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….
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
For this fortieth anniversary issue, I invited former guest editors to contribute new work of their own, to nominate and introduce an emerging writer, or to give an account of turning points in their careers. Among the twenty-five who responded, I include here fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and poets. Longtime Ploughshares readers will recognize the…
Not long ago, I met a woman in her eighties in the parking lot of a library in Florida. I had been at the library to give a reading, and one member of the audience waited for me after everyone else had left, despite the brutal, engulfing heat. The stranger was attractive, elegant, and well-dressed,…
It was 1986 and I was staying with my brother in Omdurman close to Khartoum, where the White Nile and the Blue Nile meet. Omdurman was vast, the size of the city, but it was not a city in any way that I recognized. There were no wide streets or squares or municipal buildings, and…
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