VQR Online

During the summer of 2013, shortly after George Zimmerman was acquitted of the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin, word leaked out that a juror was already shopping around a prospective book about the case. One...

“Don’t publish the article with any adjective I did not use. If you want to use an adjective, use ‘Myanmar nationalist.’”

“That’s how you want to be described?”

“Yes.” He chuckles. “Don’t use ‘radical’ or ‘brutal.’ ‘Burmese bin Laden.’”

You have always been nosebleed 
     and nail-bite, the spit-shined halls 
where you harvested us with your tribal 
     clang. Too long we saw your face 
in every shadow, felt the whole forest 
     await your arrival like a nagging frost.  

Tokyo is a photographer’s dream, a city overflowing with potent imagery. But this sensory input can also be overpowering, making it tough to find a single focus. Photographer Yoshinori Mizutani, though, knew he found a great new subject...

Recently, painter Marc Burckhardt has been in a deep “visual conversation” with literature—specifically, with Petrarch’s Triumphs, a sequence of poems from the Italian Renaissance in which Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity...

Our summer issue explores a big, almost unwieldy question: How do we better understand ourselves through the animals around us? The question is a layered one, invested with themes of stewardship, responsibility, imagination, devotion, even...

Not that you ever are. The small, rough dogs lie at your feet or warm your belly.

Beware the Jabberwock. Beware the basilisk, too, that terrifying creature of the medieval bestiary.

It’s hard for
the master
sharpener after
all that work
to have the shaft
taken for the point.