Essays

ESSAYS / Spring 2012

The Art of the Rhymed Insult

By David Caplan

In insult verse, the accuracy of the charge matters less than its confident presentation. To be assertive is to be right; to be memorable is to win.

 

ESSAYS / Spring 2012

Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp

By William Logan
ESSAYS / Fall 2011

A Monument to Forgetting

By Morgan Meis

How one disaster at Katyn helped us move past another

ESSAYS / Fall 2011

The Resurrection

Just outside Chernobyl’s exclusion zone, a generation of children has grown up wondering about the future.
ESSAYS / Fall 2011

A Threat to Public Order

How My Love of Belarusian Tractors Got Me Arrested by the KGB

Photography by Jason Motlagh
ESSAYS / Fall 2011

The Lovely Sea

A generation ago, a Soviet dam drained the Aral Sea. Can a new dam reclaim it?

MEMOIR / Fall 2011

What is Gone

By Amy Knox Brown ,  Photography by Mary Anne Andrei
ESSAYS / Fall 2011

All That Remains

By Elliott D. Woods

One Afghan Refugee’s Quest to Recover the Past.

Sherifullah, eleven, and Abdel Basit, eight, stand on one of the upper floors of the Russian Palace of Culture, which was heavily shelled during the mujahidin civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal. Until recently, the bombed out buildings sheltered homeless Afghans and heroin addicts. Efforts by the Russian government to rehabilitate the cultural center are underway.
ESSAYS / Fall 2011

My Life as a Foreign Country

By Brian Turner

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.

ESSAYS / Summer 2011

The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef

By Lawrence Weschler

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...