Anna is in the orchard wearing a sleeveless housecoat, lifting a stone from the Roman road discovered a few feet away. It was unearthed a week ago during the gas line extension to Taranto. The stone fits a low wall in the garden she’s planted with nightshades—eggplant, tomatoes, firecracker red peperoncini hot peppers whose oil…
In memory of Chinua Achebe 1930-2013 Aupres de toi j’ai retrouvé mon nom. —David Diop I. The first time I read The Portrait of a Lady I was twenty-three and had been married for less than a year. We had been living for only a few months in Nigeria, a country that had become independent…
It was only June, but Steven Darby knew his summer was already gone. He waited with the men at the crest of the ravine. Down in the basin, a brook swept past old bathing pools, beneath a rotted footbridge and a crumbling, stone pump house, to follow the declination of the land south into the…
In the months after my friend R.’s death, I suffered bouts of shame deeper than any I’d experienced before. These were often followed by unreasonable fits of anger, which had me shaking my fist at drivers when I was walking and shouting at pedestrians when I was driving. At least I considered them unreasonable at…
Absent-Minded Professor Joke: A famous mathematician works in the city at a university and lives with his family in the suburbs. One day they make a short move to a three-story, slate-gray Victorian house with red shutters the next street over, a move his wife oversees while he’s at work. He leaves his old house…
I must have been the oldest Jew in America who had never been to Israel. During the Six Day War, when I was eleven, I was determined to defend my people’s homeland. I doubted I would be able to take aim at an enemy who reminded me of my beloved Danny Thomas, the only Arab…
I was flattered when asked to guest-edit this issue of Ploughshares. I am proud to offer these stories. When selecting them, I was looking for range and adventurousness. I did not want stories that read or looked alike. These range from so-called mimetic to so-called meta. I do not like such labels and I hope…
First the good news: In spite of every dour pronouncement I’ve heard over the four decades I’ve called myself a writer, and probably going even farther back, literature as we know it is not in crisis. Reading is not obsolete. Books are not doomed. Print is not archaic, nor is it likely to become so….
The Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction Ploughshares is pleased to present Karl Taro Greenfeld with the second annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his short story, “Strawberries,” which appeared in the Winter 2012-2013 issue of Ploughshares, edited by Ladette Randolph and John Skoyles. The $1,000 award, given by acclaimed writer and Ploughshares advisory editor…
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