There are many things I look for in a story—a vivid character or place, a memorable situation, a new way of seeing something. I like to be pulled in for a ride where I’m not quite sure where I’m going but feel confident that the driver does know and will indeed deliver me to the…
1. Sweets My father was a dentist, so I was allowed only one sweet a day. The reasons for this restriction were not mysterious. The water in our town wasn’t fluoridated. When my father tried to convince his fellow citizens they should add this chemical to the well, they accused him of fomenting a Commie…
Syria is the country where I first began to hike. I had moved there from the US with my husband in the early 2000s to the approving nods of the elders of my family. Before then, I’d only gone on visits, to see relatives and learn the language. My move was supposed to be a…
What is the importance of reading and writing in this moment? Those who come from overtly troubled communities and countries have long known that literature holds enormous power: the veracity that can bring about humility, death, growth, and change. As a child walking to school in the tumult of 1940s China, my mother saw men…
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…
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