It was my first time teaching. I was nervous about it. My husband had a bottle of Malbec that a student had given him, so he opened it. It tasted awful at nine in the morning, but I drank the whole bottle before going in to teach. I did well in class that morning. I…
Almost two thousand years before Da Vinci imagined a machine whose screwlike overhead motor could lift the machine into vertical flight, children in China played with bamboo toys whose propellers, thin and light as dragonfly wings, were set on a sharpened stick and spun into the wonder of an object spiraling in the air. The…
It’s music night at Mihalis’ taverna, and the musicians wait for the darkness, for the desperation of the cicadas to quiet. They’re the loudest they’ve ever been, everyone says, and the noise is all anyone can talk about. But compared with the last topic of conversation—the fires—it’s an improvement. Mihalis is Aspa’s father, and she…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Victor LaValle with the seventh annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his short story “Spectral Evidence,” which appeared in the Summer 2017 issue, guest-edited by Stewart O’Nan. The $1,000 prize, awarded by acclaimed writer and Ploughshares board member and former guest editor Alice Hoffman, honors the best piece of…
Gary Soto, The Elements of San Joaquin, poems (Chronicle Books, April 2018) Gary Soto, F. Perez Lopez’s El Mexicano, nonfiction (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, April 2018) Richard Tillinghast, Journeys into the Mind of the World: A Book of Places, nonfiction (University of Tennessee Press, 2017)
Rosellen Brown recommends Tamed & Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind, by Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017). This is a collection of brief essays by two of this country’s most daring and profound students of animal behavior. They have had seemingly endless experience with just about every kind of…
It fell to Kyle to kill the chickens. On Saturday before dawn, while Audrey was still asleep, he put on an old t-shirt and jeans and headed out to the coop in the backyard, hedge clippers in hand. It was a cloudless, cool morning, but though the horizon was still dark, the hens were already…
I have read enough about the fundamental complexity of all things, down to the very protons and neutrons, to feel at ease saying this: Beauty disciplines. I know my two-word sentence is not intelligible by conventional standards. I hope by means of it to move a little beyond these standards and to begin to justify…
I. Monsters “Pink is the color for girls,” Kiera says, so she and Ava cut their palms and let their blood drip into a shallow bowl filled with milk, watching the color spread slowly on the surface, small red flowers blooming. Ava studies Kiera. How she holds her hand steady—as if used to slicing herself…
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