The 50th Anniversary 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 remains prescient in the digital age by providing readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.”Ploughshares showcases the work of “writers who make the shapes they want to mak...

“Prescient and captivating, hilarious and horrifying. A book that enchants and entices and enrages is a rare thing; Patrick Cottrell has once again solidified his prose as knowing, and generous, and vicious, and tender."- Bryan Washington, author of Palaver, National Book Award finalistA darkly funny and profoundly moving new novel by Whiting award-winning author Patrick Cottrell.And who did I think I was, trying...

Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She is accepting a furniture delivery in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen’s adoptive brother is dead.According to the Internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows better: she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for “the abyss.” Helen al...

International institutions constitute the basis of global order. As they struggle to accommodate shifts in power and emerging threats, their legitimacy - their political authority and right to govern - often comes under fire, at times fuelling perceptions of crisis. Yet scholars seldom ask why some institutions are replaced while others are not. Blending theory with history, M. Patrick Cottrell examines some of the world's landmark security institutions, arguing that the possibility of rep...

“Prescient and captivating, hilarious and horrifying. A book that enchants and entices and enrages is a rare thing; Patrick Cottrell has once again solidified his prose as knowing, and generous, and vicious, and tender."- Bryan Washington, author of Palaver, National Book Award finalistA darkly funny and profoundly moving new novel by Whiting award-winning author Patrick Cottrell.And who did I think I was, trying...

first glance, Geniece' s story sounds like that of a typical young woman: she goes to college, has romantic entanglements, builds meaningful friendships, and juggles her schedule with a part-time job. However, she does all of these things in 1960s San Francisco while becoming a militant member of the Black Panther movement. When Huey Newton is jailed in October 1967 and the Panthers explode nationwide, Geniece enters the organization' s dark and dangerous world of guns, FBI agents, freewhe...

With his harrowing debut, Luke Mogelson provides an unsentimental, unflinching glimpse into the lives of those forever changed by war. Subtle links between these ten powerful stories magnify the consequences of combat for both soldiers and civilians, as the violence experienced abroad echoes through their lives in America.Troubled veterans first introduced as criminals in “To the Lake” and “Visitors” are shown later in “New Guidance” and “Kids,” during the deployments that shaped th...

Named by The Washington Post as a Notable Work of Fiction in 2017 and by Entertainment Weekly **as a Best Debut Novel of 2017Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Ann Patchett on PBS NewsHour, Minnesota Public Radio, Maris Kreizman, and The Morning NewsNational Book Foundation “5 Under 35” HonoreeLonglisted for the Aspen Words Literary PrizeA luminous coming-of-age novel about a young female scientist who must r...

From an award-winning playwright “who splits the difference between David Rakoff and Larry David” (New York magazine)—a “compulsively readable debut” (Time Out New York) of big-hearted, laugh-until-you-can’t-breathe essays, stories, and riffs on finding love and intimacy in New York City.Since moving to New York a decade ago, award-winning writer and performer Isaac Oliver has pined for countless strangers on the subway, slept with half the people...

Fans of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go Bernadette and and Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You will delight in Annie Hartnett’s debut, Rabbit Cake, a darkly comic novel about a young girl named Elvis trying to figure out her place in a world without her mother.Twelve-year-old Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the n...

For fans of Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, an inventive, brilliant debut novel about the disappearance of a famous Brazilian novelist and the young translator who turns her life upside down to follow her author's trail.Beatriz Yagoda was once one of Brazil's most celebrated authors. At the age of sixty, she is mostly forgotten-until one summer afternoon when she enters a park in Rio de Janeiro, climbs ...

In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses; extemporizing or drawing on folk tales, he keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes.Following her award-winning book The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father Bee Yang, the song poet, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by American'...