Literary reading podcast Apostrophe Cast is featuring a reading by and an interview with Cecily Parks this week. Cecily is one of the authors in the new VQR Poetry Series — we recently published “Field Folly Snow,” her first collection of poems, and we podcast her March reading here at the University of Virginia. Apostrophe Cast is also running a contest for the best illustration for one of Cecily’s poems. The winner gets a copy of the book.

A few authors were less than thrilled with our recent listing of readers’ negative comments, worrying that their work may have received similarly rough treatment. (Rest assured, any author who takes the time to read our blog, or who can even identify us by name, is far too competent to write submissions that are that bad.) I have no background in the literary world (I’m a programmer), so I have no concept of the point at which transparency becomes garish to writers. Whaddya know–I’ve found that point.

The forthrightness of our readers extends not just to submissions that they don’t like, but also to submissions that they adore. Sometimes a submission will strike a chord with a reader, validating the task of minding the slush pile. They’re effusive, funny, and often sweet. Here are some of my favorites, with the hope that transparency of happy comments is rather better received:

It’s worth noting that a positive review from a reader certainly doesn’t guarantee publication in our pages, given the enormous volume of submissions we receive. (We’re on track to receive 10,400 during this reading period, in which time we’ll have published 160. You do the math.) But our readers wade through hundreds of submissions every week, not for the money (there’s little to be had), but for the opportunity to be part of the literary community, and for that rare but wonderful occurrence of discovering a new and talented voice.

An “Ellie,” as the National Magazine Awards are known due to the award’s resemblance to an elephant.

Great news from VQR HQ: we took home a National Magazine Award from last night’s ceremony. (And, actually, Ted didn’t take it home–they mail ‘em out later. Because who wants to explain that to airline security?) We won the Single-Topic Issue category for our Fall 2007 issue about South America, co-edited by Ted and Daniel Alarcón. The judges said:

In its provocative and moving issue on South America, The Virginia Quarterly Review presents a multi-faceted portrait of a continent on the move. Created by some of South America’s most daring writers and visual artists, this illuminating collection of fiction and nonfiction is at once surprising and comprehensive, from street soccer and political violence to a comic book journey to Antarctica and the new breed of 21st Century Madonnas.

We were nominated for two other Ellies this year, in the Photojournalism and General Excellence categories. Congratulations to National Geographic and Print, who beat us out in those two categories, respectively.

The entire issue is available online for free. Some brilliant authors, photographers, artists and filmmakers contributed to this issue, and it’s well worth taking the time to see why this issue has received so many accolades.

1) Judging from his profile of Augusten Burroughs, New York Magazine’s Sam Anderson has a second career as a private investigator.

For all I know, [Burroughs has] just memorized a couple of trivial details in order to unleash them on me at exactly this kind of strategic moment.

Now that he’s being brazen, I decide to test him: What else does he remember?

2) The Virginia Law Women sell t-shirts that read, “Be the lawyer your mother always wanted you to marry.” Perhaps VQR needs some that read, “Be the tortured/starving/anemically-published artist your mother never wanted you to marry.” You can undergo years of therapy, or just buy an empowering t-shirt.

3) Porn for the Blind – “Porn for the Blind is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing audio descriptions of sample movie clips from adult web sites. This service is provided free of charge.”

4) Fake authors scam bookstores for cash. What a compelling story. I predict that these fake authors will soon have real book deals.

“Berman speculated that this gang has several members — one black man, one English guy, one woman — to make impersonation easier. “It’s like the Mod Squad or something.”

Vroman’s has hung up on someone claiming to be Ray Bradbury and, in late February, Ramos said, Russell Banks.

5) Cornelia Hesse-Honegger paints bugs mutated by radiation. See her artistic renditions of tree bugs from Chernobyl and harlequin bugs from Three Mile Island.

6) There are more bad writers than good readers. Someone should write a book about this.

“American literature has never been deeper and stronger and more various than it is now,” [Mark McGurl, associate professor of English at UCLA] said in an e-mail message. Still, he added, “one could put that more pessimistically: given the manifold distractions of modern life, we now have more great writers working in the United States than anyone has the time or inclination to read.”

7) Radar puts a chic-lit cover on the Bible.

8) Scientific American calls for “more novels about real scientists.”

A good work of fiction can convey the smells of a laboratory, the colors of a dissected heart, the anxieties of a chemist and the joys of an astronomer—all the illuminating particulars that you won’t find in a peer-reviewed article in Science or Nature.