The Boston Strangler—immortalized in popular culture including the 1960s' one-hit wonder "Dirty Water"—might yet live on in another, even more sinister form. In Covid times anyone might be a masked criminal but this one's disguise, you could say, is their lack of disguise. Such villains have always been among us.

In this provocative book, Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, the most outspoken critic of the civil-rights establishment in America today, lays bare its corrupt leadership, courageously taking aim at the bigest names?Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, among others?claiming they are nothing more than scam artists profiting off the hatred and disorder they foster in the black community. Peterson insists it's time to throw off the oppression of the established black leadership ...

After a tragic loss, an American woman investigates her birth family in Paris: "The novel's twists and turns are wonderfully unexpected" (Emma Straub, author of Modern Lovers).In her early forties, Emma has recently lost her husband and daughter to a tragic auto accident. When her elderly aunt visits her Indiana home to provide comfort, and instead blurts out the news that Emma was adopted, a new kind of shock sets in.Soon, a still-mourning Emma fi...

Between 2009 and 2011, as I was opening a new practice, I evaluated 1000 new patients, as counted by my secretary. I changed approximately 250 of these patients from antidepressants to drugs for mania (lower dose than usual mania.) Some of them had been on antidepressants for many years with no relief. Their diagnosis, mixed mania, presents as depression but a careful history reveals that their mind has been racing and that they cannot fall asleep for about four hours each night.Ge...

The Winter 2023-24 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 2023-24 Issue, edited by Ladette Randolph, features poetry and prose by Richard Bausch, Jesse Lee Kercheval,...

In Jesse Lee Kercheval’s sixth collection, I Want to Tell You, her searching, incantatory poems speak directly and forcefully to the reader in a voice that is by turns angry, elegiac, wry, or witty but always sharply alive. Crossing through the bewildering territory of grief, Kercheval argues with god and the universe about the deaths of people she loves. She also writes movingly about the complications of family life and love, the messy puzzle of life itself.SAY T...

Jesse Lee Kercheval writes with wit, vivid language, and devastating honesty in these autobiographical poems. Tracing the timelines of her life forward and backward, she offers a moving examination of the role of family and the possible/probable/hoped for existence of God—and how our perceptions of the divine can be transformed from a kindergartner’s dyslexically scrawled "doG loves U" to the ever-present but oft-ignored Dog Angel of the title. Ranging from a cross-country drive to bury he...

The concluding volume in the humorous punk rock adventure that began with The Unnoticeables and The Empty Ones.After the events of the first two books of the Vicious Circle series, Carey and Randall reached LA during the early ‘80s punk scene, which was heavily mixed up with Chinatown. A young Chinese girl with silver hair is the Empty One that seems to run things there, and her ex-lover, an Empty One named Zang, has apparently turned against them...

Inspired by a tragic true event in his past, Allan Wolf examines the circumstances of one boy’s inexplicable murder and the fateful summer leading up to it.Everybody likes Chris Goodman. Sure, he’s a little odd. He wears those funny bell-bottoms and he really likes the word ennui and he shakes your hand when he meets you, but he’s also the kind of guy who’s always up for a good time, always happy to lend a hand. Everybody likes Chris Goodman, which makes it especia...

"Each short story is unique, carefully crafted, and memorable. A fun read from cover to cover." – MIDWEST BOOK REVIEWDesperados and yellow-bellies be warned: These ain't your typical westerns…Herein find legendary masters of anomalous Western and Horror stories—along with a posse of budding word-slingers—who all bring you an electrifying and frightening collection of extraordinary tales set in the Old West and beyond...

From bestselling author Chuck Grossart comes a genre-bending psychological thriller that explores the limits of reality and the dizzying destruction of consciousness.Brody Quail is a man without dreams…but he’s beginning to live a nightmare. He exists in four different lives, in four simultaneous identities: happy young boy, lovelorn teenager, damaged young man, and a pitiable middle-aged loner. He lives blissfully unaware of his divided nature until a series of in...

In raw, poignant alternating first-person narratives, interspersed with e-mails, gay chat-room exchanges, and other fragments of a youth laid bare in the age of social media, The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves unravels the mystery of a life in all its glory: despair and regret, humor and wonder, courage and connection.A heartbroken and humiliated Ricky Graves took the life of a classmate and himself. Five months later, the sleepy community is still in shock ...