Since its first issue in 1925, the Virginia Quarterly Review has distinguished itself among literary magazines for its iconoclastic approach to American letters and world affairs. A century later, we’re naturally curious to know what...
In the Sonoran Desert, my brother hands me a revolver. In place of tenderness he tells me to kill a woodpecker. It’s injured, on its back like a sunbather thrashing in a gravel bed.
For more than fifty years, I have been studying and writing about political repression and higher education, with a special emphasis on McCarthyism, long considered by historians to be the most serious assault on academic freedom since the...
My dream of being a professional writer, which I’d been pursuing in earnest since I was a teenager, had objectively come true. This wasn’t misery, not really. This was happiness, hiding. Nevertheless, the nagging dissatisfaction I felt made...
