The Spring 2014 issue of Ploughshares, edited by Jean Thompson. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles. 

Acclaimed novelist and short-story writer Jean Thompson (The Year We Left Home) guest-edits this issue of prose and poetry. As she writes in her introduction, "The thing that gives me hope for the enterprise of writing is the incredible variety and vigor of the terrain." With poets ranging from Erin Belieu to the Uruguayan Tatiana Orono, and stories that move from the eerie (Peter Rock's dreamlike story of a mysterious stalker, "Go-Between") to the comic (Elizabeth McCracken's story "Hungry," about an overweight young girl) to the tragic (Dan Chaon's "What Happened to Us," about a family transformed by fostering a disturbed child), Thompson's issue celebrates writers as they “grapple or dance with the world we live in, reflect or distort it, embrace or escape it.” 

The issue also features Jesse Lee Kercheval's Plan B essay about learning to play the accordion ("Welcome to Hell"), and an exploration of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities by John Domini.