“You couldn’t shoot people for sneering. You could, however, shoot them for burning down stores and bankrupting people. And in fact, if nobody else was going to do it for you, you had to.”Nick Sweeney’s stories haunt the web and print. His books include a lover’s jaunt around Poland in Laikonik Express (Unthank Books, 2011), an opportunist’s wander into the wrong part of Silesia in The Exploding Elephant (Bards and Sages, 2018), and a look at the genocide-surviving denizens of 1960...

Life is not a straight line, but a squiggle. Alex Dante is not quite living the dream as he tends a bar in Madrid, but he knows life could be worse. The right señorita would be perfect, he thinks, but then falls for the wrong one. Optimistic, or foolish, or both. Aided as well as hindered by his strange friend Nuria Hidalgo, Alex refuses to stop chasing dreams that doggedly elude his pursuit. There must be a way to reclaim them, and the endless roads of Spain provide a few pointers; like l...

In A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved, a London nurse narrates the story of a drifter she latches onto in a public hospital. Henri is in permanent recovery, not only from his heroin addiction but from the 1960s, a decade that invited the unwary to the biggest party in history, then discarded them. She is curious about his past life on the C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur with a French countess, hanging out with the Rolling Stones in their exile. Henri dismisses that story; it\u2019s an old one. Inst...

The Fall 2021 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 Fall 2021 Issue of Ploughshares, edited by Ladette Randolph, features nine longform pieces by Leslie Kirk Campbell, Afsh...

Spring 2017 edition of Mystery Tribune Magazine is an exciting collection of the short fiction, essays, book reviews and interviews by some of the best voices in mystery and suspense.The issue features:Stories by Lynne Barrett (Edgar Award Winner), Bill Soldan (Best American Mystery Short Stories 2017), Tai Matsumoto, Teresa Sweeney, Paul Heatley and Nick Kolakowski.Essays by Katharina Hall, Rosemary Johnsen and Elena Avanzas Álvarez (Los Angeles Review of B...