VQR is featuring selected work from our archives in honor of Veteran’s Day. Brian Turner’s “My Life as a Foreign Country,” from the Fall 2011 issue, is also the title essay of his new memoir, out now from Norton.
For twenty dollars, this dude named Byron promised to beat the crap out of you. That’s pretty much what the flyer said, and the flyer was all over the neighborhood. The first one we noticed was up high on the half-dead palm tree in front of...
Moby-Dick is not about Moby-Dick. Not really. The white whale makes his appearance, of course. We have been promised that much. Moby-Dick emerges, finally, at the end of Melville’s great novel, in the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean.
Days later, not long after we left the convent, the war ended. I promised to take her directly to the train station, but the sight of her on the back seat scrambling out of that uniform,
The more they’ve been shrinking, the bigger it’s been getting, though maybe that’s the wrong way to put it. The world’s great coral reefs, that is, and in particular Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, on the one hand—and, on the other, the...
