VQR Online

About twenty-​five years ago, my younger brother and I set out into the oilseed-​rape fields behind our house to kill something with shotguns.

It would be easy to dismiss Slab City as a trailer park at the end of the world, but that would miss the spirit of the place, the ambition of the people who live there. 

Engaging with art isn’t always a purely visual experience—it can sometimes involve getting your hands dirty. 

My new boss, Chick, was a morbidly obese manic off his meds who hailed from a tiny town I’d never heard of—​Wassily, Louisiana—​a town so small, Chick claimed, the shotgun shacks only had space for pistols. In summers, he told me, you...

I am going to disappear in Belmont,
after taking a walk in intermittent rain.
I will vanish one day in Belmont—don’t correct me—

In Boswell’s visit with Rousseau, we discover a window into our contemporary selves.

About a year ago, Sergey had stopped looking for a job. He now spent his time scouting the internet, hoping to come up with an app idea that would make him successful. It was the banal apps that sold. If only Sergey could think of something...

You probably won’t be around for your death, and it’s probably all right that you miss it.

Nobody, my father said, could get so many
scrapes and scratches accidentally:
without them I probably would not have liked it so much.

In 1931, Robert Penn Warren received free books in exchange for penning unsigned reviews for the Virginia Quarterly Review. However, his poems and stories were repeatedly rejected. Finally, he wrote the editor, Stringfellow Barr: “If my...