VQR Online

For personal reasons, W. Ralph Eubanks has decided to leave the team of the Virginia Quarterly Review. Ralph brought his unique talents, commitment, and dedication to the magazine, and has made substantial contributions as Editor of VQR...

my son breathes to leave me
to leave the lean-to
of family: extended and penal 

The untold story of Jackson C. Frank, one of folk music’s best-kept secrets.

She kept putting off sending him the book,
then one afternoon she recognized 
the author walking up Fifth Avenue

First, a distinction. When I employ the term academic in what follows, I will not mean the first definition, the technical one: individuals who teach college students. I will mean the second definition, the sullied one: individuals for whom...

One night, she turns the novel’s last page. This is all—
small house, plain street, some trees, sweet and irksome neighbors, dishes, bills, water leaks, 

Jamaicans are primed to contend with all who speak ill of their country. As someone who grew up and lived in Jamaica until my midtwenties—although I now live in the US—I understand how the culture reacts to criticism.

Nervous, twigs split, become swallows, 
jeté the platinum poring chits

over horizon’s bistered tinge.
Is a murderer secreted in us all,

Master of the short story Charles Baxter has a new collection of linked stories, There’s Something I Want You to Do, out this February from Pantheon. Each of the ten stories is named for a virtue or a vice, and we’re proud to publish...