We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the Author. —John Keats, letter to John Reynolds, May 3, 1818 Prologue “I purpose…to make a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to pursue.…I will clamber through the Clouds and exist.” —Keats, letter to…
Sun Ra claimed to hail from Saturn, but he and his Intergalactic Arkestra still had to suffer the trials of earthly travel. When his agent phoned us to say they’d be driving up early, a day before their hotel was expecting them, we had to scramble to find beds. Adam, our piano player, lived in…
Childhood is self-enclosed and timeless. In adolescence, a moment comes when we sense the future, if only vaguely and ecstatically. For me, that happened on a boarding school trip to Quebec. It was 1962 and I was fourteen. The circumstances of the excursion have gotten fuzzy in my memory, but I do know we traveled…
Peter Ho Davies, The Fortunes, a novel (September 2016, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Gail Mazur, Forbidden City (April 2016, University of Chicago Press). Alan Shapiro, Life Pig, poems (September 2016, University of Chicago Press). Alan Shapiro, That Self-forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration, essays (October 2016, University of Chicago Press). Gerald Stern, Divine Nothingness, poems (May 2016, Norton)….
It’s thought that when Cervantes embarked on Don Quixote, he intended to write a short novel. Henry James’ short stories had a way of growing into novellas and novels, a fate he fondly cursed. With Chekhov, it was the other way round: life was too short for the novel. (Though perhaps just long enough for…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Ramona Ausubel with the fifth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her short story “Fresh Water from the Sea,” which appeared in the Summer 2015 issue, guest-edited by Lauren Groff. The $1,000 award, given by acclaimed writer and Ploughshares advisory editor Alice Hoffman, honors the best piece of fiction…
Martín Espada, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, poems (W. W. Norton, January 2016) Thomas Lux, To the Left of Time, poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April, 2016) Gail Mazur, Forbidden City, poems. (University of Chicago Press, March 2016) Gary Soto, You Kiss by Th’ Book, poems (Chronicle Books, Spring 2016)
When you reach “a certain age,” time begins to accelerate, and you become acutely aware that there’s much less time ahead than behind. And when your older friends start dying, the closer you were to them, the more their deaths seem impossible, a mistake, some stupid oversight—a fatal lapse of attention that resulted in their…
Chapter 1 “Tino, come here,” his mom called him back to her bedside. Tino was on his way out, but stopped. The nurse had been searching for something among medicine bottles on the bedside table and also looked up. “Take care of your dad,” Tino’s mom said. “I will,” he told her and kissed her…
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