Virginia Quarterly Review

  • This Week in Essays

    A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    This week, a new Maggie Shipstead story at Virginia Quarterly Review explores love, infidelity, and the ways life can slip from under your feet like an avalanche. Bonus: there is also a literal avalanche. The story, “Backcountry,” follows a twenty-five-year-old…

  • Ice Cream and Shrugging

    Yesterday at the bus stop a fellow creature the gym ladies call “that particular element” asked for a hand—out, job, shake, off. That’s the door being female in public is walking through. It’s a drag, but mostly it’s ice cream…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    It’s July, and the summer issues of literary magazines are rolling off both the physical and cyber presses, including Virginia Quarterly Review, which this week shared a story from its summer print issue online. In “Dixon” by Bret Anthony Johnston,…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    You know it’s fall because of the crisp air, the changing leaves, the decorative gourds, and, most importantly, because the fall issues of literary magazines are launching. This week was Virginia Quarterly Review’s turn. On Monday, its Fall 2015 issue…

  • Percival Everett, Begrudgingly

    Everything is about identity. What is not? Over at VQR, Matthew Dischinger interviews Percival Everett, who expresses his views on the necessity of region and place in literature, good old-fashioned American racism, and his hatred of USA Today.

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    If you’re looking for something to read over the Fourth of July weekend, you’re in luck. This week gave us brand-new issues of Virginia Quarterly Review and PANK to peruse in the beer-buzzed downtime between barbecues and fireworks. VQR’s summer issue…

  • A Postcard from History

    Jessica B. Harris writes about her collection of historic postcards and the unique slice-of-life perspective offered by the 19th century postcard form. Harris has cultivated her postcard collection for decades with a focus on “depicting Africans in their homeland and…

  • The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Erika Meitner

    The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Erika Meitner

    The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Erika Meitner about her new book, Copia, writing about Detroit without writing ruin porn, form, and now-empty shopping malls.

  • Away, But Not Away

    How can writers get a room of their own, literally or figuratively? In Away, an essay in the summer issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Roxana Robinson writes about carving out private space in the midst of being over-saturated by the world around…

  • When the Gospel of Lean Gets Mean

    All of this American productivity, but cui bono? The answer is actually a little harder to get to than it seems. The Virginia Quarterly Review reports:  One might be forgiven for asking what, exactly, all this productivity is for. “We…

  • Literature vs. NYC

    Independent publishers are producing literature, Chris Fischbach writes in the Virginia Quarterly Review, which is not the same thing as what commercial publishers are printing. Fischbach (a publisher at Coffee House Press) goes on to explain a duality similar to that…