Guest editor Nick Flynn selects and introduces a diverse collection of poems, essays, and stories. The issues features everything from Eric Fair's essay Consequence, on being an interrogator at Abu Ghraib, to Major Jackson's list poem, "Why I Write Poetry." A stylistically varied issue featuring several emerging poets like Samuel Amadon and Sophie Klahr, as well as established writers such as Mark Slouka, D. A. Powell, Claudia Rankine, and others.

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning writer Alexander Chee.Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

How much of the human experience can fit into 750 words? A lot, it turns out. Since its founding in 1997, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction has published hundreds of brief nonfiction essays by writers around the world, each within that strict word count. Over the past 20 years, Brevity has become one of the longest-running and most popular online literary publications, a journal readers regularly return to for insightful essays from skilled writers at ever...

A clear voice of her generation, Sierra DeMulder’s writing offers a gritty, sincere perspective on the subtle joys and modern pains of living. Her debut collection The Bones Below delicately carries the reader to a place of brutal, beautiful honesty. DeMulder’s personal revelations complete a touching portrait of the young artist and her fearless exploration of the human experience, bare in its rawest and most tender forms. DeMulder possesses the most important quality a young writer can h...

The eagerly awaited, brilliant, and engaging new poems by Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me*The parade for the slain police officergoes past the bakeryand the smell of fresh breadmakes the mourners salivate against their will.*—from "Note to Reality"Are we corrupt or innocent, fragmented or whole? Are responsibility and freedom irreconcilable? Do we value memory or succumb to our for...

This important and inspiring collection is a sweeping overview of poetry written in New York in the year after the 9/11 attacks . . .This anthology contains poems by forty-five of the most important poets of the day, as well as some of the literary world’s most dynamic young voices, all writing in New York City in the year immediately following the World Trade Center attacks.It was inspired by the editors' observation that after the tragic events of Septemb...

From the creators of Six-Word Memoirs comes The Moment, a collection of personal stories from writers both famous and obscure revealing how a single instant changed their lives forever. An innocuous decision, an unforeseen accident, a chance conversation, a tag sale, a terrorist strike, a tweet . . . sometimes all it takes is a single moment to redirect the course of an entire life. In the tradition of Smith magazine’s Not Quite What I Was Planning and the sensational Six-Word Memoirs on L...

The Romans believed that an artist's inspiration came from a spirit, called a genius, that lived in the walls of the artist's home. This character appears throughout the book, providing charming commentary and biting insight on the young author's creative process and emotional path.

The best of short literary memoirs, essays, and reflections, many of which were written expressly for this collection. Also availableThe late Judith Kitchen, editor of the perennially popular anthologies Short Takes, In Short, and In Brief, was greatly influential in recognizing and establishing flash creative nonfiction as a form in its own right. In Brief Encounters, she and writer/editor/actor Dinah Lenney expand this vibrant field wit...

In her Los Angeles Review of Books essay “Who Is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves,” Dana Levin describes Stacey Waite’s fusion of gender identities: “Pseudonyms, heteronyms, personae, all the ventriloquizing literary arts; point of view and tonal shifts: these are tools for speakers and speaking. But the sentence too has a voice: ‘i will not be the kind of boy who can not bear the memory of her body’ ... This is [Waite’s] genius ... to take innocuous syntactical phrasi...

Widows convey their feelings and survival strategies in this compelling anthologyThe Widows’ Handbook is the first anthology of poems by contemporary widows, many of whom have written their way out of solitude and despair, distilling their strongest feelings into poetry or memoir. This stirring collection celebrates the strategies widows learn and the resources they muster to deal with people, living space, possessions, social life, and especially themselv...

The Spring 2010 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Elizabeth Strout. This issue of Ploughshares features fiction by Richard Bausch, Lisa Cupolo, Mary Gordon, Amy Hempel, Carol Keeley, Marjorie Kemper, Scott Nadelson, Joyce Carol Oates, E. V. Slate, and Kathryn Staley as well as poetry by Amy Beeder, Dan Bellm, Justin Bigos, and others. The volume also includes a profile of Strout, an introduction by Strout, as well as book reviews and more.Table of Contents: