Drifting Out to Infinity

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."

Available now are nine new Ploughshares Solos, longform stories and essays also collected in our annual fall issue. Edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph, the Fall 2019 collection of Solos features new longform work by Andrea Barrett, Kiley Reid, Lex Williford, and Tracy Daugherty, as well as Ian Stansel, Nancy Mays, Danielle Spencer, Christopher Peacock, and Susan Neville. The stories and essays in our longform issue are also available for individual purchase as e-books.

Read "Drifting Out to Infinity" by Danielle Spencer:

"There is a distinctive cool cinderblock smell to math departments everywhere. Conference posters fluttering on the office doors, the glossy canary-yellow spines of Springer textbooks. A red-bearded man in black socks and sandals walks amiably down the hall carrying a cup of coffee and a pad of paper, a one-armed wristwatch pinned to his breast pocket. I am six years old, and the daylight from the window at the end of the hall next to my father's office casts a cloudy oblong reflection down its length. Inside, my clay stegosaurus stands diffidently atop his gray metal filing cabinet. Looking up at the smudged blackboard, the most insistent chirping chalk equations are boxed, marked do not erase."

Dettagli