Spring Issue: The End of Ice

Our Spring 2009 issue is showing up in mailboxes around the country this week, and the entirety of the issue is available on our website, with about a third of it available to non-subscribers. The theme is “The End of Ice,” with our contributors reporting from around the globe about how climate change is affecting the coldest parts of the world. Some of the works on this topic include:

 

We also have Eric Wilson on collectors of film prints, Dimiter Kenarov on the capture of a Macedonian serial killer, William Finnegan on Mi’kmaq blueberry rakers in Maine, Lawrence Weschler on Trevor and Ryan Oakes’ radical breakthroughs in the rendering of three-dimensional space in art, and the fourth installment of Chris Ware’s “Jordan W. Lint,” his serialized pictorial fiction.

On the fiction front, we’ve got Jessica Francis Kane’s “The Inquiry,” her story of a WWII-era London air raid drill gone wrong, and Kent Nelson’s “The Spirit Bird,” about birdwatching in coastal Alaska.

There’s lots of poetry in this issue. David Baker, Elizabeth Bradfield, Rita Dove, Eamon Grennan, Jim Harrison, Walter Jost, Sara Pennington, Kevin Prufer, R.T. Smith, Stefi Weisburd, and Anna Pierson Wiese all contribute work, with several poems along the theme of the issue.

We’ve got a pair of book reviews, one from Oscar Villalon on What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America, and the other from Blake Bailey on Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, plus the usual array of shorter book notes.

For this issue we’ve created a few online features, and two are available now. Andrew Shelden has put together a history of VQR’s relationship with H.L. Mencken, to provide the context for our publication of “The South Astir” in our Winter 1935 issue. And Andrew Shelden and Jon Schneider put together a history of our relationship with Katherine Anne Porter, who was a regular contributor to the publication in the mid 1930s. She was particularly insistent that we publish “The Grave” in our tenth anniversary issue, since it focused on “Southern letters.”

If you can’t wait to make this 216-page issue yours, order a copy right now, or start with this issue when you subscribe today.

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Published: April 1, 2009