VQR Online

An exclusive front-line report.

The talk-show host recurses into himself, courtesy of Lawrence Lessig.

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.

Autumn and its thousand adjectives have come
to this, a swither in the trees,
their limbs bronchial and backlit in the gloam.

Radovan Karadžić must have enjoyed being nobody. After so many years under the limelight of NATO, UN, EU, CIA, and ICTY, he was probably getting a bit sweaty and fame-weary, eager to step down from the stage and hide among the dark mass of...

 I thought of waiting until tomorrow to begin but decided that elegies are better written in the middle of the night—and an elegy for Mahmoud Darwish is best written in a country where one feels foreign, gazing at a dark horizon with a...

The best poetry of the year counted down.