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…
In nonfiction, our winner is Jeremiah Barker for his essay “Bearing.” Of his essay, nonfiction judge Esmé Weijun Wang says, “The winning essay captured me immediately: both calm and confident, with a mature voice that carried me through a brilliantly written narrative of trauma. I am in awe of how adept this writer is at…
DeWitt Henry recommends a hundred little pieces on the end of the world by John Rember (U. of New Mexico Press, 2020). “Rember’s meditations ‘on teaching, writing, and friendship in an increasingly fragile world’ are, above all, alert, voracious, thoughtful, and life-read. From his prospect in Sawtooth Valley, Idaho, he offers clear-minded witness of our…
Charles Baxter, The Sun Collective (Pantheon Books, 2020). Peter Ho Davies, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, January 2021). Rosanna Warren, So Forth (W.W. Norton, 2020). Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters (W. W. Norton, 2020).
Ploughshares is pleased to present Jill Osier with the thirtieth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her poetry collection, The Solace Is Not the Lullaby (Yale University Press, 2020). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry…
On the occasion of Ray Bradbury’s one-hundredth birthday, we are still discovering the depth of his genius as his imagined future becomes our present. When Ray Bradbury began writing, the term magical realism hadn’t yet been invented. He was dubbed a fantasy writer, for those who wrote about magic or about the future or about…
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