The Fall 2024 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the most innovative 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 2024 Issue, edited by Ladette Randolph, features prose by Andre Dubus III, Gretchen E. Henderson, Benjamin H...

The impetus for literary creation has often been explained as an attempt to transcend the mortality of the human condition through a work addressed to future generations. Failing to obtain literal immortality, or to turn their hope toward the spiritual immortality promised by religious systems, literary creators seek a symbolic form of perpetuity granted to the intellectual side of their person in the memory of those not yet born while they write. In this book, Benjamin Hoffmann illuminate...

First published in French in 1792, Letters Written from the Banks of the Ohio tells the fascinating story of French aristocrat Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia and the utopia he attempted to create in what is now Ohio.Looking to build a perfect society based on what France might have become without the Revolution, Lezay-Marnésia bought more than twenty thousand acres of land along the banks of the Ohio River from the Scioto Company, which promised French aristocrats a fer...

Benjamin Hoffmann’s Posthumous America examines the literary idealization of a lost American past in the works of French writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.For writers such as John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur and Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia, America was never more potent as a driving ideal than in its loss. Examining the paradoxical American paradise depicted in Crèvecœur’s Lettres d’un cultivateur américain (1784); the “uchronotopia”—the im...

Twenty-one gritty, high-caliber crime stories from some of today's greatest authors—"A high-quality anthology. . . . The writing is top-notch" ( Publishers Weekly )."Stunning, shocking, unforgettable. . . . Each contributor has brought his or her 'A' game to the proceedings, and the results will keep you reading one after the other. . . . Vengeance is a collection you wi...

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWSOne of our most renowned and brilliant historians takes a fresh look at the revolutionary intellectual movement that laid the foundation for the modern world.Liberty and equality. Human rights. Freedom of thought and expression. Belief in reason and progress. The value of scientific inquiry. These are just some of the ideas that were conceived and developed during the Enlightenment, and which...

A devious collection of short stories from the master of misdirection, featuring appearances from Lincoln Rhyme and Colter Shaw.Amongst the dead ends …A murder at a crime writers' conference. The method is entirely literary, the motive seems obvious – but can the detective who was first on scene puzzle out what's between the lines?Amongst the misdirections …An intelligence analyst has the chance to get out from behind the d...

**The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.“Robert Darnton has the inquisitiveness of an investigative reporter, the thoroughness of a rigorous scholar, and the sensitivity of a novelist.” —New Republic**When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously ...

A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer and series editor Heidi Pitlor.Andrew Sean Greer, “an exceptionally lovely writer, capable of mingling humor with sharp poignancy” (Washington Post), selects twenty stories out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

Sudhir Hazareesingh's How the French Think is a warm yet incisive exploration of the French intellectual tradition, and its exceptional place in a nation's identity and lifestyleWhy are the French an exceptional nation? Why do they think they are so exceptional? An important reason is that in France intellectual activity is regarded not just as the preserve of the thinking elite but for almost everyone. French thought can sometimes be austere and ...

He's watching. He's waiting. He'll stop at nothing. The second Jack Paris thriller from the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Byrne and Balzano series.Christmas is just around the corner; the season of peace and goodwill.But this year, for Detective Jack Paris, the Christmas spirit is eclipsed by the hunt for a sadistic and twisted serial killer...When an accused murderer is acquitted on a technicality then found dead of an apparent suicide, a spree of brutal murders t...

This book tells nothing less than the story of how the modern, Western view of the world was born. Cultural and intellectual historian Anthony Pagden explains how, and why, the ideal of a universal, global, and cosmopolitan society became such a central part of the Western imagination in the ferment of the Enlightenment - and how these ideas have done battle with an inward-looking, tradition-oriented view of the world ever since. Cosmopolitanism is an ancient creed; but in its modern form ...