VQR Online

Can a nationalist movement from the internet save the world’s most scattered people? 

Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami’s fourteenth novel and nineteenth book of fiction, begins with a “faceless man” who appears to the unnamed narrator as he wakes from a nap, asking for his portrait to be drawn. When he vanishes, the...

I put a poem

in your backup jewelry box,

the one you keep

at the bottom of the taxes from 2003

in order to foil the inevitable burglars,

In the house there were always two 

white deep freezers packed pretty 

decent with red meat. Deer season, 

I had traveled up the Hudson Line at my friend’s invitation to deliver a lecture to his literature students at the college where he taught. There had been three people in attendance and one had fallen asleep halfway through. My friend had...

I’m without body but forming in the latticework 

of blood cell and fret. Each threat pulls me upward

tempting and building me until my spine lifts into a column,

When Marlon James announced his follow-up to his Booker-Prize winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, it was met with intense excitement. James is best known as a literary novelist with a reputation for not mincing his words in...

1. Dad, Don’t Be That Guy

2. Dad, Quoting the Wikipedia Isn’t Gospel

3. Dad, I’m Going to Take Those Away

4. Dad, I Warned You

Up ahead it’s white. Snow animal,
I’m running at your back. I’ve failed to tell you
I’ve been hungry all this time, to tell you 

Think about losing things when you are a child, and how losing things thrusts you into a state of absolute despair, even if what you lost is relatively unimportant: toothbrush, sweater, homework folder.

Adults. We are like balloons inflated...