The Virginia Quarterly Review back issues from July 2006:
DEATH OF A WORTHLESS MAN: AN ESSAY
Jul 01, 2006; ... There was a time when I thought the Serbs would never get rid of Milosevic. Dictators give the impression of permanence. They convince themselves and the rest of us that they are going to be around forever. "Long live," their enthusiastic followers keep shouting. Even the night Milosevic was ...
The Lessons of History
Jul 01, 2006; ... On May 21, the people of Montenegro voted to secede from Serbia. The European Union had insisted that it would not recognize Montenegro's independence unless at least 50% of Montenegrins turned out to vote and of those at least 55% cast their vote for secession. The hurdle was high but the ...
MILOSEVIC IN RETROSPECT: AN ESSAY
Jul 01, 2006; ... Looking back at it now, the death of Slobodan Milosevic seems of a piece with his life. When he reigned supreme in the Balkans, even those who claimed to know him well-and outside his immediate family circle, they were few-could never say with certainty who the "genuine" Slobodan Milosevic ...
THE LITTLE BOX THAT CONTAINS THE WORLD: SERBIA AFTER THE DEATH OF MILOSEVIC: AN ESSAY
Jul 01, 2006; ... I had taken them for hookers, but they were just ordinary smugglers. Mid-thirties, peroxide hair, tight counterfeit Levi's and pink blouses: the two women eyed me with suspicion as I settled back in the shabby carmine plush of my seat. The Sofia-Belgrade train was not to leave for another ten ...
Madonna del parto
Jul 01, 2006; ... Chi è hitija, chi è hitija, the angry driver shouted. A classmate had thrown a stone pinecone, which ricocheted off the asphalt and struck the window of the bus. As the smaller one, out of collective guilt, I pissed myself. I. G. Plame introduced this, ...
Kubota to Miguel Hernández in Heaven, Leupp, Arizona, 1942
Jul 01, 2006; ... The sun travels slowly from over the top of this adobe stockade And, when I finally wake and pull my face to the bars At my window, I see a gray light filling in the shadows Between the mess and guard quarters And among river stones on the sides of the central ...
BENEATH US, THE GROUND STILL MOVES
Jul 01, 2006; ... PAKISTAN, APRIL 2006 IN THE HAZY AFTERNOON LIGHT I walk past row after row of tan Pakistan Army tents, taut and erect and aligned, past row after row of aluminum toilet stalls and water dispensers and parched ground. My translator, Tahir, shoos children away, stops them from clutching my ...
ORDINARY OUTSIDERS
Jul 01, 2006; ... A Symposium on Alice Munro Alice Munro is the consummate reviser. Her story "Home" appears here for the first time in the United States, but it is a story that Munro has been working on for more than thirty years. Originally published in New Canadian Stories '74, the story's structure ...
Appreciations of Alice Munro
Jul 01, 2006; ... Michael Cunningham, novelist Alice Munro tells the large stories of people whose lives are outwardly small. Rarely does she write about the exceptional outsider. She is a great champion of ordinary outsiders, of people who in small and crucial ways don't fit, who need a better life than ...
Some Stories Have to Be Told by Me
Jul 01, 2006; ... A Literary History of Alice Munro Sometime in the late 19705, Alice Munro made a policy of refusing prizes that didn't specifically honor the quality of her fiction. When the Canadian government offered her one of its highest honors in 1983-an appointment as an Officer of the Order of ...
HOME: a story
Jul 01, 2006; ... I come home as I have done several times in the past year, traveling on three buses. The first bus is large, air-conditioned, fast, and comfortable. People on it pay little attention to each other. They look out at the highway traffic, which the bus negotiates with superior ease. We travel west ...
Anorexic, Farmers' Market
Jul 01, 2006; ... All around her, we sounded melons, practiced at hearing what we couldn't see, pretending not to notice when she stopped at the stall where the Amish displayed their loaves of zucchini and pumpkin bread, hand-thick oatmeal cookies, pecan pies all wrapped in ...
Piano Fire
Jul 01, 2006; ... How she must have dreaded us and our sweaty coins, more than we hated practice, the lessons, scales, the winter-hot parlor, her arthritic hands, the metronome's awful tick. She lectured to us about the history of the piano: baby and concert grand, spinet and ...
