VQR Online

I’m asked questions about travel—
What countries I’ve visited, how long I stayed.

They press my fingers to a pad then frown
and shake their heads and press again.

Hotel Saravana Bhavan is one of the newer restaurants in Manhattan’s Curry Hill neighborhood. Its decor is simple. There are no silk prints of Mughal art. There are no large carved elephants. The tables are Lucite. The chairs and booths...

Jefferson’s life, writings, and aesthetics inspire in his spiritual descendants, real and feigned, as many contradictions as virtues. This valley may represent the apotheosis of the American family farm, with what is one of the most...

Under the hanging lights in a pool hall
at nineteen I read the table after the break
and followed a map in my head

In the book when the boy nearly drowned 
his legs wrapped in weeds or maybe rope 

On the first day I tell them: “When searching for the Seven Cities of Cibola, Coronado was so disappointed by what he found in the land that would one day become Kansas that he strangled the guide who’d brought him here and turned around.”

Sugar beets in North Dakota, shark-fin soup in China, American wedding cake, Cuban ice cream, South Indian rasam, and rams’ balls in Iceland: Our Spring 2015 issue charts foods and foodways from around the US and the world—in reporting...