Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
It takes real skill to speed down the packed streets of Zhongguancun, but the singer with the mohawk is handling it like a pro. His asymmetrical spikes are poking the roof of his dad’s sedan, so he’s compensating by tilting his head slightly to the left. We are meeting with a new band to talk…
In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extra-literary passions, and the roads not traveled. My father always wanted me to go into real estate. It was in the family: pioneer land swaps and strategic purchases during the Depression kept the Svobodas solvent. My father would stand at the edge of one…
Reprinted with newly restored content from Issue 11 of Ploughshares, Spring 1977 (guest-edited by Jane Shore and DeWitt Henry) A gray late afternoon in winter. Elizabeth Bishop, dressed casually in a Harvard jersey, welcomes the interviewer and answers his polite questions about a gorgeous gilt mirror on her living room wall. Yes, it is Venetian,…
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…
Homo Fictus…is never conceived as a creature a third of whose time is spent in the darkness. —E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel Strange, how rarely it’s a topic. Yet how we cherish that dark, soothing lake water beneath our chattery reflexive surfaces. “Already,” a story has it, “she seemed to be fishing in…
Reprinted from Issue 3 of Ploughshares, Winter 1972. (guest edited by James Randall) Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1926. He graduated from the Avon School in 1944, served in the last years of World War II, and until 1952 worked at a variety of jobs, ranging from newspaper rewrite man to…
The tribute was held downtown, far away from the theater district. Christine crossed the street gingerly, on four-inch heels thin as pencils—Ivan had always loved women in high heels—and checked the address against the invitation in her purse. The building was new and modern, the front window lettered with Cyrillic characters and a boldface translation:…
Reprinted from Issue 18 of Ploughshares, Fall 1979.? (guest-edited by James Randall) Seamus Heaney has been at Harvard University teaching two writing courses during the Spring semester. The interview took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Michael Mazur’s studio with James Randall and Seamus Heaney seated on a couch, tape recorder between them, and Michael Mazur…
A map unfolds into a world where new poems, new ways of writing them, a new way of living, become possible. My turning points have included the discovery of the city of Istanbul, where I spend a few weeks every year, and my eventual immigration to Ireland, where I now live. With an accent instantly…
No products in the cart.