Editor’s Corner
Richard Tillinghast, Blue If Only I Could Tell You (White Pine Press, September 2022).
Nonfiction
Ordinary Magic
If there’s one thing you learn working on a carnival, it’s how to be invisible. Despite all that bling and zip and wow, a carny’s goal is to straddle the distance between spectacle and crowd: to entice people toward the ticket booth, then slip into the background. In my family, it’s a long-standing tradition. Tricksters…
Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors
Laura van den Berg recommends Planes Flying Over a Monster,by Daniel Saldaña París (Catapult, August 2024). “Daniel Saldaña París writes about cities as labyrinths; each essay in this marvelous collection leads readers to corridors where the intimate and the cosmic intersect.” DeWitt Henry recommends Joy Ride, by Ron Slate (Carnegie Melon Press, 2023). “Slate’s third collection is divided between…
New Work by Former Guest Editors
Robert Pinsky, Proverbs of Limbo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2024) Margot Livesey, The Road from Belhaven (Knopf, 2024) David M. St. John, Prayer for My Daughter (Walton Well Press, October 2024)
The Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction
Ploughshares is pleased to present Andre Dubus III with the sixth annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for his short story “Gary’s Way,” which appeared in the Summer 2023 issue, guest-edited by Tom Perrotta. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors, honors a short story published in…
Gaps and Silences
The two-lane highway clings to the lakeshore, passes through a rocky tunnel, and climbs Spooner Pass. I listen to music, telling myself my recent symptoms mean nothing, even as I feel a whoosh of vertigo. It’s late September, and the aspens are just starting to change—light green against the Sierra blue sky. It’s a beautiful…
Introduction
My sophomore year of college, I had a job in the cafeteria dish room: scraping food off plates, stacking trays, helping the occasional panicked freshman dig through trash for a lost retainer. At the end of fall semester, I got an unexpected call from the financial aid office. The college’s professional literary magazine was looking…
Lesser-Known Butterfly Facts
1. No one knows whether butterflies act fromconsciousness or instinct. The in-flight map showed twenty-eight hundred miles traveled when our plane touched down in Fort Lauderdale. Jordan was looking out the window in her Buffalo Bills cap, seeing Florida for the first time. Between us, in the middle seat, Elle scrunched her curly blond hair…
Introduction
We are witnessing a war—multiple wars—whose scale and devastation are overwhelming. Every day, pictures of maimed or murdered children, carried in the arms of their grieving families, flicker on our social media timelines. Nearly every post asks the same questions: Does our suffering not matter? Who will bear witness to our loss? To lose a…