Summer 2022

The third installment of our biannual Summer fiction issue brings together an eclectic mix of stories showcasing a range of modes and voices, featuring fiction from the confessional to the surreal. All the stories here share a disposition to exercising different kinds of tension, which manifests in hard ethical choices, the impulse and consequences of betrayal, even a tension between realism and the fantastical. Complementing the special fiction section is an essay on the promises and shortcomings of English as a second language (in particular, as the language of new beginning for migrants in Europe) along with a photo portfolio on the unsettling sublimity of an evangelical mecca in the Ozarks.
Summer 2022

Volume 98, Number 2

Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2022 cover
Print: $20.00
Digital download: $20.00

Table of contents

Essays 
Photography 
Fiction 
Poetry 
#VQRTrueStory 
Art & The Archive 
Editor's Desk 
Drawing It Out 
Open Letter 

Contributor Profiles

Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry, 2020), with poems featured in the New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, and Poetry Unbound.

Jenna Garrett’s work has been featured in the New York Times and WIRED. Garrett is a Silver Eye Fellowship Award honoree, Critical Mass finalist, and CATALYST mentee.

Agostino Iacurci has been commissioned for monumental wall paintings and installations for public and private institutions.

Laura Kolbe is a writer, physician, and medical ethicist in New York City. Her debut poetry collection, Little Pharma (Pittsburgh, 2021), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize.

Ling Ma is author of the novel Severance (FSG, 2018) and the story collection Bliss Montage (FSG, 2022). Her writing has received the Kirkus Prize, a Whiting Award, and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. 

Jess Row’s most recent books are Your Face in Mine (Riverhead, 2015) and White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination (Graywolf, 2019), a collection of essays.

Spring 2024 Cover; Photo by Mathias Depardon
Spring 2024
Volume 100, Number 1
Fiction Issue Cover. Photo by Adam Ekberg.
Fiction 2024
Volume 100, Number 2
Fall 2024 Cover. Illustration by Johanna Goodman.
Fall 2024
Volume 100, Number 3
Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring/Summer 2023 cover
Spring/Summer 2023
Volume 99, Number 1