The Fall 1999 fiction issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Charles Baxter. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different and personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

Award-winning author Charles Baxter (The Feast of Love, First Light) compiles this fiction issue of Ploughshares. While Baxter admits to being easily distracted, in these short stories he sees elements suspended, so profound that they remain even after several readings. In his introduction he states: "What is profound or psychically consequential often allows its pivotal elements a kind of suspension in the midst of an onward narrative flow, and each one of these stories has that power to suspend itself, like a trapeze artist who flies off into the air and somehow, despite the forces of gravity (and of time), manages to stay transfixed, by us, above the net." Featuring work by Peter Ho Davies, Doug Dorst, James Morrison, Antonya Nelson, Stewart O'Nan, Elwood Reid, and Joan Silber.