Twenty years ago, the most grandiose political and social experiment of the twentieth century, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, came to an end. It was a slow and painful death; there was no Soviet 9/11, no sudden implosion of...
VQR is featuring selected work from our archives in honor of Veteran’s Day. Brian Turner’s “My Life as a Foreign Country,” from the Fall 2011 issue, is also the title essay of his new memoir, out now from Norton.
For twenty dollars, this dude named Byron promised to beat the crap out of you. That’s pretty much what the flyer said, and the flyer was all over the neighborhood. The first one we noticed was up high on the half-dead palm tree in front of...