Recent Books

America’s Game, America’s Obsession: The National Football League—Then and Now

Oscar Villalon

One of the biggest shifts in American popular culture in the past half century—right up there with hip hop sidelining rock and roll and TV steamrolling radio (and now TV being shoved aside by the internet)—has been professional football usurping baseball as America’s sport of choice.


Poetry

Equinox

Honor Jones

We dug potatoes from their cabinets of soil, watched / the belly of the earth turn over in its grave, a glimpse of flesh / through darkening ground, roots and greenlings—then the plow.


The Summer after They Crashed and Drowned

Traci Brimhall

The moon changes and changes back / like a woman dressing and undressing, / taking her sadness on and off. We don’t / say their names.
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Dead Fly

Ted Kooser

This black sedan lies on its top / on the kitchen window sill, its wheels / in the air, its battery drained, / the oil trickling into the cylinders.


The Polio Vaccine, Chatham, Virginia, 1964

Claudia Emerson

It was not death we came to fear but her life, / her other birth, waking remade from the womb / / of that disease.


Editor’s Desk

The Price of Aggression

Ted Genoways

We, as a nation, seem to believe that, win or lose, the war is nearly finished, done with, history. Unfortunately, for hundreds of thousands of American veterans and their families, the war is anything but over.


VQR Portfolio

The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce

Ashley Gilbertson

Gravesite Visit

At age 23, Noah Pierce took a handgun and shot himself in the head. It could have been the memory of the Iraqi child he crushed under his Bradley. It could have been the unarmed man he shot point-blank in the forehead, or the friend he tried madly to gather into a plastic bag after he had been blown to bits, or it could have been the doctor he killed.

From the Blog

Reading the Fine Print

Mandy Redig

Passport Cover
Jonathan Clapper­/CC

There are moments in life when none of us are particularly looking to be inspired by language. Standing in line at airport security during the travel madness that is the week between Christmas and New Year’s comes to mind as one of those times. Amidst the uncertainty of our world, the turbulence of our recent election, and the grave challenges that rise before us in the new year, I think I might have unwittingly stumbled across a top ten list worth pondering.


In Priase of Plagiarism

Jacob Silverman

Obabakoak Cover

There are many extraordinary things about Bernardo Atxaga’s “Obabakoak,” and chief among them perhaps is its capacity to delight. It is, in the best sense of the word, an entertainment. It whirls and skips along, riffing on stories and archetypes you’ve probably heard or read before in another form, another language, perhaps set in some other place and time.


Fiction

Representing Doris

Peter Walpole

At some point in her late sixties, no one remembered exactly when, Doris Moat began to water her driveway. She would stand there for ten minutes, maybe fifteen, then carefully lay the hose down, walk over to the spigot by the stoop that led to her small side porch, and shut off the water.


The Iraq Show

Charles Antin

My main duties as the Production Assistant on The Iraq Show are to 1. translate the Daily Data into plain English and 2. get the coffee. I’ve only been on the job a few weeks so, for the most part, my job has been to 2. get the coffee. But today is different.
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Web Exclusives

Tributes to writer and mentor George Garrett

Read reminiscences by Richard Bausch, Robert Bausch, Carrie Brown, Kelly Cherry, Brendan Galvin, James W. Hall, Hilary Masters, Thomas McGonigle, Alan Wier, and many others.

A Few Unforeseen Things

Watch Elliott Woods’s video interviews with the friends and families of two men killed in a suicide bombing at the FOB Marez chow hall.

A conversation with poet Brian Turner

Read Patrick Hicks’s conversation with Brian Turner, Iraq War veteran and author of the acclaimed poetry collection Here, Bullet.


Plus...

Lawrence Weschler on David Hockney’s return to painting, J. Hoberman on “Lonesome Rhodes,” Blake Bailey on John Cheever’s childhood, and much, much more.