Virginia Quarterly Review
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The State of American Poetry
If you liked David Biepsiel’s State of American Poetry address, here’s a nice counterpart by Natasha Trethewey at the Virginia Quarterly Review. “Despair about the place of poetry in American culture is nothing new,” she begins, and goes on to…
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Namibian Fashion Spools Out a Whole World of Meaning
To many Americans, fashion is a frivolous distraction. To many women in Namibia, it’s an expression of identity hammered out of years of tradition, culture, colonialism, and genocide. Catherine E. McKinley writes about it in fascinating detail for the Virginia Quarterly…
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“Revolutionary, Disruptive Technology”: The Business of Books
What is particularly crucial to understand is that books were not dragged kicking and screaming into each new area of capitalism. Books not only are part and parcel of consumer capitalism, they virtually began it. In an essay for the Virginia…
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Why Celebrity Gossip Is Actually Kind of Important
Here’s something to look forward to: Anne Helen Petersen’s “Scandals of Classic Hollywood” column, which we blogged about previously, is becoming a book! If you simply can’t wait for the publishing-industry process to put that book in your hands, you…
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Let Us Now Raze Famous Men
A Rumpus Meditation on Editors, Ambition, and Angry Dependence (in 33 loosely jointed parts): 1. On July 30, the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Kevin Morrissey, took his life. His note stated that he “just couldn’t bear it…
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What Happens When Literary Journals Report The News?
With newspapers folding and cutting corners all around the country, it’s easy to give up entirely on the fourth estate. But now look who’s riding in on their white horse: those writers you newspaper types wouldn’t give jobs to before…
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VQR Interviews Michelle Orange
The Rumpus’s own Michelle Orange has a contribution in the Virginia Quarterly Review‘s most recent issue. The piece, entitled “Beirut Rising,” “entertains with its amusing depiction of the Lebanese passion for plastic surgery, but the essay also penetrates deep into…