VQR Online

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.

If a dirty bomb attack ever occurs, the radiological material is apt to come from the land of Chernobyl

The Soviets detonated hundreds of bombs in Kazakhstan in preparation for a nuclear war that never came.

Bill and Lyla had graduated, gotten married, and departed directly for Europe. Lyla’s parents had given them a thousand dollars to spend on a honeymoon, sowing the seeds for months of argument. Bill wanted an adventure, but Lyla, who had...

Surviving the Soviet Hangover in the former USSR’s last dictatorship.

All I can do
to keep from believing
where, in truth, your last steps led,