1. I know where I came from, born up out of the half shell dog house, roof tin fence rusted right into summer. The bended sag of the wire gate, the warm rustled fur, the worn-down dirt, the dog shit, and all of us, blind pups and children, new in our bodies, snuffling for mothers…
In Trinidad, the police have so much power, and they are so young. How to Wear the Uniform The police uniform is a cruel piece of work, the sleeved gray shirt a punishment of thick, rough wool and polyester in the Caribbean heat. Starched to the pliancy of grade-two cardboard, it invites an itchy ring…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Victor LaValle with the seventh annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his short story “Spectral Evidence,” which appeared in the Summer 2017 issue, guest-edited by Stewart O’Nan. The $1,000 prize, awarded by acclaimed writer and Ploughshares board member and former guest editor Alice Hoffman, honors the best piece of…
Gary Soto, The Elements of San Joaquin, poems (Chronicle Books, April 2018) Gary Soto, F. Perez Lopez’s El Mexicano, nonfiction (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, April 2018) Richard Tillinghast, Journeys into the Mind of the World: A Book of Places, nonfiction (University of Tennessee Press, 2017)
Rosellen Brown recommends Tamed & Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind, by Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017). This is a collection of brief essays by two of this country’s most daring and profound students of animal behavior. They have had seemingly endless experience with just about every kind of…
I have read enough about the fundamental complexity of all things, down to the very protons and neutrons, to feel at ease saying this: Beauty disciplines. I know my two-word sentence is not intelligible by conventional standards. I hope by means of it to move a little beyond these standards and to begin to justify…
The Danger of the Everyday On September 7, 1978, while crossing London’s Waterloo Bridge on his way to work at the BBC, the Bulgarian writer and journalist Georgi Markov was shot in the right leg with a 1.52-millimiter poisonous pellet—as tiny as the tip of a ballpoint pen—by an undercover agent of Bulgaria’s intelligence services….
At twenty-five and with little direction in my life, I decided to volunteer in a soup kitchen. Several years after graduating college, things had fallen into a quarter-life stability: I was living in Boston, working as an administrative assistant at a nonprofit, making enough money to cover expenses and go out to dinner and drinking…
“I had to get away from her,” my husband whispered as we lay together in bed. For thirty years, I’d heard only his sharp, flinted words, the stories about his mother no more than a few terse sentences—“She sacrificed me to my stepfather. She let him beat me. She beat me too”—his resentment flaring on…
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