Showing results for "lamie eric"

The Fall 2025 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 2025 issue features longform prose by Juliana Lamy, Eric McMil...

“Short stories can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values,” writes guest editor Celeste Ng. “In a time when our values are being tested daily, it’s hard to think of anything more important.” The Best American Short Stories 2025 resonates precisely at this pitch: twenty pieces that upend expectations and test the foundation of our beliefs. From a bereaved medical actress obsessed with a student in her rotation to a mysterious sickness that ignites a leth...

“The essay has taught me how to live,” writes Jia Tolentino, this year’s Best American Essays guest editor. In a time of escalating authoritarianism and disinformation, we turn to artists and writers to make sense of the world around us. The twenty-one authors featured in this collection do not proselytize, nor do they claim to have all the answers. Instead, they teach with vulnerability, raw truths, and open questions. This volume offers testimonies and personal narratives about ...

The prestigious annual story anthology, featuring prize-winning stories by a diverse and exciting array of writers, including Wendell Berry, Alice Hoffman, Dave Eggers, Ling Ma, Lori Ostlund, and Anthony Marra.Continuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence, this year's edition contains twenty prizewinning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. Guest editor Edward P. Jones has brought his own refresh...

Of science fiction and fantasy, guest editor Nnedi Okorafor writes, “There are times when it feels like a box, but within it, technically, you can expect anything.” The twenty stories in this collection simultaneously fulfill and defy expectations of genre, showcasing boundary-pushing authors at their best. In this year’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, a robot will struggle to make friends, a team of auditors determines the financial value of a lifetime, an alien speci...

“While a single sentence can turn a novel, a single word can turn a short story,” writes guest editor Don Winslow. The pieces featured in this collection hinge on those small, exacting moments that shock, spook, delight, and change a story entirely. A disgraced ex-cop approaches a crossroads with his ex-wife and new neighbor, pistol in hand; an ill-advised acid trip reveals the dark side of a twisted friendship; a hardened hit man struggles with his latest target. Full of dramatic...

“These stories remind us that food is not just fuel, nor is travel just movement,” writes Bryant Terry in his introduction. “They are acts of remembrance, resistance, and connection.” The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2025 embodies this wisdom, offering an incredible range of stories that refine and revitalize our relationship to taste, place, and the narratives that we build around them. From tracing the history and endurance of heirloom Laotian rice to investigating how ...

“The best science and nature writing—which these stories represent—reminds us of the wide world and our connection to it, and the multitude of ways we make our place in it,” writes Susan Orlean in her introduction. This year’s collection masterfully guides us through exotic locations and groundbreaking research, leading us to consider complex and utterly fascinating questions about the world. How does it feel to camp in one of the hottest places on Earth? Is the ability to recognize and re...

Longlisted for The Story PrizeFrom the acclaimed author of Beasts of a Little Land and City of Night Birds, an exquisite, globetrotting story collection about humans in precarious balance with the natural worldSpanning multiple locales and epochs, and rendered in fine detail and vivid color, this transportive collection shows what it means to live as human inhabitants on our one miraculous planet. Lyrical, at times hilario...

A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, author of Matrix and The Vaster Wilds, and series editor Heidi Pitlor.“There have never been as many exquisitely built stories in existence than there are now,” proclaims guest editor Lauren Groff in her introduction. This abundance led to a volume of robust stories with the nerve to push against narrative expectations. The Best American Shor...

Featuring multiple narrators, each story is brought vivdly to life.Desire. Longing. Tenderness. Passion. In this year’s volume, love lies at the heart of the stories that guest editor Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “so good that they may be bad for you”: a sixteen-year-old moves into town and effortlessly falls in love with a classmate who he knows he must abandon; a grandmother stitches together the hurts of her past when she connects with her granddaughter in the presen...

One of the finest and most influential horror writers of the twentieth century, Richard Matheson has left his stamp on the collective imagination. Here are more than twenty of Matheson's most memorable tales of fear and paranoia, personally selected by the author himself. Many of these stories have already entered into popular culture, including the title story, which became a landmark episode of The Twilight Zone, and "Duel," the nail-biting tale of man versus machines that inspi...