Politics: America's Missing Constitutional Link
Jul 01, 2006; ... It's manifestly obvious. The last thing the United States needs is more politics. Or so the American people, who hate politics, believe. And on this point, alas, they are very wrong. One reason citizens dislike politics is that the political system doesn't work terribly well, but it doesn't work ...
(LONG LIVE THE NOVEL)
Jul 01, 2006; ... It seems that every six months we're forced to endure yet another report on the Death of the Novel, or Failure of the Novel, or the Shrinking Audience for the Novel, or-conversely but not coincidentally-the Rise of Nonfiction. As such, we shouldn't be irked by these reports, any more than we ...
The Vacationers
Jul 01, 2006; ... A Story Margaret strolled the edge of the sidewalk, head tilted back. Office buildings disappeared above, black rectangles and silver corners widening into a yellow cloud ceiling. Set in this scale she felt shrunk down and lightened, as though she might float up along the edges of the ...
Dark Theater
Jul 01, 2006; ... Make no mistake: when you were born, the world did not want you. Did not need another with precisely your dormant talents. Stars shone of their own accord, not because of you, as they say in songs someone will one day play for you, looking ...
First Night
Jul 01, 2006; ... for Rohan My first night home, after we'd kissed a long time then drunk half a bottle of wine, tasting summer orchard heavy with the heat they say you must pass through to enter the gates of heaven, removing your shoes and ...
Leaving Hawk Mountain
Jul 01, 2006; ... I longed to teach the child the pinheaded oscillating glide of the turkey buzzard, nimble serene accipiter, chunky-tailed spiraling buteo and scissoring merlin, osprey lofted like a spark, bold V of a harrier locking the ...
Not Sumerian
Jul 01, 2006; ... They tried to stop her dying. The son with the money tried-he shoveled it by the trainload into her lungs. The daughter made herself an expert in the illness, to erase it on its own terms: still it stayed, it grew, and as you know the eraser soon starts ...
Urbs et Orbis
Jul 01, 2006; ... Each stone uncovered, the gift of figures hundred and fifty, two hundred years ago, foundation for creekside mill or barn, or silo, sledded then rolled into place. Buried by default of earth and rain again, at this rebirth the stones are saying ...
In Filling Out the Form
Jul 01, 2006; ... A triple dactyl for John Hollander Dazzle me fascinate: Practically nobody Does so in triplicate Verse anymore Socioculturally Not a surprise and yet I'd've thought somebody'd Keep it in store. Now is the time to ...
My Mother and the Dahlia
Jul 01, 2006; ... an essay Motion pictures pervade the culture far more broadly and immediately than books. It's a quick-march progression of advance publicity and saturation screen-time. My signature novel will now be a film in wide release. The film will possibly expedite book sales in ...
Purity, Restraint, Stillness
Jul 01, 2006; ... Celebrating the painter Elstir, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time suggests that for the great artist, the work of painting and the act of being alive are indistinguishable. For each of us, says Proust, there may be "certain bodies, certain callings, certain rhythms that are specially ...
Euphorias of Perrier: The Case Against Robert D. Kaplan
Jul 01, 2006; ... Euphorias of Perrier: The Case Against Robert D. Kaplan [A]n embattled democracy ... soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision on everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all ...
Turning to Memoir
Jul 01, 2006; ... Turning to Memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion. Knopf, 2005. $23.95 All Will Be Well, by John McGahern. Knopf, 2006. $25.00 Let Me Finish, by Roger Angell. Harcourt, 2006. $25.00 In December of 1988, when I was forty-one, I contracted a virus that targeted ...
On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era
Jul 01, 2006; ... On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era, edited by Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone. Feminist Press , November 2005. $18.95 paper Fourteen distinguished scholars discuss how the interconnected web of economic globalization, transnational networks in new information technology, and the ...
Power, Justice, and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement
Jul 01, 2006; ... CURRENT EVENTS Power, Justice, and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement, edited by David Naguib Pellow and Robert J. Brulle. MIT, November 2005. $25 paper In the 1970s and '80s scholars and activists began to publicize correlations of exposure to ...
