The Summer 2023 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 Summer 2023 Issue, guest-edited by Tom Perrotta, features prose by Marianne Leone, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Andre Dubus III...

Thurgood Marshall said that the more people learned about the death penalty, the more they'd be against it. It's racist, unfair to poor people and the mentally retarded, and far too often ends horribly in the state sanctioned murder of innocents. And no one, no matter how much they're paid, likes to be involved with death itself. In Machinery of Death , death penalty lawyer David R. Dow and writer Mark Dow bring together diverse views from lawyers, wardens, victims' families, executioners ...

**#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING MICHAEL B. JORDAN AND JAMIE FOXX • A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice—from one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time.“[Bryan Stevenson’s] dedication to fighting for justice and equality has inspired me and many others and made a lasting impact on our country.”—John LegendNAMED ONE OF THE MOST ...

The #1 New York Times -bestselling legal thriller writer delivers "the most convincing, levelheaded analysis of [the death penalty] I have encountered" ( The Washington Post ).Scott Turow is known to millions as the author of peerless novels about the troubling regions of experience where law and reality intersect. In "real life," as a respected criminal lawyer, he has been involv...

**New York Times BestsellerNew York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice"An essential and groundbreaking text in the effort to understand how American criminal justice went so badly awry." —Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me**In A Colony in a Nation, New York Times best-selling author and Emmy Award–winning news anchor Chris Hayes upends the national conversation on policing and democracy. Drawing on wide-ra...

A vivid history of America's biggest, baddest prison system and how it came to lead the nation's punitive revolutionIn the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. The most locked-down state in the nation has led the way in criminal justice severity, from assembly-line executions to isolation supermaxes, from prison privatization to sentencing juveniles as adults. Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the pres...

The first full-scale biography of the Supreme Court's most provocative—and influential—justiceIf the U.S. Supreme Court teaches us anything, it is that almost everything is open to interpretation. Almost. But what's inarguable is that, while the Court has witnessed a succession of larger-than-life jurists in its two-hundred-year-plus history, it has never seen the likes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.Combative yet captivating, infuriating yet charmin...

A provocative history that reveals how guns—not abortion, race, or religion—are at the heart of America's cultural divide.Gunfight is a timely work examining America’s four-centuries-long political battle over gun control and the right to bear arms. In this definitive and provocative history, Adam Winkler reveals how guns—not abortion, race, or religion—are at the heart of America’s cultural divide. Using the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. ...

From the author of the national bestseller Dead Man Walking comes a brave and fiercely argued new book that tests the moral edge of the debate on capital punishment: What if we’re executing innocent men? Two cases in point are Dobie Gillis Williams, an indigent black man with an IQ of 65, and Joseph Roger O’Dell. Both were convicted of murder on flimsy evidence (O’Dell’s principal accuser was a jailhouse informant who later recanted his testimony). Both were executed in spite of n...

Can the police strip-search a woman who has been arrested for a minor traffic violation? Can a magazine publish an embarrassing photo of you without your permission? Does your boss have the right to read your email? Can a company monitor its employees' off-the-job lifestyles--and fire those who drink, smoke, or live with a partner of the same sex? Although the word privacy does not appear in the Constitution, most of us believe that we have an inalienable right to be left alone. Yet in are...

When news breaks that a convicted murderer, released from prison, has killed again, or that an innocent person has escaped the death chamber in light of new DNA evidence, arguments about capital punishment inevitably heat up. Few controversies continue to stir as much emotion as this one, and public confusion is often the result. This volume brings together seven experts--judges, lawyers, prosecutors, and philosophers--to debate the death penalty in a spirit of open inquiry and civil discu...

Mormon Taliban explores the Mormon Taliban paradigm of Utah. It unabashedly exposes the legal, political and religious influence of Utah's oligarchy. Its pages are rife with controversy, corruption, and the undercurrent of hidden agenda that has become the bread and butter of Utah's governing policies.