Since its first issue in 1925, the Virginia Quarterly Review has distinguished itself among literary magazines for its iconoclastic approach to American letters and world affairs. A century later, we’re naturally curious to know what...
In the Sonoran Desert, my brother hands me a revolver. In place of tenderness he tells me to kill a woodpecker. It’s injured, on its back like a sunbather thrashing in a gravel bed.
For more than fifty years, I have been studying and writing about political repression and higher education, with a special emphasis on McCarthyism, long considered by historians to be the most serious assault on academic freedom since the...
My dream of being a professional writer, which I’d been pursuing in earnest since I was a teenager, had objectively come true. This wasn’t misery, not really. This was happiness, hiding. Nevertheless, the nagging dissatisfaction I felt made...
The house that the three men lived in looked like any old house in the neighborhood. No carvings on the door or around the roof. No lush garden out back, just a patch of green and barely even that. The windows had all been closed and the...
The first time I escaped a language was in spring 1983. I was nine years old and living with my family in Barcelona, the city where I was born. My parents had just been informed that all my classes the following school year would be taught...
