David Morris, author of “Trophy Town: Ramadi Revisited, October 2007” from our current issue, was interviewed today on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” by Neal Conan about his experiences in Ramadi a few months ago and the enormous changes from just a year ago. You can listen to the interview on their site.

We hate to love to brag¹, but people are saying all sorts of nice things about our Winter 2008 issue.

Peter Carlson has a very kind review of our latest issue on the front page of the Style section in today’s Washington Post. Carlson particularly enjoyed David Morris’ “Trophy Town,” about Ramadi’s sudden turnaround, and Malcom Garcia’s “All the Country Will Be Shaking,” about his return to Afghanistan to track down the six war orphans he’d left behind three years before. Carlson’s best moment in the article is also his least complimentary one, describing our Botero portfolio:

There’s also a selection of the controversial Abu Ghraib paintings by the famous Colombian artist Fernando Botero, which you’ll love if you’re the kind of person who enjoys pictures of fat, naked men being tortured. I’m not, but, hey, you can’t please everybody.

Last week the Wall Street Journal’s Robin Moroney recommended Garcia’s “All the Country Will Be Shaking,” too, in the paper’s “Informed Reader” column.

Talk of the Nation’s David Gura plugs Neil Shea’s “Ramadi Nights” over on Blog of the Nation, praising the “riveting read” for providing engaging reportage that dares use the nominative singular pronoun. Incidentally, this piece came to us via our submission system, totally unsolicited, which is unusual for reporting like this. It was a delightful break from our standard fare of me-moirs, as our jaded nonfiction reader refers to the never ending series of autobiographical submissions that are every bit as bad as Rob Kunzig says they are.

Our fiction is getting some lovin’, too. Patrick Rapa is all about Alejandro Zambra’s “Bonsai” and Drew Johnson’s “The Last Dead”.

If you want to stay ahead of the hipness curve, check out Daniel Heyman’s “Art Born of the Need to Tell.” It hasn’t yet gotten the buzz that it inevitably will, so if you check it out now, you can claim to be utterly bored with it by the time your aunt forwards you the link in a few weeks.

1. Dizzy Dean being our philosopher of choice around here these days.

Just for the heck of it, I wrote some code that would index every word of every article we’ve published from 1975 onward, rank those words by the frequency with which they’ve appeared, skim off the most frequent words, and graph them in a tag cloud. (Whee!) Here’s how this process summarizes 33 years of VQR:

For comparison, here’s our current issue rendered as a tag cloud:

I don’t know if this is really interesting or hopelessly mundane. But it is clever, and that’s got to count for something.

Our office manager of fourteen years, Janna Gies, retired in December and we’re looking for someone enthralled by the hectic, fast-paced world of literary journals to come work with us. So if you’re looking for a job that’s part “His Girl Friday” and “All the President’s Men,” look no further.

Well, it’s not really that fast-paced. But we do offer a casual and friendly office, flexible hours, and engaging coworkers, all in the service of helping put out what we think is one of the best little magazines around. The position is part-time (25–30 hours per week) and we’re looking for someone who’s organized, personable, and preferably has some experience with bookkeeping or accounting. Past experience in the magazine or publishing world is helpful (but this is not an editorial position). Our office is located on the historic central grounds of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, less than fifty yards from the Rotunda.

If you’re interested, there’s more info and instructions on how to apply at the Jobs@UVA website. (Please note that applications have to be done online through the Jobs@UVA website; don’t send applications to our office.) General questions about the position can be emailed to the editors (no phone calls, please).

Word comes to us early this morning that Nicholas Schmidle, a regular contributor to VQR, has been deported by the Pakistan government, in the wake of his reporting for VQR, the New York Times, Slate, and others. According to Schmidle, the government was most upset about his travels to Baluchistan (off-limits to journalists), one of which he detailed in “Waiting for the Worst” in our Spring 2007 issue.

Update: Steven Clemons has more info at The Washington Note.

Last night, as the results from the Iowa caucuses began to look conclusive, MSNBC’s co-anchor Chris Matthews marveled at the significance of the moment in American history: the people of Iowa (what many in the media have taken to calling “lily-white Iowa”) had chosen “Barack Hussein Obama” as their Democratic candidate. On Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough, Matthews returned to his musing of last night: “I tell you, it’s going to be a headline all over the world: ‘Barack Hussein Obama wins first presidential test in America.’” This is hardly the first time that the cable news channels have expressed fascination with Obama’s name—his full name.

(more…)

Our Winter 2008 issue is showing up in mailboxes everywhere today. Readers are doing double-takes when they see the cover — one excited subscriber called this morning, anxiously inquiring whether cover was really and truly drawn by who he thought it was — and understandably so. (If you select the image at right, you can see a full-screen version.)

We turned over the cover of the issue to comic artist Chris Ware. Not just the bottom 60% — we gave him the whole thing to make his own. (We did this once before, with a special 2006 fiction supplement.) He re-rendered our logo and issue header in his distinct style. Ware’s pixel-perfect drawing style is done by hand, not computer. Check out your print copy up close — look at the edges of the “Q” and the “R” in our logo, or the lettering of “The Virginia Quarterly Review” — and you can see Ware’s individual pen strokes, evidence of its provenance.

And there’s stuff inside this issue, too. The issue focuses on the matter of torture, both contemporary and historical. We’ve got a pair of stunning visual works: Daniel Heyman’s watercolor portraits of former Iraqi prisoners tortured at Abu Ghraib and Fernando Botero’s paintings of the famous Abu Ghraib prisoner photos. We have a symposium on Ryszard Kapuściński, with contributions by Salman Rushdie and Werner Herzog. David Morris on how Ramadi came so far, so fast and Neil Shea on Ramadi a year ago. Post-apocalyptic fiction from Drew Johnson. Jane Hirshfield on justice. Roberto Bolaño on the banality of torture. A new work by Chris Ware. Poetry by Oliver de la Paz, William Logan, and an exciting newcomer, Patricia Lockwood.

This is the part where I write “and much, much more.” And it’s true. That doesn’t mean “there’s just one other thing that I’m not mentioning so I can make it sound like there’s a lot more.” What I’m trying to explain to you is that this is a Big Issue, and you should read it. Some of it is available for free online. But most of it, you’ve gotta read on the dead tree version. Buy this issue now for $14 or just get it over with and subscribe like you’ve totally been meaning to, but just haven’t gotten around to doing.

The trick in putting out a quarterly anchored by current events is to figure out what will be current in a few months. That is our editor’s job, and how he does it, I would not try to guess. But somehow the stars aligned this week, and we’ve got a honest-to-god current events article — one of our contributors is in Pakistan, and he’s filed a story on the last few days’ developments in the nation:

Mohammad Alam, an elderly, wrinkled man wrapped in a tattered blanket, guarded his street corner in Peshawar last Friday, while angry mobs burned a motorcycle, ransacked the chamber of commerce building, and threw stones at police just a few feet away. Even as the sound of gunfire clattered nearby, Alam didn’t dare leave the kiosk where he sells neswar, a type of chewing tobacco widely used by Pashtuns; the thirty bags stacked neatly on the box beside him—and worth a total of about $1.50—constituted his entire inventory and livelihood.

Author Nicholas Schmidle also wrote a fascinating article for our Spring 2007 issue, Waiting for the Worst: Baluchistan, 2006, and contributes Democracy Is Not a Postcard: Iranian Influence in Western Afghanistan to our Winter 2008 issue.

01/03 Update: Schmidle has a feature on a related topic in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, entitled “Next-Gen Taliban,” available online now.