In 2012, we established Ploughshares Solos, a digital-first series for longer stories and essays, edited by Ploughshares Editor-in-Chief Ladette Randolph. Solos were compiled in the Solos Omnibus until 2017, after which they were published in our yearly fall longform issue.
After a decade of publication, we ceased publishing new solos in a digital standalone format. You can still enjoy new longform prose in our fall issue. To read Solos-past, subscribe to the Ploughshares archive, starting at $20. Solos are also still available where e-books are sold for download on your Kindle, Nook, iPad, or Kobo.
I. Living It When a teacher at the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, Ireland, was asked about James Joyce, the school’s most famous student, he is said to have replied: “not one of our successes.” That wasn’t the attitude at my Jesuit high school in Detroit in the early 1970s. There, Joyce’s Jesuit…
She was wiping the counter down for closing when he came and seated himself on a stool, asking for pie and coffee. There was nothing special about that, nothing special about him. He was in working clothes, a heavy cloth jacket, gray to begin with, and blackened now at the elbows and cuffs. He didn’t…
Anna is in the orchard wearing a sleeveless housecoat, lifting a stone from the Roman road discovered a few feet away. It was unearthed a week ago during the gas line extension to Taranto. The stone fits a low wall in the garden she’s planted with nightshades—eggplant, tomatoes, firecracker red peperoncini hot peppers whose oil…
for L.S.K.V. “I’m gonna kill you,” Gina says in my ear as our camp counselor, Eunice, shows us around. “Tonight, in your sleep. If I haven’t killed myself first.” I shrug Gina off. “It’s one week. We’ll survive.” Secretly, though, I’m dying inside. Nothing I’ve read or seen on TV ever suggested that US summer…
In memory of Chinua Achebe 1930-2013 Aupres de toi j’ai retrouvé mon nom. —David Diop I. The first time I read The Portrait of a Lady I was twenty-three and had been married for less than a year. We had been living for only a few months in Nigeria, a country that had become independent…
Chicago, 1960 In the big old Nordling house near the university, at the far end of the long, tall living room, there was a baby grand piano. The piano was next to an open window with gauze curtains that almost reached the floor. Astrid Nordling was standing behind them, hiding from the grown-ups sitting over…
It was only June, but Steven Darby knew his summer was already gone. He waited with the men at the crest of the ravine. Down in the basin, a brook swept past old bathing pools, beneath a rotted footbridge and a crumbling, stone pump house, to follow the declination of the land south into the…
The lobby was a crunch of necessary blues, blues from a lifetime, blues stored up and colonized. On the floor-length, brocade drapes, silver vines and chrysanthemums crawled on a pale blue background. The walls were painted throttled midnight blue. Blue Oriental rugs tic-tac-toed across the floor. Two nearly purple wall lamps glimmered, and under a…
There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You find in this way the path of your life. —Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table I have cultivated an approach Obviously out of…
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