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Current Issue
Since 1925, VQR has distinguished itself among literary magazines for its iconoclastic approach to American letters and the world at large. Launched in the spirit of forming “a fellowship of uncongenial minds,” this magazine has been cherished by writers and artists seeking to publish work that resists convention, and beloved by readers like you who have relied on it as a place where intellectual rigor and the delight of surprise form a certain chemistry that make it unlike any other magazine in publishing.
VQR celebrates its centenary with an issue that delivers on all fronts. A set of powerhouse nonfiction is led by Joseph Earl Thomas, who heads to New Orleans to compete in the Pokémon North American International Championship, giving us a close reading into why this “pocket monster” phenomenon is arguably the most humane game on the planet. Leslie Jamison indulges in a nostalgic pilgrimage to Disneyland—this time with her own daughter, discovering a reliable fantasy that, as a parent, possesses strange and unsettling layers. Tom Bissell’s profile of legendary screenwriter William Goldman is a funny, poignant, meet-your-hero portrait that walks us through Goldman’s love-hate relationship with Hollywood, one that turns out to be as entertaining as the indelible stories and characters he dreamed up for decades.
Our portfolios are anchored by a special project with the Pulitzer Center, with dispatches from reportage illustrator George Butler, who returned to Syria just after the fall of the Assad regime last December to document this historic crossroads for everyday citizens emerging from generations of tyranny. In addition, Nina Berman’s photo diary of a dark new normal at Columbia University, where she serves on the faculty, provides a chilling bellwether of the state of higher education in America. With an introduction by historian Ellen Schrecker, the portfolio articulates what’s at stake as the Trump Administration seeks to quash academic independence. Finally, Louie Palu inaugurates his #VQRTrueStory column on the surreal dynamics of being a pool photographer covering the performance of politics.
This issue’s fiction trifecta includes Etgar Keret, Karan Mahajan, and Souvankham Thammavongsa. Poetry by Victoria Chang, Stephen Espada Dawson, and Amanda Gunn round out the issue. Illustrator Gambineri kicks off a comics noir series.
Cover illustration by Eiko Ojala.
Spring 2025
Volume 101, Number 1
Print: $20.00
Digital download: $20.00
Table of contents
Reporting
Essays
Profiles
Portfolios
Fiction
Poetry
Open Letter
On Becoming
VQR Vault
#VQRTrueStory
Editor's Desk
Contributor Profiles
Nina Berman is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, journalist, and professor at Columbia University. She has written three books: Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq (Trolley Books, 2004); Homeland (Trolley Books, 2008); and An autobiography of Miss Wish (Kehrer Vlag, 2017). She is a 2025 Guggenheim fellow in photography and lives in New York City.
Victoria Chang’s latest book of poems is With My Back to the World (FSG, 2024). She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech.
Leslie Jamison is a VQR editor at large and the author of five books: The Gin Closet (Free Press, 2011); The Empathy Exams (Graywolf, 2014); The Recovering (Little, Brown, 2018); Make It Scream, Make It Burn (Little, Brown, 2019); and most recently the memoir Splinters (Little, Brown, 2024). She teaches at Columbia University.
Born in Ramat Gan, Etgar Keret is a leading voice in Israeli literature and film. His books have been published in over four dozen languages and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Le Monde, and the New Yorker, among others. His awards include the Cannes Film Festival’s Caméra d’Or (2007), the Charles Bronfman Prize (2016), and the prestigious Sapir Prize (2018). Over a hundred short films and several feature films have been based on his stories. Keret teaches creative writing at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Since 2021, he has been publishing the weekly newsletter Alphabet Soup on Substack.
Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink: A Memoir (Grand Central, 2023) and the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer (Grand Central, 2024), winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. His writing has been published in Harper’s, Vanity Fair, Dilettante Army, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Thomas teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College in addition to courses in Black studies, poetics, video games, queer theory, and more at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
Ellen Schrecker is an American historian known for her research on McCarthyism, political repression, and American higher education. Her latest work is The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing War on Academic Freedom, coedited with Valerie C. Johnson and Jennifer Ruth (Beacon, 2024). Her other books include The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (Chicago, 2021); Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Little, Brown, 1998); and No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford, 1986). She is active in the American Association of University Professors and now serves on its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
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