New Work by Former Guest Editors
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)
Nonfiction
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Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors
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…
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Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction
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,…
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Introduction
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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Sad Women: A Look2 Essay on Anita Brookner
At first, I meant to write a treatise on happiness, but only as a kind of anti-history. —Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women Recently, I’ve had a case of Anita Brookner-itis—by which I mean a propensity to read and reread her twenty-four novels despite the aching sadness they leave in the pit of my stomach. Given…
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Introduction
In Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli writes: “I suppose that documenting things—through the lens of a camera, on paper, or with a sound-recording device—is really only a way of contributing one more layer, something like soot, to all the things already sedimented in a collective understanding of the world.” I’m writing this introduction in the…
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Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction
Ploughshares is pleased to present Kaitlyn Greenidge with the tenth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her story “Doers of the Word,” which appeared in the Summer 2020 issue, guest-edited by Celeste Ng. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by acclaimed writer, former guest editor, longtime patron, and member of the Ploughshares advisory board Alice Hoffman,…
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New Work by Former Guest Editors
Martín Espada, Floaters (W.W. Norton, 2021) Yusef Komunyakaa, Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) Elizabeth Spires, Kate’s Light (Holiday House Publishers, 2021)
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Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors
Peter Ho Davies recommends Likes by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum (Macmillan, 2020). “Several pieces in this collection of sly, wise stories—two of which originally appeared in Ploughshares—spring from myth and fairytale, but the abiding magic here lies in the luminous reality of the characters.” Peter Ho Davies recommends The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade (W….