For nearly thirty years, the Berlin Wall—a ninety-six-mile partition that separated West Berlin from Soviet-controlled Germany surrounding it—was the Cold War’s geopolitical line in the sand. But by 1989, the Soviet Union was weakening, and...
You borrow a book from a friend, knowing full well that you’ll never return it. You sleep with another friend’s spouse. You drink too much at a party, then drive home, merrily exceeding the speed limit.
Joseph Brodsky—the Joseph addressed in the epigraph—once said that when you hear Derek Walcott’s voice, “the world unravels.” It is a voice concomitant with the sea, and by connection, history.
He is not much read today, but when his book Talents and Geniuses appeared in 1957, the exemplary public intellectual Gilbert Highet could count on two things.
Not long ago, Syria’s prospects were looking good—tourism was rising, restrictions on the economy were being relaxed, and a historically icy relationship with the United States was (very) slowly thawing out. But the Arab Spring protests...
On April 1, 2014, Andrew Chastain joined Jack Hitt onstage at the Institute Library in New Haven, Connecticut, as part of the ongoing series “Amateur Hour,” in which various tinkerers, zealots, and collectors discuss their obsessions...
VQR Editor Charlotte Kohler chose Nadine Gordimer’s short story “The Catch” for publication in the Summer 1951 issue. It was the young South African writer’s first letter of acceptance for publication in an American magazine. Some forty...
