The big white flakes sank down from the sagging sky. A wet gray light hung over everything; and the flakes looked gray against it, then turned white as they sank toward the dark earth. The roofs of the few houses along the road looked...
The day care is run out of an old boxing gym where corrugated tin ceilings spread like sky and the glossed cement floors are always cold to the touch. Tucked into a northern corner of Long Beach, far past the beach and not so far past the...
Stucky was not a screenwriter by trade, but the market for historical fiction was poor and it seemed incredible that no one had ever made a biopic about Trotsky. Trotsky was the perfect Hollywood subject. History had conspired to preserve...
Seven years after the dictators left, their luggage stuffed with whorls of clothes and cash, we found out what Mateo Musco really was. We’d all seen him, walking his dogs around the neighborhood, smoking his cigar, letting ash scatter at...
This is a story about heroes. Yes, it is also a profile of a famous man, a “celebrity,” I suppose, but it is first and foremost a story about heroes, what they mean, and the draperies of significance with which we decorate them. The hero in...
Manna Man checks the internet. He glances over the Local sections of over three-hundred small-town weekly newspapers to which he subscribes. He takes notes. He categorizes and tries not to make assumptions. The mail carrier detests Manna...
You followed Oleta Esteban every time you saw her. At the grocery store she was buying frozen peas, milk and bread, chicken broth, two bananas. Is this what women ate after they lost their children? Oleta looked as if she scavenged crumbs...
Chris Ware contributes the second installment of “Jordan W. Lint,” a “serialized pictorial fiction,” to the Spring 2008 issue of VQR. Ware’s new project tells the story of the fictional Jordan W. Lint by illustrating single days from each...
In 1917 she met the rancher and entrepreneur Sebastian Mendiluce, twenty years her senior. Everyone was surprised when they announced their engagement, after only a few months. According to people who knew him at the time, Mendiluce thought...
