He hadn’t been back to this church since 2005, when he’d left his wife. “She was mean. She was spreading rumors, I don’t even know. She’d walk through church saying ‘mmmhmm, that one’s homosexual, yup, that one too.’ Because of how they...
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.
