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…
Nick Flynn, My Feelings, poems. (Graywolf, 2015) Alice Hoffman, Faithful, a novel. (Simon & Schuster, November 2015)
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…
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