Reif Larsen

Biography

Reif Larsen’s first novel, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (Penguin, 2009), was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into twenty-seven languages. Larsen’s essays and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, GQ, Tin House, McSweeney’s, One Story, the Harvard Review, the Millions, VQR, Asymptote, and the Believer. 

See Work

#VQRTRUESTORY / Fall 2020

A Taxonomy of Mask Cheats

By Reif Larsen

The face mask, that simple piece of cloth, has become fraught territory. Over the summer, Americans began reading the use or absence of a mask as a political statement, a commentary on individual freedom, an invitation to a fight. Our...
MAPPING / Summer 2014

The Half-Life of a Lake

By Reif Larsen

All lakes, by definition, are temporary. They naturally fill in with sedimentary deposits and disappear, though their geologic lives tend to span millennia. 

MAPPING / Spring 2014

A Short History of Cars in Cuba

By Reif Larsen
MAPPING / Winter 2014

Diasporas

By Reif Larsen

The US is filled with remarkable diasporic hot spots, where immigrant and refugee communities have sprung up, most often due to secondary migration patterns.
MAPPING / Fall 2013

Exclaves

By Reif Larsen

A wise man once said that every story is the story of someone trying to make a home in a place where he doesn’t belong. The world is filled with such places. An exclave is a piece of land not bound to the rest of its territory, orphaned by...