In May 2009, a year after I graduated from college, I found myself in a mangrove swamp thirty miles east of Haikou, the capital city of China’s southernmost province, Hainan Island, standing atop a massive, concrete floodgate. With me were six reporters from a Cantonese television station, the CEO of one of China’s largest telecommunications…
I lived about fifteen years in New York and Los Angeles, and by the time I moved back to rural Ohio, I’d been gone long enough to forget all the stuff I hated: I forgot about the rules for men (there are none) and the rules for women (the men make the rules). I forgot…
In December of 1936, George Orwell, on his way to fight in the Spanish Civil War, stopped in Paris, where he had a chat with Henry Miller. It would be the two writers’ only encounter. Neither was particularly well-known or financially secure at the time. Miller had published Tropic of Cancer two years prior, but…
When Lou Reed departed in 2013, I stopped what I was doing and spent a few minutes listening to “Sweet Jane” and “Pale Blue Eyes.” When I heard about Prince a few years later, I turned to “1999” and “Raspberry Beret.” These private memorials were a reflex of gratitude on my part—a small protest against…
Charles Baxter, Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature (Graywolf Press, 2022). Alice Hoffman, The Invisible Hour (Atria Books, August 2023).
Peter Ho Davies recommends The Book of Disbelieving, by David Lawrence Morse (Sarabande Books, 2023). “Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, these are wondrous, beguiling, and deeply affecting stories.” Peter Ho Davies recommends The Best Possible Experience: Stories, by Nishanth Injam (Pantheon Books, 2023). “Hauntingly beautiful tales of arrival and departure, love and loss.”…
Ploughshares is pleased to present E. K. Ota with the fifth annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for her short story “The Paper Artist,” which appeared in the Fall 2022 issue, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors, honors a…
I’m early again, so I sit idling in the parking lot, watching the young boys shoot baskets through the chain-link fence. My windows are open with the AC blowing at my knees on low. I just want to feel the wind on my face, but I can’t stand this heat right now, not when I’m…
She was seven and having her bacon and orange juice in the kitchen on North Kings Road in West Hollywood. Behind her and above the sink the jalousies were angled open. Outside were palm and hibiscus and there was weather. You could hear it. She looked at me and stopped chewing. Me at that age…
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