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…
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…
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…
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,…
MartĂn 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)
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….
Over the past decade, my taste in literature—or at least my engagement with it—has shifted dramatically. I spend most of my “reading time” reciting charming and insufferable tales to my children. Curious George, for instance, is both the account of an irascible chimp unleashed in the big city and the chilling tale of interspecies abduction….
The night before my husband and I agreed to get married, we fought. It was a stupid and terrible argument. I’d planned a whole proposal for the next day: rented a rowboat, bought a bottle of champagne, measured his finger while he slept and had a wooden ring made. When he confessed, after a few…
In the Boston of inherited wealth, the five fetching Rotch daughters were raised in a Commonwealth Avenue mansion in the same Back Bay neighborhood as the Crosby and Bigelow families. The eldest daughter, Josephine, was engaged to marry Albert Bigelow the day after Bert’s graduation from Harvard. But when Josie and her mother sailed to…
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