In the fall of 1987 after driving across the country to study at the University of Iowa, I found myself enrolled in James Alan McPherson’s fiction workshop, not knowing how I’d ended up there. The rumor circulated that, like a magisterial conductor of a symphony orchestra, the Iowa Workshop office manager, Connie Brothers, somehow made…
What are these stories and why are they here? As this issue’s guest editor, I suppose it’s part of my job to justify their existence, though, as with my own work, I’m tempted to say just read them. No disclaimers or praise from me will change your appreciation of them. Their charms should be self-evident,…
1. Where the Dead Speak Odessa, 1923: The executioners are all drunk, of course, and the snow is slippery as Prisoner Z stumbles to join the others before the firing squad. He pulls at his shirt, sweat-soaked, though he can see his breath. He’s worn it a week now. Beside him, fellow prisoners reeking of…
The restaurant is the most popular in town, and we wait the better portion of an hour for a table. There are eight of us gathered on the sidewalk. It’s late spring, the kind of mauvish gloaming hour that Virginia Woolf would have marked by the whirling and wheeling of rooks, but there are no…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Viet Dinh with the sixth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his short story “Lucky Dragon,” which appeared in the Summer 2016 issue guest-edited by novelist Claire Messud and literary critic James Wood. The $1,000 award, given by acclaimed writer and Ploughshares advisory editor Alice Hoffman, honors the best…
Lloyd Schwartz, Little Kisses, poems (University of Chicago Press, April 2017) Richard Tillinghast, Journeys into the Mind of the World, essays (University of Tennessee Press, February 2017)
Years ago, I went to a family reunion in rural Sweden, where the houses are red, yellow, or white, and the mailboxes bear the family’s last name. My grandfather was born Birger Johansson, but because the farmers on either side of his family’s farm were also named “Johansson,” Birger’s family decided to change their surname….
The following piece has been adapted from the author’s biography of Lola Ridge, Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (2016). Lola Ridge slipped under the ropes and started straight for the cordon of mounted police and the prison doors. A young mounted guard, a boy, rode down upon her. As…
In the fall of 2016, I traveled to China for the first time, a two-month fellowship sponsored by the Shanghai Writers’ Association. I was there to work on a new novel, but in reality, I spent much of my time and attention putting together this issue of Ploughshares. It was a good time to be…
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