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…
Circa 1960, in an early recording with La Sonora Matancera, Cuban songstress Celia Cruz belts out a street vendor’s tongue-twister offering candy by the kilo. Los traigo de coco y piña, de limón y miel de abeja. I’ve got coconut and pineapple, lemon and bees’ honey. De piña para las niñas y los de miel…
1. It’s usually a lone figure, backlit so as to seem anonymous and therefore universal, because if we don’t know who a person is, we’re more likely to think it could be us. No one seemed to consider the animosity of strangers or the threat we might associate with the unknown. The people are poised…
Romania, 1983 The curette is a stylus, my mother says as she wraps it gently, the way she wraps strudel, but in white linen and tighter. The stylus, my mother says, is a typewriter. That one we keep in uncle’s house, under floorboards in the pig shack. Uncle is illiterate and a drunk so…
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