I had driven to Nashua to look for farmhouses. I was researching abandoned farmhouses and wanted to find a part of New Hampshire with both rural and urban poverty.
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...
When his beloved Sophie died, Novalis Lay by her grave and wept himself to sleep. On the third night she met him in a dream. He woke transformed, longing for the last trance, “When sleep shall be without waking.”
Goddess, I have watched your motions gratify the world. Votaries of all casts and ages, genders, voices bow to you as they must, for nothing follows without you.
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...
This is how it is with my mind, heading out over the ocean, tipping one way so I see only water, shades of blue and green and cloud-shadow slate; tipping the other, all sky and complication of cloud. Ruckus of glinting refracted light. Some...
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.
Fire does not abide by reason. In its destructive trail, there are empty bank accounts, unreturned voice mails, FedExed checks, hours upon hours of smooth-jazz hold music, fine print written in inscrutable jargon, and the summary Laurie...
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...
