My beloved grandmother, who just turned 90, used to bring me a stack of books every summer and say, “Whenever I want to go somewhere, I just open a book.” This is why I love the work in this issue of Ploughshares—it opens doors into new and deep explorations of internal and external worlds. It takes…
Charles Baxter recommends Question 7, by Richard Flanagan (Knopf, 2023). “A brilliant mix of memoir and both personal and social history, this book manages to say something new about the atom bomb, Leo Szilard, colonialism in Tasmania, and the author’s near-death experience, with all these strands braided together in a formal way that Sebald himself might have…
Charles Baxter, Blood Test: a Comedy (Pantheon, 2024)
So much in this world we can’t make better. So much in this world we can’t understand. For those reasons, literature sustains us. We need, more than ever, language that expands human perception, that opens us to the broken world. We need the compassion and outrage and tenderness and horror of language that nibbles at…
Vivian is still alive when it happens, sitting alone in Chicago on a far northside park bench overlooking Lake Michigan, as the storage war hipsters start selling her photographs. I have not seen pictures of her sitting there, but imagine a faded blousy dress, the scratched bench, the spray of waves against the broken revetment…
Education got us into this. – Murray Sinclair I will go to the archives. What will I look for? Another place, simply, where the past speaks? I call Linda Johnson, former Territorial Archivist of Yukon. I tell her I am going to the archives. What should I do there? What should I look at; what should…
I find in this wilderness a being who only wears pants, has always only worn pants. Lucky Brand jeans for dates, Levi’s for swagger, Carhartts for work. A self who carries a pocket knife everywhere because I never know when it might be necessary to open the straight-edged locking blade sheathed in the polished, blond…
Autumn Blaze Maple October is warmer than usual. All weekend, social media friends post pictures of high school homecoming dances. Their daughters wear short tubes of colorful fabric held in place with hip bones and spaghetti straps. The homecomings I remember were chilly. The popular girls wore Irish knit sweaters that swung like thigh-length hoop…
An hour and a half north of Bishop, up a road with a view of Death Valley; that’s where to find the ancient bristlecone forest, and when I say ancient, first, there are trees in those woods who—who? That? Who—trees who are two to three thousand years old, who fully remember who they’ve always been. They…
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