From a writer and producer of HBO's acclaimed apocalyptic drama series The Leftovers comes a compelling story of young love and old secrets.Ben Hanson's aimless life has bottomed out after a series of bad decisions, but an unexpected offer from his father draws him home to Wisconsin. There, he finds his family fractured, still reeling from his cousin's mysterious death a decade earlier.Lauren Sheehan abandoned her career in medicine after a series ...

A VINTAGE ORIGINALIn this hilarious and wildly inventive debut, including a title story that was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Patrick Somerville charts the dangerous territories of adolescence and adulthood for the American male.In “Puberty,” Brandon takes the matter of his reticent hormones into his own hands. In “English Cousin,” Terry’s enigmatic relative arrives, looking to learn about love, stateside. And in “The Future, the Future, the Future,” D...

Early one summer morning, Matthew Bishop kisses his still-sleeping wife Marissa, gets dressed and eases his truck through Milwaukee, bound for the highway. His wife, pregnant with their first child, has asked him to find the antique cradle taken years before by her mother Caroline when she abandoned Marissa, never to contact her daughter again. Soon to be a mother herself, Marissa now dreams of nothing else but bringing her baby home to the cradle she herself slept in. His wife does not kn...

From award-winning novelist Patrick Somerville comes this genre-busting novel-in-stories that leaps between small-town suburbs and the outer reaches of outer-space. A cast of outcasts—including the world's angriest mercenary, a sad surrealist, and a messianic alcoholic lawyer—bind together in this surprisingly warm exploration of love and identity in the post-millennial world.

The Summer 2023 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 Summer 2023 Issue, guest-edited by Tom Perrotta, features prose by Marianne Leone, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Andre Dubus III...

From a writer and producer of HBO's acclaimed apocalyptic drama series The Leftovers comes a compelling story of young love and old secrets.Ben Hanson's aimless life has bottomed out after a series of bad decisions, but an unexpected offer from his father draws him home to Wisconsin. There, he finds his family fractured, still reeling from his cousin's mysterious death a decade earlier.Lauren Sheehan abandoned her career in medicine after a series ...

Elizabeth Strout “animates the ordinary with an astonishing force,” wrote The New Yorker on the publication of her Pulitzer Prize–winning Olive Kitteridge. The San Francisco Chronicle praised Strout’s “magnificent gift for humanizing characters.” Now the acclaimed author returns with a stunning novel as powerful and moving as any work in contemporary literature.Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Bur...

A glorious, sweeping novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed*.*In The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure, and discovery. Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Wh...

A New York Times BestsellerAn Economist Book of the YearCosta Book Award Winner for BiographyGalaxy National Book Award Winner (New Writer of the Year Award)Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots—which are then sold, collected, and handed on—he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings,...

A critically acclaimed, award-winning author, Alix Ohlin pens a masterpiece of emotional complexity with Inside. In this literary tour de force, a therapist named Grace attempts to help a man recover from his failed suicide attempt. Meanwhile, Grace's teen patient Annie runs away from home to reinvent herself in New York, and Grace's ex-husband leaves the comfort of a successful relationship to attempt to help native peoples in the bleak Arctic. ''A skillful storyteller attractively quick-...

I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ.Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.” As her family lay dying, little Libby fled their tiny farmhouse into the freezing January snow. She lost some fingers and toes, but she survived–and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, Ben sits in prison, and troubled Libby lives off the dregs of a trust created b...

Private investigator Cormoran Strike must track down a missing writer -- and a sinister killer bent on destruction -- in this "wonderfully entertaining" mystery (Harlan Coben, New York Times Book Review) that inspired the acclaimed HBO Max series C.B. Strike.When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days -- as he has don...