nicaragua…
Suddenly I’m remembering a public conversation between two Great Straight White Male Writers. We’ve all made the mistake of going to this event at least once, right? After Great Straight White Male Writer 1 reads, it’s time for the Q&A. This is where we’re supposed to find profound insight. The questions are always the…
He was fed up with the little brat and just wanted to be by himself for a while. He wanted to ask his wife if she minded if he took a walk alone, met up with them in a few hours, but he knew she would be hurt. “How many times have you been here?”…
Their last morning of vacation, he’d poured so much champagne at brunch—Chandon, with little gold stars gushing across the label—that her tongue had loosened. “Strangely enough, it was about my ex,” she’d said. “I mean, strange that I’d dream it now.” They’d taken a cabin in the woods for the Thanksgiving holiday. Her grown son…
DeWitt Henry, Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays (MadHat Press, October 2018)
Margot Livesey recommends Hungry Ghost Theater by Sarah Stone (WTAW Press, 2018). “I loved this richly imagined, deeply inventive, politically engaged novel about three generations of a family and how they act out, both onstage and in the streets, their pain, fear, and dismay at the state of the world. I reached the last page,…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Kaveh Akbar with the twenty-eighth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his poetry collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and…
No products in the cart.