The rediscovered second novel from National Book Critics Circle Award-winning writer Joan Silber—a wry, exquisitely told story of self-invention in 1920s New YorkLike all young people who move to Manhattan from elsewhere, Pauline sees her arrival in the city as an escape from the provincial entrapments of home. She seeks something more than her quiet life with her rough-mannered family in bucolic Newark, New Jersey: a frugal but free-wheeling existence among the ar...

A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEARWhen a man discovers his father in New York has long had another, secret, family—a wife and two kids—the interlocking fates of both families lead to surprise loyalties, love triangles, and a reservoir of inner strength in this "expansive and elegantly crafted novel" (Fresh Air, NPR)."Rich with the complexities of life . . . the stories create a world made fully dimensional through chan...

Shortlisted for the National Book Award: "Joan Silber writes with wisdom, humor, grace, and wry intelligence. Her characters bear welcome news of how we will survive."—Andrea BarrettIntense in subject yet restrained in tone, these stories are about longings—often held for years—and the ways in which sex and religion can become parallel forms of dedication and comfort. Though the stories stand alone, a minor element in one becomes major in the next. In "My Shape", a...

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award"Unqualified praise goes to this rarity: an extraordinary novel about ordinary people." — Chicago TribuneThe year is 1940, and Rhoda Taber is pregnant with her first child. Satisfied with her comfortable house in a New Jersey suburb and her reliable husband, Leonard, she expects that her life will be predictable and secure. Surprised by an untimely death, an unexpected illness, and the contrary natures of her two dau...

Love and family loyalty meet up with the allure of far-off vistas in elegant new fiction by an acclaimed novelist.A richly imagined novel—set in wartime Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Sicily, and contemporary America—about men and women whose jolting encounters with the unfamiliar force them to realize how many "riffs there are to being human." Travelers, colonials, immigrants, and returned ex-pats meet or pass one another in narratives spanning lifetimes.In the book's...

Longlisted for the National Book Award"'Linked' doesn't begin to describe the complex web Silber has woven…Emotionally, it's astounding…[A] beautiful, intricate, and wise collection." — New York Times Book ReviewWhen is it wise to be a fool for something? What makes people want to be better than they are? From New York to India to Paris, from the Catholic Worker movement to Occupy Wall Street, the characters in Joan Silber's dazzling new story cycle...

The national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book about a young single mother living in New York, her eccentric aunt, and the decisions they make that have unexpected implications for the world around them from one of America's most gifted writers of fiction, "our own country's Alice Munro" (The Washington Post).Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn’t perfect, yet as she visits him throughout his three–month stint at Rikers Island, thei...

The Winter 2024-25 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.”The Winter 2024-25 Issue, edited by John Skoyles, features poetry and prose by Joan Silber, Timothy Liu, Pádraig Ó Tuam...

Fiction imagines for us a stopping point from which life can be seen as intelligible," asserts Joan Silber in The Art of Time in Fiction. The end point of a story determines its meaning, and one of the main tasks a writer faces is to define the duration of a plot. Silber uses wide-ranging examples from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chinua Achebe, and Arundhati Roy, among others, to illustrate five key ways in which time unfolds in fiction. In clear-eyed prose, Silber elucidates a tricky bu...

**Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates PrizeA rich and nuanced story beginning with a moment of fear and abandonment that will reverberate across decades and change the course of many lives, by a beloved PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author**In the gritty East Village of 1970s New York, Ivan and his best friend, Eddie, a popular local bartender, are dabbling in drugs following a short tour of Europe. One night, as Ivan and Eddie experiment with...

"A love story of our time." —Ha Jin, author of The Boat RockerOnce upon a very recent time in New York City, there was a couple, two ordinary single people who met the way city people meet. Even though mismatched, they fell in love. And after some hesitations they decided, finally, to marry-only to look up and find their world caving in around them.Sexy, vivacious Elisa, of the miniskirts and tiny T-shirts, still in art school and just coming off a...

On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction...