Editor's Desk

• Ted Genoways — On the Necessity of Negative Capability

Dispatch

• Tom Bissell and Morgan Meis — After the Fall
• Erik Campbell — Shirtless Days: On Living and Writing in the Jungles of Papua

Essay

• Steve Almond — I Learned It All the Hard Way
• Lindsley Cameron — Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the World Sixty Years Later
• Pauline W. Chen — Dead Enough?: The Paradox of Brain Death
• Stanley Plumly — Cold Pastoral

VQR Gallery

• Oscar Muñoz — Project for a Memorial
• Art Spiegelman — Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! (Installment #1)
• Lawrence Weschler — Unfinished: On Vincent Desiderio’s Sleep

Play

• Tony Kushner — A Prayer for New York

Fiction

• Alan Heathcock — Peacekeeper
• Joyce Carol Oates — Smother
• R. T. Smith — Ina Grove

Poetry

• Dan Albergotti — Revision
• Aaron Baker — Commission
• Jennifer Chang — Obedience, or The Lying Tale
• Geri Doran — Caliban to the Lovers
• Diane Furtney — The Nights in June and Lovers’ Conversation
• Steve Gehrke — Michelangelo’s Seizure, Self-Portrait with Doctor, and Goya at the Madhouse
• Robert Gibb — An End to the Marriage: My Stepmother Buys Twin Beds
• Karin Gottshall — The Exile’s Tale
• Jeffrey Levine — Cleaning Out the Gutters
• William Logan — Apologia pro Vita Sua
• Katherine Soniat — Red Again
• Lisa Russ Spaar — Keats House and Stairwell, Rio Road
• Sharmila Voorkkara — Jane Doe
• C. Dale Young — Late Poem

Book Reviews

• Book Notes
  
• William Logan — The Most Contemptible Moth: Lowell in Letters

Humor

• Ross MacDonald — Dead-Eye Comic