We read Paradise Lost my senior year of high school in Mr. P’s AP English class. Mr. P was married to my first-year English teacher, whose maiden name was often confused in my mind with the delicate membrane, sought after and highly...
For all the intentionality behind each issue of VQR, there are plenty of accidents and unexpected outcomes that happen along the way. Half of them are lucky; the rest we wrestle with until they fit the larger puzzle. Every magazine...
Barry was six-foot-six, fifteen like me, floating layups and hook shots over our heads through the hoop in my driveway. We called him Big Bird for dwarfing us, for his slappy feet, for the mouth that hung in a grin at all
Oksana and Ruslana, Ukrainian girls playing in the streets of Lwów: dolls and sticks and rope. Sunup-sunset, never a cloud in the sky, even when it rains. Always tying and buckling one another’s shoes. When they fall or get scraped, they...
My father spoke: Look at this, he said to me. We were walking through an alley from somewhere to somewhere else in Brooklyn. In front of us, a man with white hair and a white beard reached into a dumpster, plucked out a bag of potato chips...
