In celebration of today being Darwin Day, we’re offering a sneak peek of an essay by Niles Eldredge (“Confessions of a Darwinist”) from our forthcoming Spring issue which features a portfolio of essays on Darwin, evolution, and intelligent design. Eldredge is best known as the codiscoverer with Stephen Jay Gould of the theory of punctuated equilibrium—a milestone in evolutionary theory. He is curator of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and curated the “Darwin” exhibit that’s currently running at the Museum.

Other highlights of our Spring issue (due early April) are essays by David Quammen, Michael Ruse, Thomas Eisner, and Robert M. Sapolsky on Darwin and evolution; a symposium on Adrienne Rich, including new work by her; a new short story by Francine Prose; and an excerpt from Marjane Satrapi’s forthcoming graphic novel Chicken with Plums.

Deborah Eisenberg—UVA professor, Rea Award winner, and contributor to the winter issue of VQR—receives staggeringly good reviews for her new story collection, Twilight of the Superheroes, in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, The Christian Science Monitor, Bookslut, and two in The New York Times—one last week by Michiko Kakutani, and one by Ben Marcus in Sunday’s Book Review. The Times features the title story both online and as an MP3 read by the author.

I somehow missed Nancy Milford’s excellent essay on the “false memoir” until today. Maybe everybody else has already read this, but in case you haven’t, check it out. It’s the most thoughtful and intelligent essay I’ve read on the whole James Frey fracas and the question of how much truth memoir must contain.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo has devised a novel plan to raise money for the Community School in his hometown of Camden, Maine. It seems Camden is facing a $79,000 budget shortfall (somebody has to pay for those tax cuts, right?), so Russo is hoping to sell 1,000 tickets at $100 a piece for an unusual raffle. The prizewinning ticket gets the winner—or at least the winner’s name—a place in Russo’s next novel. What Russo does with that name, the Village Soup website reports, “depends on the name,” though the author known for his offbeat and sometimes unsavory characters promises, “I’m not going to use a real person’s name as a scumbag character.”

For raffle tickets, call 236-3000, e-mail cschool@cschool.acadia.net, or visit thecommunityschool.org.

Read Paul R. Pillar’s article, “Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq,” on the Foreign Affairs website. Pillar’s article is going to be excerpted, spun, and debated into the ground in the coming week. Thanks to the editors of Foreign Affairs for making the full article available to everyone so we can read it and decide for ourselves.

Kerry Carter, former back-up running back for the Seattle Seahawks, has found something to fill his idle hours since being cut by the team before this season. He’s been writing poetry. This must-have gift for the Seahawks fan on your Valentine’s Day list is subtley titled Fiery Scenes of Seduction. The Torontoist says, “Not only can he find a hole in the defense, but this NFL running back can help to fill the hole in your heart.” Personally, I plan to wait for One for the Thumb: The Collected Poems of Jerome Bettis. I’ll put it on my bookshelf next to these recommended titles:

• Rocky Bleier, Fighting Back
• Terry Bradshaw, It’s Only a Game
• Andy Russell, A Steeler Odyssey
• Randy Roberts and David Welky, eds., The Steelers Reader

Or, more seriously, you might consider Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper—Stephen J. Dubner’s account of growing up obsessed with Steelers running back Franco Harris.

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer features an interview with UVA professor and recent VQR contributor Rita Dove.

Africa is too large and diverse for generalizations. It has 54 nations, 5 time zones, at least 7 climates, more than 800 million people, and, according to the latest diligent research, maybe 14 million proverbs. This series of talks and readings seeks to present some fresh voices from all corners of Africa, in all their differences. Organized by the Virginia Quarterly Review, Granta, and Transition Magazine.
All events are free and open to the public.

SOUTHERN SWING
Wednesday, February 15th, 5:30 p.m.
College Park, MD: University of Maryland, David C. Driskell Center
Kwame Dawes & Binyavanga Wainaina

Thursday, February 16th, 6:30 p.m.
Fairfax, VA: George Mason University, Center for the Arts, Grand Tier
Kwame Dawes & Helon Habila

Friday, February 17th, 4:00 p.m.
Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, UVa Bookstore
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie & Helon Habila

NORTHERN SWING
Tuesday, February 21st, 6:30 p.m.
New York, NY: Mercantile Library of New York, 17 East 47th Street
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Helon Habila & Binyavanga Wainaina

Thursday, February 23rd, 7:00 p.m.
New York, NY: New York University, 19 University Place
Adekeye Adebajo, Philip Alcabes, Daniel Bergner, John Ryle & Binyavanga Wainaina

Tuesday, February 28th, 7.00 pm
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, W.E.B. DuBois Institute
Brent Hayes Edwards, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts & Binyavanga Wainaina

SPEAKERS
Adekeye Adebajo is the Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution in South Africa.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (Vintage), has been shortlisted for the Orange Fiction Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun is due out from Alfred A. Knopf in 2006. She now divides her time between Nigeria and the United States, where she is a Hodder fellow at Princeton University.

Philip Alcabes is an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Hunter College who has written extensively on the epidemiology of HIV/AIDS and other community-acquired infections. His work has appeared in the American Scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsday and the Washington Post.

Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana in 1962 and grew up in Jamaica. He is Professor in English and Distinguished Poet in Residence at the University of South Carolina. Dawes has published eight collections of poetry, is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Iowa’s writing program.

Helon Habila was born in Nigeria in 1967. His debut novel, Waiting for an Angel (Norton), was awarded the Commonwealth Literature Prize for the Best First Novel by an African writer, and he won the Caine Prize in 2001. He is a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review, and currently the first Chinua Achebe Fellow in Global African Studies at Bard College.

Brent Hayes Edwards is professor of English and African American Studies at Rutgers University and a contributing editor at Transition. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is a contributing editor at Transition. Her book Harlem Is Nowhere is forthcoming from Little, Brown.

John Ryle is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Human Rights at Bard, Chair of the Rift Valley Institute, and author of Warriors of the White Nile.

Binyavanga Wainaina was born in Kenya in 1971. He moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where he worked as a freelance food and travel writer. He won Caine Prize in 2002. He lives in Nairobi, where he is the founding editor of Kwani?

Inside Higher Ed reports that Thailand, upset over a forthcoming critical biography of President Bhumibol Adulyadej, has blocked access in the country to Yale University Press’s website:

In Thailand, the assistant minister of information and communication technology, Kanawat Wasinsangworn, confirmed for the Associated Press that the Yale Press Web site had been blocked “following a request from the Royal Police Bureau, which deems the book is insulting to the king.”

The book, The King Never Smiles, is described on the press’s website as the story of “how a king widely seen as beneficent and apolitical could in fact be so deeply political, autocratic, and even brutal.”

From Shelf Awareness, VQR contributor Art Spiegelman will be the guest today on KCRW’s Bookworm, along with John Carlin, curator of the “Masters of American Comics” exhibit currently running at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. Spiegelman is currently excerpting his comix memoir “Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*!” in the pages of VQR (a brief excerpt from the first installment is available online). FYI: our Spring 2006 issue won’t have an excerpt (Spiegelman’s hard at work but didn’t have a piece ready for us), but we expect to publish another excerpt in our Summer issue, due in July.