The Summer 2016 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles, with the Winter issue staff-edited.This 45th anniversary issue, guest edited by novelist Claire Messud and literary critic James Wood, includes new work from Viet Thanh Nguyen (winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize), Lydia Davis, Carys Davies, an...

The Time Traveller's Almanac is the largest, most definitive collection of time travel stories ever assembled. Gathered into one volume by intrepid chrononauts and world-renowned anthologists Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, here is over a century's worth of literary travels into past and the future. The anthology covers millions of years of Earth's history – from the age of the dinosaurs to strange and fascinating futures, through to the end of Time itself. The Time Traveller's Alman...

Here's a spooky story: Slenderman has been seen around the world for over 2,000 years. This book - dedicated to the authors who tragically and violently lost their lives shortly after writing it - aims to tell you everything you want to know about Slenderman. What does he look like? What are his powers? What is his purpose? All this and more can be found within these very pages. Including excerpts from historical Slenderman documents (such as the 15th century poem that ends with the words ...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry“One of the truly imaginative writers of our time.” —Los Angles Times Book ReviewYou never know what Charles Simic is up to until you reach the end of the line or the bottom of the paragraph. Waiting for you might be a kiss. Or a bludgeon. A smile at the absurdities of society, or a wistful, grim memory of World War II.He puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak hims...

“Rich’s poetry itself is a mirror, reflecting the truths about humanity this discerning poet has come to understand.”—Booklist“Rich is one of the greatest American poets of the past half century . . . attested to both by the extraordinary power of her poems and by the laurels she’s racked up. . . . The events of our blood-dimmed decade have afforded Rich a subject for some of her strongest material.”—Sara Marcus, San Francisco Chronicle

The poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay's lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth, and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth.Aracelis Girmay's debut collection won the Great Lakes Col...

By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias GraceCurious Pursuits is a collection of personal essays, book reviews and articles from the fierce, ingenious mind of Margaret Atwood, ranging from 1970 to the present.Atwood remembers moving to London as a starry-eyed teenager in 1964 and her first attempts at gardening; she discusses feminist utopias in fiction, and writes moving odes on beloved classics like Anne of Green Gables.

Short offers the tradition and glorious present of these popular forms that stretch and defy genre. From 1500 to present, hundreds of pieces. Inventive, entertaining, and addictive.Short prose forms are elusive to define--one writer's prose poem is another's flash fiction or brief essay. Rather than quibble, Short opts for inclusiveness. Here is a dazzling array: 100s of pieces (under 1250 words) from 24 Western countries, written over five centur...

In this posthumous collection from an avant-garde great, Hollo’s spare, sly, lyrical greatness is on display a final time."Someone comes alonggives that tedious old thinga new twist orbreaks its neckthe old questionsdon't change:what do you want me to say?what do you want me to do?"

“Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss. . . . And he is the master of juxtaposition, lining up the unlikeliest of pairings and contrasts as he explores the nexuses of madness and prophecy, hell and paradise, lust and death.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist"As one reads the pithy, wise, occasionally cranky epigrams and vignettes that fill...

Starting in 1995, NPR’s All Things Considered began presenting poets reading their own works. Introduced by “poetry DJ” Catherine Bowman, these popular short segments allowed listeners to experience poetry as a kind of verbal music, recalling its roots as a spoken art form. Word of Mouth, edited by Bowman, brings together the poems that have been featured on NPR, providing a window onto the dynamic contemporary poetry scene. A child playing with flashes of sunligh...

WINNER OF THE 75th GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR POETRYWINNER OF THE 25th TRILLIUM BOOK PRIZEWINNER OF AN ALCUIN AWARD FOR DESIGNSHORTLISTED FOR THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZEThese are poems of critical thought that have been influenced by old fiddle tunes. These are essays that are not out to persuade so much as ruminate, invite, accrue.Hall is a surruralist (rural & surreal), and a terroir-ist (township-specific regionalist). He offers memories of, an...