On June 17, 1951, natives of the Ukrainian village Liskuvate began parting ways with everything they’d ever known. Earlier that year, the Soviet Union put a plan in motion to acquire Polish land that held valuable coal deposits.
As a bookish child in the Pennsylvania suburbs, I won the school spelling bee without quite meaning to, startled and delighted to hear an adult with a microphone intoning aloud words I’d only read in books—it’s mis-led, not mizzled?—as...
Like the pirates and revolutionaries of legend, heads spiked atop the great bridge spanning the great city, I am now a head without a body. Maybe the body ran away while I was sleeping, slamming headless into walls and doors. Maybe my body...
We read Paradise Lost my senior year of high school in Mr. P’s AP English class. Mr. P was married to my first-year English teacher, whose maiden name was often confused in my mind with the delicate membrane, sought after and highly...
For all the intentionality behind each issue of VQR, there are plenty of accidents and unexpected outcomes that happen along the way. Half of them are lucky; the rest we wrestle with until they fit the larger puzzle. Every magazine...
Barry was six-foot-six, fifteen like me, floating layups and hook shots over our heads through the hoop in my driveway. We called him Big Bird for dwarfing us, for his slappy feet, for the mouth that hung in a grin at all
