The Summer 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 Summer 2025 issue, edited by Victor LaValle, features prose by Helen Phillips, Deesha Philyaw, S.A. Cosby, Joanna Pear...

A thief steals the air from a room. Children invent a nursery rhyme to make sense of their fate, and a band of girls rots from the outside in. These characters stumble through joy and murder and confusion, only to survive and wait for the next catastrophe to arrive. Moments so brief and disturbing you can't afford to look away. Jac Jamc's affecting stories mine the territory between what is real and what it means to create understanding.

A wildly over-the-top social satire reimagining the mad misadventures of the iconic royal cousins King Ludwig and Empress Sisi, from the incomparable Jac Jemc.History knows them as King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Elizabeth of Austria, icons of the late nineteenth century who died young and left behind magnificent portraits and palaces. But to each other they were Ludwig and Sisi, cousins whoshared a passion for beauty and a stubborn refusal to submit to the roles impos...

THE GRIP OF IT is a psychologically intense literary horror novel that deals in questions of home: how we make it and how it in turn makes us A chilling literary horror novel, Jac Jemc's THE GRIP OF IT tells the story Julie and James, a young couple haunted by their new home. The move―prompted by James's penchant for gambling, his inability to keep his impulses in check―is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to leave behind their usual haunts and start afresh. But the house,...

Science, birds, Billy the Kid, and lots of feathers surround The Feather Room, Anis Mojgani's follow up to his Pushcart-nominated work, Over the Anvil We Stretch. In The Feather Room, Mojgani further explores storytelling in poetic form while traveling farther down the path of magic realism, endowing his tales with a greater sense of fantasy and brightness. The work recounts loss and heartbreak while discovering lightness and beauty on the other side. Throughout the book, Mojgani opens tre...

How do we reckon our past without being ravaged by it? How do we use people, and their bodies, to express ourselves?

In Willful Creatures Aimee Bender takes us on a journey to a fantastical world in which authentic love blossoms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a family of pumpkin heads embrace their ironhead son and potato-children dotingly follow their mother around as she completes her daily chores. With the mix of charm and keenly felt emotion that characterised her New York Times bestseller The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Bender once agai...

Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry“Kooser documents the dignities, habits and small griefs of daily life, our hunger for connection, our struggle to find balance.”—Poetry"[Kooser] brushes poems over ordinary objects, revealing metaphysical themes that way an investigator dusts for fingerprints. His language is so controlled and convincing that one can't help but feel significant truths behind his lines." —The Philadelphia Inquirer"Del...

Ted Kooser sees a writer’s workbooks as the stepping-stones on which a poet makes his way across the stream of experience toward a poem. Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, what’s jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life.Kooser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. The Wheeling Year offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and...

"Young has always stood out for his sharp humor, boundless poetic energy, and sheer readability. If adventurous poetry can sometimes feel like a tenuous tightrope walk, Young's poems feel more like zip lines."-The Boston Globe"This book reads like a long, breathless thank-you for life's seemingly random jumble of beauty, strangeness, tenderness, and joy."-Los Angeles TimesFall Higher is a major collection by one of America's most inventive and ent...

"Reading Michael [Dickman] is like stepping out of an overheated apartment building to be met, unexpectedly, by an exhilaratingly chill gust of wind."-The New Yorker"These are lithe, seemingly effortless poems, poems whose strange affective power remains even after several readings."-The Believer"My master plan is happiness," writes Michael Dickman in his wonderfully strange third book, Green Migraine. Here, imagination and reality swirl in the ju...

A daughter's narrative about life with and without her father, whose death plunges her into deep grief but gradually becomes her most compelling reason to hope.Like so many Christian women, Rebecca, her mother, and her two sisters love a man who does not walk beside them in faith. As his cancer returns after a year of remission, they face his last days. As the women in his life struggle to savor their final times together and let go, he finally reaches out to God, ...