Allen Tate was heartened to see the inaugural issue of VQR. The Fugitive, the magazine he had helped found in Nashville in 1922, was struggling and would publish its final number in a matter of months. Tate was hopeful that VQR would succeed where others had [...]
The Observer has spilled the beans: we’ll be publishing new work by Joe Sacco. The journalist/artist is producing an original, 48-page comic for us, entitled “The Unwanted,” about the thousands of African refugees who have wound up in Malta in their effort to escape to Europe. Conflicts throughout Sub-Saharan [...]
A bit more than a month ago, The New York Times launched an experiment that could transform the newspaper industry, and might be the final nail in a coffin shared between the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News. Seeking to expand [...]
Susan B.A. Somers-Willett is the author of two books of poetry, Quiver (VQR Series, 2009) and Roam (Crab Orchard Award Series, 2006), and an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Montclair State University. For the fall issue of VQR, she traveled with photographer Brenda [...]
Editor’s Note—This is the last in a four-part series [1, 2, 3, 4] on the November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai.
V. “By the Grace of Allah”Editor’s Note—This is part three of a four-part series [1, 2, 3, 4] on the November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai.
[...] Editor’s Note—This is part two of a four-part series [1, 2, 3, 4] on the November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai.
[...] 
Editor’s Note—This is part one of a four-part series [1, 2, 3, 4] on the November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai.
Photo by Jon Ledford
J. Malcolm Garcia is a regular contributor to VQR, whose essays have been anthologized in Best American Non-Required Reading and Best American Travel Writing. For his piece in our Fall 2009 issue, Garcia accompanied tabloid journalists in Juárez who follow [...]On a blustery Saturday afternoon last March, Jason Motlagh and I sat in my office, discussing the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008. Jason had recently completed an article for us on separatist rebels within India, and we had been kicking around ideas for a follow-up. Now that he [...]
When Commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed to Japan in 1854, he came bearing gifts. Among other things, Perry brought with him a barrel of whiskey, more than a few casks of wine, Audubon’s Birds of America, [...]
Two leading American cultural historians have recently shifted their sights from the close textual readings of scholarly essays and the rigorous cultural mappings of books to a wider, gentler critical plain: that of biography. It’s not the holidays yet, and these biographies are certainly no Christmas bargain-bin books, but both [...]
Carl Sandburg visiting Monticello. (Courtesy of the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.)
In 1928, [...]
On a cold, starry night twenty years ago, thousands of Germans flooded the streets to dance and sing and cry—and to climb the wall that scarred the heart of a once-proud city for nearly thirty years. The hours in which the cement and barbed wire came tumbling down [...]
Poet, editor, teacher, and philosopher, John Crowe Ransom was also one of the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century, and the five essays he published in VQR in the 1930s reveal the evolution of his thoughts and ideas about the contemporary South and its literature.
Ransom [...]
The myths attributed to Los Angeles—land of movie stars, crime, natural disasters, or (the enduring favorite) superficial culture—are no more than an attempt at caricature, usually done by outsiders. The city is not defined by Hollywood, despite its preeminence in the pop cultural imagination; L.A. is [...]
I just saw the movie adaptation of The Time-Traveler’s Wife, the best-selling novel by Audrey Niffenegger. Eric Bana was the only reason I don’t regret buying the ticket. I’d had such high hopes because the novel was so compelling. It seemed like it [...]
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart had its first heckler last week. After eleven years of potentially objectionable guests like Henry Kissinger, Pervez Musharraf, Trent Lott, Nancy Pelosi, George Tenet, Ralph Nader, and Jim Cramer, the first to be heckled was Palestinian peace [...]
Carianne King, Mary Beth Lineberry, Mandy Redig, Jason Motlagh, Aja Gabel, Ted Genoways, Michael Lukas, Jacob Silverman, Waldo Jaquith, J. T. Keller
