“It was a dungeon,” Marvin Gilmore said about Boston State Hospital. “Like something out of medieval times.” Located on 232 acres of farmland, it began its therapeutic tenure in the late nineteenth century with promise, with the idea that a quiet pastoral setting outside the bustling city would do wonders for the lost and the…
One afternoon last week, I was sitting at my kitchen table, doing an online search for Bobby Bocelli. What came up was an entry headed: Robert A. Bocelli, 54, journalist, novelist, play and screenwriter. It sounded like an obituary. My second feeling was shame and guilt about my first feeling, which had been a flash…
In 1946, setting out to write the memoirs of his most remarkable life, Arthur Koestler walked into the Times publishing offices in Printing House Square London. In a small cubicle overlooking the Thames, while, as he said, a tugboat wailed longingly for the sea, Koestler examined the newspapers of the day, month, and year of…
Years ago, in the liminality of early transition, I worked a brief labor job. I hadn’t started hormones and looked like, what until recently I had been: a dyke. At the café where I hung out was a private contractor, with a crew of macho-seeming mostly Hispanic workers, doing construction and remodeling. He liked the…
I saw him when I entered the lobby. A tall man, sitting down. American or Australian or British. Young but not that young. Starting to bald. He had what the Japanese called a tall nose. When he stood, his body arched, then kept going, reminding me of a solitary egret, uncomfortable in rumpled feathered skin….
Edward Hirsch, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021) Elizabeth Spires, Kate’s Light (Holiday House, 2021) Maura Stanton, Interiors (Finishing Line Press, March 2022)
Laura van den Berg recommends The Mysteries by Marisa Silver (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021). “Silver’s latest is brilliant on the life-warping power of grief, and on the tactile etherealness of childhood. A suspenseful and deeply felt novel.” Rosellen Brown recommends Imagine the Dog by Cecilia Pinto (Texas Review Press, 2021). “There aren’t enough presses that dare…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Vincent Yu with the third annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for his short story “You Just Make Me So Happy,” which appeared in the Fall 2020 issue, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors,…
On the first day of my graduate workshop, sometimes I will ask the writers to draw an undersea creature and put it on the chalkboard. They do it willingly, and some are surprisingly good artists, making convincing jellyfish and eel out of chalk. Another might draw a blob of a whale, someone makes the classic…
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