The Business of Literature

• Richard Nash on the publishing industry, technology, and future of the book
• A VQR conversation with innovators Andy Hunter, Simon Lipskar, Amy O’Leary, Evan Ratliff, and John Tayman on how writers can flourish in the digital age
• Kevin Young on the damaging impact of fake memoirs
• Fiction by Percival Everett, Randall Kenan, Bobbie Ann Mason, Danzy Senna, and Elizabeth Strout
• Julia Cooke on the fine line between friendship and journalism in Havana

Classic Hollywood

• Jesse Dukes on filmmaking in Tunisia from Star Wars through the Arab Spring
• Chip Hayes on his education on the set of Satan's School for Girls
• Photo essays on the Hindi film industry, the architecture of John Lautner, and the lives of stunt doubles
• New fiction by Vsevolod Benigsen (translated by Reed Johnson), Manuel Gonzales, and N. M. Kelby

The Female Conscience

• What does it mean to have a female conscience? Although it's hard to put a finger on it, we recognize it in the people around us, and in the women featured in this issue.
• Marie Arana reports on a girl's education in a mining town in the Peruvian Andes
• Judith Warner explores whether too much mothering is bad for us
• Sylvia A. Earle explores the world's oceans and sea life

Burma Exhales

• Aung San Suu Kyi and democracy may have pushed Burma from an isolated nation to a potential partner to the rest of the world. Original reporting and photojournalism offer insight into pro-democracy activists, rebel camps, and ruling generals.
• New fiction by Madison Smartt Bell and Edith Pearlman

American Poetry: A Special Issue

• Walt Whitman in Washington, commemorating America's poet during the Civil War, with essays by David Baker, Linda Gregerson, Stanley Plumly, and Ann Townsend—plus an unpublished letter by Walt Whitman
• The State of American Poetry: an examination of our splintered traditions
• William Logan on Elizabeth Bishop at summer camp
• David Caplan on hip-hop and the art of the rhymed insult

The Horn's Dilemma: Mogadishu, Hargeisa, Dadaab, Nairobi, & Arusha

• Jason Florio on facing Mogadishu
• Tom Sleigh on Somalian refugees in Nairobi
• Major Jackson's poems on the Dadaab Refugee Camp
• Tyler Stiem on Somalia's struggle toward a democratic future
• Elliott D. Woods on the Egyptian revolution
• Anthony Ham on the Libyan revolution
• Fiction by Daniel Alarcón and Ru Freeman

The Soviet Ghost: Twenty Years After the Collapse

• Maria P. Vassileva on Chernobyl's resurrection
• Steve Featherstone on loose nukes in Ukraine
• Jason Motlagh on the Soviet hangover in Belarus
• Dimiter Kenarov on getting arrested by the KGB
• Fiction by Alan Heathcock, Kseniya Melnik, and Maggie Shipstead

Our Threatened Fisheries

• Donovan Webster on Iceland cod fishing
• Jesse Dukes on lobster fishing in Maine
• Bart DiFiore on the Atlantic bluefin tuna
• Ruxandra Guidi on rising sea levels
• Annie Murphy on the salmon farms of Patagonia<
• Lawrence Weschler on Margaret Wertheim's crocheted coral reefs

Ruin & Rebirth
• Elliott D. Woods on Cairo's trash pickers
• Meera Subramanian on the collapse of India's vulture population
• J. Malcolm Garcia on the aftereffects of the Balad burn pit
• Paul Reyes on Miami's condo market
• Poetry by Kwame Dawes and Erika Meitner
• Fiction by Fabrizio Mejía Madrid and Benjamin Percy

LOOKbetween
A Special Issue of Emerging Photographers
Featuring Christopher Capozziello, Maisie Crow, Kevin German, Andrea Gjestvang, Tim Hussin, Ian Nichols, Thomas P. Peschak, Joe Riis, Gabriele Stabile, Susan Worsham