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830
Jul 01, 2006; ... HISTORY Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830, by J. H. Elliott. Yale, May 2006. $35 Sir John Elliott, the undisputed dean of Hispanic New World and Golden Age historians, brings his formidable knowledge to bear on this important topic. His access to ...
To Rescue My Native Land: The Civil War Letters of William T. Shepherd, First Illinois Light Artillery
Jul 01, 2006; ... To Rescue My Native Land: The Civil War Letters of William T. Shepherd, First Illinois Light Artillery, edited by Kurt H. Hackemer. Tennessee, April 2006. $42 The Voices of the Civil War series by the University of Tennessee Press has presented a number of first-rate Union and ...
Two Confederate Hospitals and Their Patients: Atlanta to Opelika
Jul 01, 2006; ... Two Confederate Hospitals and Their Patients: Atlanta to Opelika, by Jack D.Welsh. Mercer, March 2006. $35 This volume offers, in fewer than 200 pages, a wealth of material regarding Confederate hospitals that served the Army of Tennessee in the Civil War's Western Theater. The author of ...
Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945
Jul 01, 2006; ... Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945, by R. J. B. Bosworth. Penguin, February 2006. $35 Until now, books about Mussolini's Italy have focused primarily upon Mussolini and his inner circle. Bosworth's book, however, bucks that trend. Mussolini's Italy is not ...
Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
Jul 01, 2006; ... Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945, by Catherine Merridale. Metropolitan, January 2006. $30 Too often military history foregrounds the generals and effaces the armies, those masses of unknown soldiers whose lives and experiences go unrecorded. In this powerful book, ...
Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War
Jul 01, 2006; ... Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, by Harry S. Stout. Viking, January 2006. $29.95 Surprisingly little has been written on the religious aspects of the Civil War or on the importance of this conflict in the history of American morality. Therefore, Stout's ...
Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History
Jul 01, 2006; ... Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History, by Frederick H. Smith. Florida, November 2005. $59.95 Smith, a professor of anthropology at William and Mary, has applied the tools of his field to the rum trade, a subject that has been the province of the historian, and given us the ...
The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America
Jul 01, 2006; ... The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America, by James N. Gregory. North Carolina, October 2005. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper Numerous books deal with the migration of blacks to the North after the Civil War, and others treat the ...
Yeats and the Logic of Formalism
Jul 01, 2006; ... LITERARY STUDIES Yeats and the Logic of Formalism, by Vereen M. Bell. Missouri, January 2006. $37.50 Charles Altieri once condescendingly described Yeats's poetic persona as "heroic selfprojection" based on a continual "crowing about the solitary will's triumph over incoherence." In ...
The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings
Jul 01, 2006; ... The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, edited by Lawrence Buell. Modern Library, January 2006. $18.95 paper Buell, professor of American literature at Harvard, has done a splendid job of presenting in one hefty but manageable volume the core writings of the ...
Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance
Jul 01, 2006; ... Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance, by Bruce Mills. Missouri, December 2005. $39.95 In somewhat obtuse language, this scholarly study traces the connection between Edgar Allan Poe's and Margaret Fuller's writings and theories concerning ...
Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction
Jul 01, 2006; ... Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction, by Joshua Kates. Northwestern, November 2005. $74-95 cloth, $29.95 paper In this new contribution to Derrida studies, Joshua Kates sets out to make up for the lack of a truly global interpretation of Derrida's ...
Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction
Jul 01, 2006; ... Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction, by Lisa Surridge. Ohio, November 2005. $55 cloth, $24.95 paper For Surridge's well-documented study of spousal abuse in Victorian Britain, she sifted through parliamentary debates, newspaper accounts, and court records from the early ...
Come Together, Fall Apart
Jul 01, 2006; ... FICTION Come Together, Fall Apart, by Cristina Henríiverhead, April 2006. $24.95 Henrí graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and one of "Fiction's New Luminaries" in the Summer 2004 issue of VQR, presents a stunning debut collection of eight stories and a novella, all of which take ...
The Madonnas of Leningrad
Jul 01, 2006; ... The Madonnas of Leningrad, by Debra Dean, Morrow, March 2006. $23.95 In her debut novel, Dean has created a moving and beautiful tribute to the human spirit. During the Siege of Leningrad, the young orphaned Marina, a tour guide in the Hermitage, lived with hundreds of others in the ...
