The Winter 2020-21 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 Winter 2020-21 Issue, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph and Poetry Editor John Skoyles, features poetry an...

Other Girls to Burn is a collection of essays that explores the relationship between women and violence within such contexts as the 2014 Isla Vista shooting, early Christian virgin martyrs (discussed in relation with modern true crime stories), mixed martial arts, and rape culture. Formally inventive and lyric leaning, these essays shift between cultural criticism and personal essay and cohere around a central motif of female mystics. With them, Caroline Crew asks, What does it me...

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and familyMaggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexualit...

A timely, powerful collection of essays from one of our sharpest minds and most sparkling stylists.How much joy can a person tolerate? How many kinds of boredom make up a life? Who owns the story of black America? Should Justin Bieber be more like Socrates? And why is there a dead art collector floating in the swimming pool?Dazzlingly insightful, explosively funny and ever-timely, Zadie Smith is back with a second unmissable collection of essays. From German...

A frequent contributor to the New York Times magazine, Outside, Salon, and GQ, and a regular on Public Radio International's "This American Life,"David Rakoff's debut collection of essays is simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny and take-your-breath-away poignant.David Rakoff is a fish out of water. Whether he finds himself on assignment climbing Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire — donning a pair of Timberlands for his trek, only to realize with hor...

A Kirkus Reviews “Best Book of the Year”This “witty, engaging analysis” of female monsters in pop culture offers “provocative and incisive” commentary on society’s fear of female rage and power (Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her).Women have always been seen as monsters. Men from Aristotle to Freud have insisted that women are freakish creatures, capable of immense destruction.Maybe they are. And maybe that...

The first graphic novel—a mesmerizing fictional chronicle of a universal American experience.Through a quartet of four interwoven stories, A Contract With God express the joy, exuberance, tragedy, and drama of life on the mythical Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx. This is the legendary book that launched a new art form and reaffirmed Will Eisner as one of the great pioneers of American graphics.

"[A] deliciously dry, moody essay collection" about America's obsession with violence against women is "a lyrical meditation" (Carina Chocano, New York Times Book Review).In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks, Britney Spears, and Serial, illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Anna Quindlen presents a “swift and compelling paean to the joys of books” (Booklist).“Like the columns she used to write for the New York Times, [How Reading Changed My Life] is tart, smart, full of quirky insights, lapidary, and a pleasure to read.”—Publishers Weekly“Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. . . . Yet of all the many things in w...

The instant New York Times bestselling book of entertaining, irreverent, and totally accessible illustrated answers to the scientific “questions you had no idea were bugging you all your life” (Fast Company), from the creators of the wildly popular YouTube channel AsapSCIENCE.Why do we get hung over? What would happen if you stopped sleeping? Is binge-watching TV actually bad for you? Why should I take a power nap? In their first-ever book, Mitche...

In this road map to restoring feminine sexual power, Betsy Prioleau introduces and analyzes the stories and stratagems of history's greatest seductresses. These are the women who ravished the world—from such classic figures as Cleopatra and Mae West to such lesser-known women as the infamous Violet Gordon Woodhouse, who lived in a ménage with four men. Smarts, imagination, courage, and killer charm helped these love maestras claim the men of their choice and keep them fascinated for life. ...

A collection of the year's best essays selected by André Aciman, author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name."An essay is the child of uncertainty," André Aciman contends in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2020. "The struggle to write what one hopes is entirely true, and the long incubation every piece of writing requires of a writer who is thinking difficult thoughts, are what ultimately give the writing its depth, its ma...