Editor's Desk

• Ted Genoways — If It Amounts to Torture

VQR Portfolio

• J. Malcolm Garcia — All the Country Will Be Shaking
• David J. Morris — Trophy Town
• Nicholas Schmidle — Democracy is Not a Postcard
• Neil Shea and Andrea Bruce — Ramadi Nights

Essay

• Roberto Bolaño — The Corridor with No Apparent Exit
• Jane Hirshfield — Justice: Four Windows
• Floyd Skloot — When the Clock Stops
• Marcela Valdes — His Stupid Heart

VQR Symposium

• Daniel Alarcón — American Labasha
• Breyten Breytenbach — Looking for the Road
• Ted Genoways — I Make Myself Unimportant: A Symposium on the Life and Work of Ryszard Kapuściński
• Werner Herzog — What Was Worst
• Jerzy M. Nowak — Self-Immolation
• Lawrence Weschler and Salman Rushdie — The Emperor's Deathbed: An Exchange

Web Exclusive

• Alan Brody — Revisiting Afghanistan: A Conversation with Najibullah
• J. Malcolm Garcia — That Is All Of Me
• Asim Rafiqui — Letters from a Jilted Lover
• Nicholas Schmidle — We Are Ready to Die

VQR Gallery

• Fernando Botero — Botero's Abu Ghraib
• Daniel Heyman — Art Born of the Need to Tell
• Chris Ware — Jordan W. Lint, Installment #1

Fiction

• Drew Johnson — The Last Dead
• Alejandro Zambra and Carolina De Robertis — Bonsai

Poetry

• Oliver de la Paz — Nocturne with a Dictator
• Albert Goldbarth — The Poppy Fields of Afghanistan
• Garrett Hongo — Kubota Writes to José Arcadio Buendía
• Adam Kirsch — After the rabbi's game repeating back and The Gothic silhouette and flying spire
• Patricia Lockwood — I. Or, the Anchorite Who is Dying By Degrees, II. Or, the Confessor Who Greens the Garden, and III. Or, the Illuminator Who Reads to Islanders
• William Logan — Dante's Folly
• Elisabeth Murawski — Dirge
• D.A. Powell — continental divide
• Jacques Prévert and Norman Shapiro — Family Scene and The Sledgehammer Argument of General Massu
• Lisa Russ Spaar — Empty Nest
• Craig Morgan Teicher — The Prisoner, The First Fire, and Raised by Wolves
• Stefi Weisburd — José Sanchez's First Week in the Cell
• George Witte — The Blister

Book Reviews

• Book Notes
  
• Philip Connors — Denis Johnson's Higher Power

Humor

• Ross MacDonald — Dead-Eye Comic