Solos | Ploughshares

When the Khourys and McKissicks meet to share a neighborly meal, an adventure begins. Living in the changing ethnic landscape of Kansas City, one is a family of Syrian immigrants; the other, African Americans with roots in Louisiana. What brings them together is a love of food. Along with friendship, a dream takes root between the two mothers, Miriam and Tamara—starting a new restaurant that will feature the specialties from both of their traditions, the Café Deux Mondes, or Two Worlds Cafe.

When Robert Howard is assigned James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in his Catholic high school, his teacher, a Jesuit priest, announces, "Other people may read about it, but you are LIVING it!" As promised, the young Howard, growing up in 1970s Detroit, feels an intense identification with the protagonist of Joyce's first novel, Stephen Dedalus.

Leaving behind her strict Mennonite upbringing, Kathryn has moved west. America has just won victory in Japan, and a charming older man begins visiting the diner where Kathryn works, taking her out dancing and around town. With her old soldier boyfriends now scattered, and the country flush with postwar happiness, Kathryn takes a chance on her mysterious admirer and moves to Los Angeles with him. But how much does she really know about this new man?

In this meditative and flavorful essay, Alexandra Johnson visits Viggiano and the large, extended Italian family that would have been her own—had she married the youngest son, Giorgio, her old boyfriend. Now married to another man, she returns to the house to help Giorgio improve his English as he thinks about leaving southern Italy and its struggling economy behind.

Fleeing a turbulent Guatemala with her missionary parents, Penny returns to America and is forced to deal with a fresh kind of trauma: summer Bible camp for Mennonite teens. Along with her outspoken and rebellious friend, Gina, Penny struggles to deal with her past, the camp's fierce regulations, and the sexual energy that electrifies the air between the campers, counselors, and even visitors.

Young and naive, Kathleen Hill moves to newly independent Nigeria with her husband to teach at Igbobi College. It is the early 1960s, and Hill is soon caught up in the swirl of the times: the legacy of colonialism, chaos back in America, and violence and racism across the globe that touch even the quiet school where she teaches English literature.

Living under the shadow of two gifted parents, Astrid Nordling feels trapped everywhere but at the piano, finding solace in Schubert and Debussy. Her piano teacher is convinced that she is a prodigy; her mother is not so sure. Set in 1960s Chicago, this excerpt from Lisa Heiserman Perkins' upcoming novel shows that there can be such a thing as too much talent in a single family.

As the Second World War rages in Europe, two undergraduates in Tennessee work a summer job for a celebrated poetry professor, W. T. Harlan, as he supervises the clearing of a ravine to make a garden. At their side is a German POW, watched by military guard, who has been sent to help them with their task. 

Sophie Forrest writes horror stories because she sees faces in the walls; men with their heads in their laps materialize in front of her when she's trying to enjoy her cafe creme; her former lover is marrying someone else amid oyster brunches and tennis matches. 

When Tara Marconi leaves South Philadelphia on a whim to travel to Alaska for a job in a salmon hatchery, she quickly learns the cardinal rule on Baranof Island: "Work longer and harder than the person, usually male, beside you. And you'll do fine." Eager to prove herself, Tara works her way up at a cannery, studies subsistence with a native Tlingit hunter and gatherer, and earns a job on a boat crew. One by one, she finds that all of them want more from her than she is willing to give.