Some Fireside Reading

So it’s been a pretty good week for all of us at VQR. As if six National Magazine Award nominations weren’t enough (and believe me, they were), we got word that Tom Bissell’s and Morgan Meis’s travel piece “After the Fall” (from the Fall 2005 issue) has been selected for Best American Travel Writing. This is in addition to selections for Best American Mystery Stories and Best American Poetry. To cap it off, Meghan O’Rourke, the culture editor at Slate (and poetry co-editor at Paris Review), wrote a fantastically flattering piece about us. All of this led Sarah Askari at mnspeak.com to describe VQR as “hotter than the stack of gasoline-doused issues of McSweeney’s burning in my fireplace.”

Update: Slate.com has posted a podcast of Meghan O’Rourke discussing VQR.