Ploughshares is pleased to present Lara Egger with the thirty-second annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her poetry collection How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares…
Edward Hirsch, The Heart of American Poetry (Library of America, 2022) Dan Wakefield, Kurt Vonnegut, The Making of a Writer (Seven Stories Press, 2022) Madison Smartt Bell, The Witch of Matongé (Concord Free Press, 2022)
Peter Ho Davies recommends A Down Home Meal for these Difficult Times, by Meron Hadero (Restless Books, 2022). “A brilliant debut collection of stories of the Ethiopian diaspora, by a writer whose work has appeared in Ploughshares and Best American Short Stories.” Peter Ho Davies recommends Tale of the Dreamer’s Son, by Preeta Samarasan (World…
That Sunday morning, long ago, a golden light trickled in through the window of my basement apartment and stung my boyfriend and me. It stung our eyes and stung our hearts to see our predicament sharply outlined: It was late October in Reykjavik and the sun had come to say goodbye. We’d be left in…
It’s a small mark, quick cut, a single stroke. An incident, not the main event, on the page—more flicked than drawn, starting at the top and moving, diagonally, down to the left. A diacritic. It’s a diacritic. I don’t want to use the word accent. (That question, which plagues me in the francophone world: D’où…
I think I first really became aware of the word “beautiful” when, as a young woman, I lived for a while in New York City. The adjective was everywhere, so it seemed, describing anything from a club to an oyster to a state of mind. “Oh, you’re going to that party? Beautiful.” “You won’t believe…
As the war droned on, my wife’s Saigon university finally paid her salary after we threatened a lawsuit, paying her all at once at the end of the school year in so many packets of devalued piasters that we had to carry it away in two suitcases, making our motorcycle trip back to our apartment…
South Diego says we must caffeinate before the Satanic tour. In a French press, he pours boiling water over coffee grounds, grown and roasted in his village outside of Tulancingo, Hidalgo. We’re sitting at his dining table in a nondescript flat in the guts of the Centro Historico in Mexico City. He says it’s his…
1793 It begins when a three-year-old girl, the daughter of a doctor, dies at her family’s home in Philadelphia. Within a week, yellow fever infections have been reported throughout the city. “Tis a sickly time now in phila.,” the diarist Elizabeth Drinker notes on August 15; “there has been an unusual number of funerals lately…
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