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…
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)
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…
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…
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…
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…
Early in April of 1784, behind the grime-streaked walls of King’s Bench Prison in south London, a twenty-nine-year-old Charlotte Smith received news of her first publication. The poet wasn’t locked away on her own account. When Charlotte was fifteen, her father had arranged for her marriage to Benjamin Smith, the twenty-three-year-old son of a successful…
Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) Jay Neugeboren, After Camus (Madville Publishing, 2024) Lloyd Schwartz, Folhas (Leaves), edited and translated from Portuguese by Maria Lúcia Milléo Martins and Regina Przybycien (7Letras Press Rio de Janeiro, 2023)
David Gullette recommends Joseph “Jay” Featherstone’s third collection of poems, Rising Out of Nowhere (Fenway Press, 2023). “This collection shows an experienced poet at the top of his game. Particularly sharp is the sense of place—in his case, Gloucester’s Eastern Point—where he watches as ‘A great Atlantic roller swings / toward land, flowing, green. /…
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