VQR is featuring selected work from our archives in honor of Veteran’s Day. Brian Turner’s “My Life as a Foreign Country,” from the Fall 2011 issue, is also the title essay of his new memoir, out now from Norton.
The more they’ve been shrinking, the bigger it’s been getting, though maybe that’s the wrong way to put it. The world’s great coral reefs, that is, and in particular Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, on the one hand—and, on the other, the...
Moby-Dick is not about Moby-Dick. Not really. The white whale makes his appearance, of course. We have been promised that much. Moby-Dick emerges, finally, at the end of Melville’s great novel, in the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean.
One October afternoon in downtown Miami, I met up for a Sunday drive with Peter Zalewski, a condo-slinger whose company, Condo Vultures, has been feeding on the remains of Miami’s real estate implosion. “This is the pit,” he said. “New York...