Ploughshares Fall 2003 Guest-Edited by Alice Hoffman

by Alice Hoffman (Editor), Elizabeth Berg, Gregory Maguire, Grace Paley, Jayne Anne Phillips

Overview

The Fall 2003 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Alice Hoffman. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

Guest-edited by Alice Hoffman, author of Practical Magic, The Dovekeepers, and many other acclaimed works of fiction, this all-fiction Fall 2000 issue of Ploughshares contains stories by notable authors like Gregory Maguire, Jayne Anne Phillips, Elizabeth Berg, and Grace Paley. Of the works in this issue, Hoffman says in her Introduction, "That, of course, is what great fiction does: it opens a door you never even knew was there, it reminds you that the world isn't always what you had assumed it to be, and that it is our job, as writers of fiction, to report from a front no one has ever visited before."

Full Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
Alice Hoffman

EDITOR PROFILE
Maryanne O'Hara

FICTION

"The Party," by Elizabeth Berg
"The Bad Shepherd," by Peter Ho Davies
"In the Garden," by Kim Edwards
"Train to Chinko," by Karl Harshbarger
"The Firebird," by Elizabeth L. Hodges
"Double Whammy," by Perri Klass
"Precision Marching at the Orphanage, 1890," by Gregory Maguire
"Child Widow," by Alexandra Marshall
"Witness," by Tom Martin
"I Am Not Your Mother," by Alice Mattison
"Intervention," by Jill McCorkle
"Rear View," by Antonya Nelson
"Reading in His Wake," by Pamela Painter
"Justice—A Beginning," by Grace Paley
"The Bad Thing," by Jayne Anne Phillips
"Fast Sunday," by Sue Standing
"A Flower for Ginette," by Susan Vreeland

EDITORS' SHELF

Product Details

BN ID:	2940016347738
Publisher:	Ploughshares / Emerson College
Publication date:	08/15/2003
Series:	Ploughshares , #2923
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	210
Sales rank:	805,663
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Alice Hoffman was born in New York City on March 16, 1952 and grew up on Long Island. After graduating from high school in 1969, she attended Adelphi University, from which she received a BA, and then received a Mirrellees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, which she attended in 1973 and 74, receiving an MA in creative writing. She currently lives in Boston.

Hoffman’s first novel, Property Of, was written at the age of twenty-one, while she was studying at Stanford, and published shortly thereafter by Farrar Straus and Giroux. She credits her mentor, professor and writer Albert J. Guerard, and his wife, the writer Maclin Bocock Guerard, for helping her to publish her first short story in the magazine Fiction. Editor Ted Solotaroff then contacted her to ask if she had a novel, at which point she quickly began to write what was to become Property Of, a section of which was published in Mr. Solotaroff’s magazine, American Review.

Since that remarkable beginning, Alice Hoffman has become one of our most distinguished novelists. She has published a total of twenty-one novels, three books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults. Her novel, Here on Earth, an Oprah Book Club choice, was a modern reworking of some of the themes of Emily Bronte’s masterpiece Wuthering Heights. Practical Magic was made into a Warner film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Her novel, At Risk, which concerns a family dealing with AIDS, can be found on the reading lists of many universities, colleges and secondary schools. Hoffman’s advance from Local Girls, a collection of inter-related fictions about love and loss on Long Island, was donated to help create the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA. Blackbird House is a book of stories centering around an old farm on Cape Cod. Hoffman’s recent books include Aquamarine and Indigo, novels for pre-teens, and The New York Times bestsellers The River King, Blue Diary, The Probable Future, and The Ice Queen.

Hoffman has been at work on The Dovekeepers, which Toni Morrison calls “.. a major contribution to twenty-first century literature” for the past five years. The story of the survivors of Masada is considered by many to be her masterpiece.

Hometown:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

March 16, 1952

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A., Adelphi University, 1973; M.A., Stanford University, 1974

Website:

http://www.alicehoffman.com