A lot can happen on the way from one place to another, especially when an overnight flight makes for an unexpected romantic encounter between strangers seated together; a trucker finds life beyond the ranch where he grew up; and a bored Midwestern housewife tries to escape Kansas City.This anthology of tales about people in transit features Stuart Dybek's "Pet Milk", read by Keith Szarabajka; Martha Gellhorn's "Miami-New York", read by Joanna Gleason; Edward P. Jones' "An Orange Li...

'One of the most soulful writers in America, and a national treasure' George SaundersNineteen tales of growing up, wising up, and falling in love, spanning more than three decades of prize-winning work by a North American master of the short storyThe Start of Something is a visionary work following the lovelorn beatniks, hard-boiled gangsters and jaded academics of America, journeying through a haze of drugs, dreams and lucid memory. Seduc...

In a city like that one might sailthrough life led by a runaway hat.The young scattered in whatever directionstheir wild hair pointed and, gustinginto one another, they fell in love.--from "Windy City"In his second book of poems, Stuart Dybek finds extraordinary vitality in the same vibrant imagery that animates his celebrated works of fiction. A b...

The Spring 2025 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 Spring 2025 Issue, edited by Peggy Schumaker, features poetry and prose by Naomi Shihab Nye, Felicia Zamora, Tim Seibl...

In Stuart Dybek's Chicago, wonder lurks in unexpected places—in garbage-strewn alleys, gloomy basement apartments, abandoned rooms at the top of rickety stairs periodically rumbled by passing el trains. Transformed through the wide eyes of Dybek's adolescent heroes, these grimy urban backwaters become exotic landscapes of fear-filled possibility, of dreams not yet turned to nightmares. Chronicling what happens when Old World faith meets the dark side of the American dream, Dybek's poignant...

This collection gathers together the works by William Shakespeare in a single, convenient, high quality, and extremely low priced Kindle volume! It comes with 150 original illustrations which are the engravings John Boydell commissioned for his Boydell Shakespeare Gallery This book contains now several HTML tables of contents that will make reading a real pleasure! The Comedies of William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream All's Well That Ends Well As You Like It Love's Labour 's Lost M...

"A truly moving book." —John AshberyJana Prikryl’s The After Party journeys across borders and eras, from cold war Central Europe to present-day New York City,from ancient Rome to New World suburbs, constantly testing the lingua francas we negotiate to know ourselves. These poems disclose the tensions in our inherited identities and showcase Prikryl’s ambitiousexperimentation with style.“Thirty Thousand Islands,” the second half of the collection,presents some fort...

This collection of Wendell Berry poems and essays—written outdoors on the Sabbath—“[shines] with the gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of life” (Christian Science Monitor)More than 35 years ago, Wendell Berry began spending his sabbaths outdoors, when the weather allowed, walking and wandering around familiar territory, seeking a deep intimacy only time could provide. These walks sometimes yiel...

Buoyancy Control, the latest collection of poems from Vancouverite Adrienne Gruber, presents a fascinating culmination of land and sea, mind and body, in linguistic form. Metaphors of oceans, lakes, and other bodies of water (as well as the creatures that inhabit those spaces), swim and swirl their way through Gruber's languid poems, which are divided into two evocative sections that explore themes of sexuality, sexual identity, and queerness, while confronting the feelings of los...

Nothing More to Lose is the first collection of poems by Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish to appear in English. Hailed across the Arab world and beyond, Darwish’s poetry walks the razor’s edge between despair and resistance, between dark humor and harsh political realities. With incisive imagery and passionate lyricism, Darwish confronts themes of equality and justice while offering a radical, more inclusive, rewriting of what it means to be both Arab and Palestinian living in Jeru...

D. Nurkse’s Burnt Island explores tragedy both grand and intimate, in city and country, in our own troubled moment and across the greater scope of geological time. Arranged in three “suites” of lucid, often heart-wrenching verse, the book begins with a city under siege, in a group of poems that becomes a subtle homage to New York after 9/11–a metaphorical “burnt island,” where diggers doze on their shovels, citizens contribute bottles of water, M&M’s, and casseroles to recovery ef...

Slope of the Child Everlasting sustains the lyric and imagistic sensibility of Laurie Kutchins’ previous poetry collection, The Night Path (BOA Editions, 1997), while expanding on its exploration of the archetypes that anchor the heart and mind of her poetry. The characters in these poems evoke chaos and regression, as well as song, wonder, and the tenacity of the imagination.Laurie Kutchins is an associate professor of English at James Madison Un...