Introduction

Introduction

While it is only possible for this Ploughshares transatlantic issue to offer a snapshot of current British and Irish poetry, I have tried to make it as representative as possible. Most of the poets I’ve been able to solicit work from are included in one or other of the three most recent generational anthologies published…

Introduction

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…

Introduction

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….

My Share

It must seem an odd—even disqualifying—admission in an editor, even a guest editor, but I don’t really like to judge fiction, though that hasn’t stopped me doing so for Ploughshares, or in the past (not least each winter when I, along with my colleagues, read several hundred MFA applications). On reflection, my unease is less…

Introduction

Given all of the anxiety about the future of literature in an electronic age, one thing that seems unlikely—despite the fears otherwise—is that as a culture we will stop reading. Rather, we seem to be reading (and writing) more than ever. By some counts, there were over four hundred thousand books published in this country…

Radios

Of late, I have been collecting vintage radios, a distracting hobby that I am mostly ambivalent about in comparison with sincere radio enthusiasts, which explains why I only own a handful. They are scattered throughout my house. The Fisher Model 100 sits regally aged in the living room between the fireplace and my bay window…

Introduction

When you visit the statue of Montaigne in Paris, you find him amidst overgrown greenery, almost sequestered in the bushes across from the Sorbonne, as if preferring, in bronze, the margin he chose in life. The first thing you notice is his shoe. Even at night, when I came upon him, the shoe emerges first,…

Introduction

Grizzly bears, electric bears, fire bears—these three are the most dangerous bears, my three-year-old daughter informs me. I don’t know how she knows what she knows, yet she knows many things. Lately it is all about bears. Electric bears? I ask her. I’ve never seen an electric bear. If you go into his cave, he…