Virginia Quarterly Review

The Virginia Quarterly Review is a literary magazine published four times a year. It was founded in 1925 by James Southall Wilson, who was invited to create it by E. A. Alderman, the president of the University of Virginia. Known as a "National Journal of Literature and Discussion," the magazine features a variety of content including poetry, fiction, book reviews, essays, photography, and comics.

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Fall 2024 | VQR

Nov 1, 2024 | vqronline.org | Meera Subramanian |Carlo Rotella |Sarah Khatry |Bethanne Patrick

This issue presents a collection of nonfiction held together by the first-person singular, that lynchpin pronoun that can be the conduit to some larger idea, or the confidences of an inner life. Andrew Hudgins offers a wry diary of the days following his wife’s foot surgery. Meera Subramanian recounts her experience donating a kidney to a friend’s boyfriend, someone who ignored his poor health until it led to crisis.
A Tempo

Nov 1, 2024 | vqronline.org | Carlo Rotella

In music, as in just about everything else, time is the final container. It’s the biggest Russian doll because everything goes in it and it doesn’t necessarily go in anything. You can play in time without playing in harmony—by keeping the beat, for instance—but when you play in harmony you inevitably play in time as well, since the notes you play ring true only in relation to other notes sounded before, after, and at the same time.
Time Out of Time

Nov 1, 2024 | vqronline.org | Bethanne Patrick

I was perched, fully clothed, on Erich Honecker’s toilet seat, hoping for the night to end. My friend Isa was turning fifty and she’d invited every Berliner of her acquaintance from the over three decades she’d lived in the city to her birthday party. But it was 3 a.m., and the attendees seemed to have gone past their second winds, onto third and fourth winds. Beer after beer after gin-und-tonic after bottle of mineral water were gulped.
Accomack Spit, The Protected Land

Nov 1, 2024 | vqronline.org | Forrest Gander

Bay-facing scarps to the east bound beds of yellow-orange sand and sedge. And broken mollusk valvesstud the loamy fill in this paleochannel of the Susquehanna. Pollen records tell of pine, spruce, and birch— temperate daysfollowing the violent whoomph of a bolide that scooped out Chesapeake Bay, leaving a craterto fill first with seawater and then fresh as hundreds of new rivers gushed from the continent’s mangled edge.
Memories of Distant Mountains

Nov 1, 2024 | vqronline.org | Orhan Pamuk

Fifty years ago, the writer Orhan Pamuk tried to kill the painter Orhan Pamuk. He threw away his watercolors and brushes. He mocked his technique. He declared that Orhan Pamuk would be a novelist and a novelist alone. He lived like this for many years, years in which his success and fame exceeded his wildest dreams. But the writer could never shake the sense that he had yet to prove himself apart from the books he wrote.
Experiments in Light

Nov 1, 2024 | vqronline.org | Sarah Khatry

This is a type of love story, between scientist and subject, between physicist and the laws of the universe. I am nine years old in the computer lab of my public elementary school, and projected against the pull-down screen is a digital visualization of the Mandelbrot set, a famous example of the fractal. It is a set of complex numbers that satisfy a seemingly simple function and set of conditions, but when visualized in a 2D plane, a startling form reveals itself.
Image Problems

Oct 31, 2024 | vqronline.org | Jordan P. Hickey

1. “It’s twenty-six thousand cars a day going up and down that road,” Tim Poynter told me as we sat in the small office he shares with the breakroom fridge at Crockett Outdoor Media. “People will see your ad. It will work.” He wasn’t wrong. There are few places better suited to be the poster child for billboard advertising than Harrison, Arkansas, which was dubbed “the most racist town in America” after a string of racist billboards appeared there beginning in October 2013.
I Take You Out

Oct 31, 2024 | vqronline.org | Lauren Green

Among tall silver birches. Dogs yipping beyond the timberline. In my bag, a clementine for us to split. The river’s image trembles as you dip your foot in, raking the pebbles back and forth till silt rises to the surface. Memory’s solace loses fast its shine. Halved, the clementine resembles two lungs. I take each in my hands, a child showing off caught snow. In this moment, neither of us is dead. Time—mine, at least—is endless. I give you the unbruised half to right the balance. Days unravel.
A Measure of Gratitude

Oct 31, 2024 | vqronline.org | Meera Subramanian

We were two women on either side of thirty throwing punches at one another’s faces in a concrete stairwell abuzz with florescent light. Our instructor showed us how to make a fist (thumbs on the outside), take aim, and put our weight into the shot. I threw punches at her first. She was younger than I was by a handful of years and just as racially ambiguous. Then it was her turn, and I jerked my head to the side to dodge impact, heard the whoosh of fist through air. Fight Club for girls.
A Soviet Jew Walks Into a Bar in Harlem

Aug 9, 2024 | vqronline.org | Anna Badkhen

My boyfriend doesn’t really drink but he loves bars. He likes talking to strangers (he’s a sales executive) and he likes talking to strangers at bars; I hate talking to strangers but I like listening, and I like listening to him do it, how smoothly he runs conversations. The first time we went to New York together he took me to Red Rooster. This Red Rooster is a recent thing, named after the iconic speakeasy where he used to go before moving out of Harlem in the eighties.