words
Eclectic, heterogeneous, multifarious—spiffy words that, either by themselves or lined up like cherries on a slot machine, can’t truly capture the range of material in any given issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review. Trying to absorb it all seems to produce a mass of tiny bubbles in the brain, and the only way to keep from drowning in them is to resort to a compressed list of reactions. Let’s call the following not a David Letterman Top 10, but an Oprah and Uma Top 5 Reasons To Read the Latest Edition of VQR:
 Now 50 percent more eclectic! The latest VQR features stimulating essays and fiction from a Nobel Prize recipient, a former Marine and a famous dead guy. |
5. Mark Ehrman’s “Borders and Barriers.” Part of a VQR Portfolio about (mostly Mexican/American) border issues called “Drawing the Line,” this essay argues that walls have never worked as political-problem-solving devices. Sounds boring? Ehrman takes the reader on a mental journey from Berlin to the West Bank to medieval France and has him scaling the heights of anthropological bad wisdom in search of a finer world. What could be more bracing than that?
4. Mark Twain’s “The Walt Whitman Controversy.” Yes, that’s the Mark Twain. This previously unpublished, mock letter to the editor asks the question: How can you censor certain passages in Whitman’s poems when great writers from Boccaccio to Rabelais to Shakespeare to Swift have been attempting to shock the benumbed reading public for years? Or, as Twain puts it in his famously crisp, derisive, sardonic and finally indescribable way: “Which are more harmful, the old bad books or the new bad books?”
3. David J. Morris’ “The Image as History: Clint Eastwood’s Unmaking of an American Myth.” This essay by a former Marine, centered on Eastwood’s film Flags of Our Fathers, explains how Eastwood avoids fetishizing combat violence by employing a narrative method that “seems to mimic post-traumatic stress disorder.” It’s a solid look at the flimsy bridge between patriotism and war.
2. Nadine Gordimer’s “The Second Sense.” Though this isn’t Gordimer’s best short story, and cowers under the heft and unremitting virtuosity of the Nobel Prize-winner’s novels, it’s one more instance of her rare ability to offer substance without forgoing style.
1. Alessandera Lynch’s “The Mice of the Mother’s House” and “Carousel.” These poems might remind some readers of revisiting a Brothers Grimm story as an adult and seeing straight through the innocent artifice to the tortuous psychology. Macabre, harrowing, ghoulish…you name it.