No disease has upended life more in the past fifty years than COVID-19. As the pandemic unfolded, coeditors Christine Crudo Blackburn and Gerald W. Parker saw how many areas of society are impacted and how those impacts can ripple through to other sectors.Seeking to provide both warnings of these vulnerabilities and direction for future efforts to address them, Blackburn and Parker have assembled a cross-disciplinary, multinational team of researchers and writers to provide a criti...

Nora Ephron meets The Hangover in this screwball romantic comedy and family drama with a big, beating heart, set in the sun-bleached neon of Las Vegas.Kurt Richter has been in love with Eugenie Zepp since he was eight years old. Now he’s in his fifties, twice divorced, a father of four. The entire neighborhood is suing him, and he’s been estranged from Eugenie for a decade.In other words: perfect timing to declare himself ...

The Summer 2018 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year’s four issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles; the Fall and Winter issues are staff-edited.As guest-editor Jill McCorkle writes in her introduction, “Some of the most satisfying moments in fiction are those where I might gasp with shock or surprise only to immediately see that I should have known, that in...

Teacher attrition and burnout have been researched in school districts all over the country for several decades. Characterised by physical and psychological exhaustion, cynicism (as an interpersonal and emotional indication of built-up aggression), and a sense of helplessness and low self-efficacy, burnout can lead to anxiety, depression, diminished job performance, absenteeism, and attrition.Drawn to the Flame investigates incidences of burnout and burnout avoidance among...

For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, feats of science and reason. Among the Romantics, however, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life, the source of compassion in human society. A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that propels them consequently surfaced in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature. Roman...