Editor's Desk

• Ted Genoways — The Quandary of Oil in Africa

VQR Portfolio

• J. Malcolm Garcia — African Promise: Chad, August-September 2006
• John Ghazvinian — The Curse of Oil
• Chris Hondros — The Fire: The Price of Oil in Africa
• Nicholas Shaxson — What Caring Neighbors Do

Dispatch

• David J. Morris and Reynaldo Leal — The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground

Essay

• David Caplan — Ethical Suffering: On the Work of Alan Shapiro
• Pauline W. Chen — Morbidity and Mortality: A Surgeon Under Exam
• J. Hoberman — Laugh, Cry, Believe: Spielbergization and Its Discontents
• Walter Mosley — Gray Shawl
• David Rieff — Remembering Susan Sontag

VQR Symposium

• David Baker — "I'm Nobody": Lyric Poetry and the Problem of People
• Linda Gregorson — Life Among Others
• Stanley Plumley — A Place for People in Lyric Poetry
• Ann Townsend — A Mind for Metaphors

VQR Gallery

• Harry Berger, Jr. — Supposing Rembrandt's The Night Watch
• Charles Burns — One Eye
• David Opdyke and Lawrence Weschler — Miniature Monuments: The Sculptures of David Opdyke
• Art Spiegelman — Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! (Installment #4)

Fiction

• Daniel Alarcón — A Circus at the Center of the World
• Peter Nadas — A Tale of Fire and Knowledge

Poetry

• Allen Braden — Detail of the Four Chambers to the Horse's Heart
• Debra Bruce — Late Winter Lesson
• Gary Fincke — The Possibilities for Wings
• Mirian Levine — In the Magnifying Glass
• George Looney — A Kind of Restoration
• Glyn Maxwell — January
• Paisley Rekdal — The Lecturer Discusses Edward Curtis's Vash Gon and Edward Curtis's Lewis and Clark's Landing Place at Nihhluidih
• Alan Shapiro — Country Western Singer, Poet, Dentist, and Family Man
• C. Dale Young — Sepsis and Deus ex machina

Book Reviews

• Book Notes
  
• Jack R. Fischel — The Crimes of My Enemy
• George Scialabba — How Was It Possible?

Humor

• Ross MacDonald — Dead-Eye Comic