VQR Online

 A series about living in New York.

As has always been the case in the writing of Alice Munro, the 2013 Nobel laureate for literature, one need examine only a small fragment of a single story to see the full implications of her work as a whole.

Don’t dream it’s over you don’t
know what’s it’s like it’s like that
& that’s the way it be near me be near

Seeing again
your
face […]

Poetry cannot fail, yet the role of poetry waxes and wanes in the lives of many people. We turn to it when we need it.

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...