The Space Between Us
Jul 01, 2006; ... The Space Between Us, by Thrity Umrigar. Morrow, January 2006. $24.95 Umrigar's second novel uncoils in the kitchens and bedrooms of contemporary Bombay. In these spaces, where "evil had a domestic side," Sera Dubash and her aged maid, Bhima, share the oppression known to their gender ...
Hoodlum Birds
Jul 01, 2006; ... POETRY Hoodlum Birds, by Eugene Gloria. Penguin, April 2006. $17 paper Each of the poems in this stunning collection creates a different world in sensuous miniature, and in each, the poet negotiates between sharpest detail and broadest universality, mediating for the reader the ...
In the Middle Distance
Jul 01, 2006; ... In the Middle Distance, by Linda Gregg. Graywolf, March 2006. $14 paper Gregg's aesthetic is one of absence. Stark in vocabulary, rhythm, and line, meticulously balanced in tone, her poems contain exactly rendered manifestations of being. Poetry, as well as being, she seems to say, lives ...
Green Stars
Jul 01, 2006; ... Green Stars, by Charlotte Hilary Matthews. Iris Press, February 2006. $24 cloth, $14 paper A funny thing happens about three-quarters of the way through a Charlotte Matthews poem. There's a turn, a hinge moment, when something the speaker has been dwelling on prompts her to consider ...
Off the Rim: Basketball and Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood
Jul 01, 2006; ... GENERAL NONFICTION Off the Rim: Basketball and Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood, by Fred Hobson. Missouri, April 2006. $19.95 paper To the few cosmopolites not wedded to a sports team for life, this book will seem at times comical, disturbing, perverse. To all those provincials ...
Chances Are . . . : Adventures in Probability
Jul 01, 2006; ... Chances Are . . . : Adventures in Probability, by Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan. Viking, March 2006. $26.95 In the game show Let's Make a Deal, contestants selected from three doors. Two doors hid a goat, one a fabulous prize. After the contestant made his choice, host Monty Hall would ...
William Wegman: Funney/Strange
Jul 01, 2006; ... William Wegman: Funney/Strange, by William Wegman and Joan Simon. Yale, March 2006. $45 The disconcerting misspelling in the title of the book captures Wegman's penchant for keeping us slightly off guard, forcing a double take, a reconsideration of what we have just seen. People believe ...
Creators: From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney
Jul 01, 2006; ... Creators: From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney, by Paul Johnson. HarperColllns, March 2006. $25.95 This book can be seen as a companion piece to Intellectuals, Johnson's earlier bestseller, but the two books differ notably in tone. While Johnson's harshness stood out in ...
Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness
Jul 01, 2006; ... Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness, by Erik Reece. Riverhead, February 2006. $24.95 In September of 2003, University of Kentucky professor Erik Reece visited Lost Mountain, situated on the Cumberland Plateau of the Appalachian Mountains. Exactly one year later, that ...
Cézanne in Provence
Jul 01, 2006; ... Cézanne in Provence, by Philip Conisbee and Denis Coutagne. Yale, February 2006. $60 While in Paris and its environs, Cézanne studied the paintings of the old masters and apprenticed with Pissarro; he associated with friends Monet and Zola and was a warrior in the battle for modern art ...
Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back Again
Jul 01, 2006; ... Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back Again, by Norah Vincent. Viking, January 2006. $24.95 In a daring and often dangerous experiment, journalist Norah Vincent used a fake beard, a bulked-up frame, and voice lessons to pass as a man for a year and a half. "Ned" spends ...
Lincoln Perry's Charlottesville: Paintings by Lincoln Perry
Jul 01, 2006; ... Lincoln Perry's Charlottesville: Paintings by Lincoln Perry, with text by Ann Beanie. Virginia, December 2005. $39.95 Perry's bold colors and haunting figures settle into a place-Charlottesville, Virginia-that has captured his attention for a number of years. Perry sees things the rest ...
John Hughes Goes Deep
Jul 01, 2006; ... The Unexpected Heaviosity of Ferris Bueller's Day Off I missed Ferns Bueller's Day Off on the first pass, so I never quite understood what all the hubbub was about. And, as generally happens when I miss out on all the hubbub, I took it personally and thus bore a senseless grudge against ...