The restaurant is the most popular in town, and we wait the better portion of an hour for a table. There are eight of us gathered on the sidewalk. It’s late spring, the kind of mauvish gloaming hour that Virginia Woolf would have marked by the whirling and wheeling of rooks, but there are no…
Aisha threw the first stone. The crowd of girls went silent as it arced through the humid twilight, striking the principal’s thick ankle. The hush lasted a few seconds more as we processed her gasp. Our principal did feel pain after all. Then Nonso whooped and let a second stone loose. “Stop!” Mrs. Haastrup shouted…
A Certain Kind of Gray (Rhinebeck, New York) At that point they were still trying to solve it by talking and so they went, together, to see a psychologist who worked out of an office in her house. It was a beautiful place off a dirt road. There were always men working in the yard….
Our friends, our very good friends, are getting a divorce. Julia and Sunny, lovable and loving, whom we’ve adored from the beginning, when we were all in medical school. The past few years have been difficult, we know that; we’ve known that for a while. It’s not news to us that there’ve been problems, some…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Viet Dinh with the sixth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his short story “Lucky Dragon,” which appeared in the Summer 2016 issue guest-edited by novelist Claire Messud and literary critic James Wood. The $1,000 award, given by acclaimed writer and Ploughshares advisory editor Alice Hoffman, honors the best…
Lloyd Schwartz, Little Kisses, poems (University of Chicago Press, April 2017) Richard Tillinghast, Journeys into the Mind of the World, essays (University of Tennessee Press, February 2017)
Jane Hirshfield recommends World of Made and Unmade by Jane Mead (Alice James Books, September 2016): “This is a work of enormous reach and dignity. The collection’s center is Mead’s mother’s death, though naming its subject doesn’t begin to convey the power of Mead’s writing, or of her multifaceted looking and feeling. The land, with…
Some bells ring of their own accord. Some need the boy who pulls the rope and is lifted off his feet on the upswing. The pigeons scatter from the tower’s shaken air. Their paratrooper feathers storm the shaft of light. By what miracle does he recall, years later, such ascension, the last time he loved…
“Fran’s friend has cancer,” Sheila says. “Who?” “Fran’s friend. Has cancer.” “I don’t know who you’re talking about.” “I’m telling you. Fran’s friend.” Max looks up from his menu. “I’m hearing the words, Sheila. I’m asking who the hell is Fran?” “You don’t know who Fran is?” “I don’t know who Fran is.” “You don’t…
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