VQR Online

The 65-year-old author of “The Concubine” was held for about 21 hours earlier this week.

The winners of the Emily Clark Balch Prizes (for fiction and poetry) and the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction.

Mark Doty, Billy Collins, and Robert Pinsky get excited about a Thomas Hardy poem, plus CAPTCHA poetry, classifying profanity, and more.

I’d put up $20 that one of these six books will make the NYT Best Books of 2009.

What if it were not
such a tragedy
to outlive
one’s nation,

Maira Alejandra Martínez Suarez is sweeping away another layer of dirt when the bullets come flying overhead. She’s twenty-six years old, and with her French braid tucked under a brand-new baseball cap, she looks more like a rec-league...

Aging women mourn while they go to market,
buy fish, figs, tomatoes, enough today to
feed the wolf asleep underneath the table
who wakes from what dream?

“Angel at the Fence” again raises the question of the rules of memoir.