John Wray sees novels as falling into one of two categories—arrowheads or fruitcakes—whose modus operandi are distinct. “There’s the kind of novel that’s formed on the principle of exclusion, in which your goal is something very flinty and...
In Germany, I began to experience what it was like to think in another language. Also, the way Germans looked at me—with curiosity but no racial baggage—was so different than Americans. I began to understand a little bit more about my own...
For our Spring 1947 issue, VQR Editor Charlotte Kohler acquired an essay on Jean-Paul Sartre by Yale University French professor Kenneth N. Douglas as well as a translation of Sartre’s 1946 essay “Ecrire pour son époque,” which was...
We could have burned down the house. We could have been killed going through that window. But each of us deserves, in a reasonable life, at least a dozen times when death doesn’t take us.
A house is not a home. It is but a pile of sticks. “‘Home is,” on the other hand, as Robert Frost famously said, “the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’” Less well known, and more resonant, are the words...
The fourth installment of #VQRTrueStory—our new social-media experiment in which stories and images cross platforms, from Instagram to the website to the magazine—features Jamie Alliotts’s encounters on the sidewalks of Manhattan.
The third installment of #VQRTrueStory—our new social-media experiment in which stories and images cross platforms, from Instagram to the website to the magazine—features Julia Cooke in Mawlamyine, Burma.
