Living Rooms Issue

The Fall 1995 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Ann Beattie. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different and personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

This issue of Ploughshares, edited by award-winning author Ann Beattie (The New Yorker Stories), brings together a varied collection of fiction, and is subtitled "Living Rooms." In Beattie's introduction, she states: "I am drawn to stories that are at once on the page and off it, escaping boundaries just as a good photograph does. I look for a double accomplishment, both a bow to the so-called real world (I am tedious with writing students, begging them to include a telephone ringing at an inopportune moment, or a bird flying by the window), as well as a defamiliarization of that world, all achieved by including the detail or details that reverberate, on which the writer has focused his or her lens, in close-up. In short, I expect the world of stories, and I expect them, in some way, to acknowledge the world." Featuring work from Frederick Barthelme, Laura Furman, Tess Gallagher, William Henry Lewis, Steven Rinehart, and Jessica Treadway.