A personal essay by author Meghan Daum in which she describes her trepidation around the re-issue of her 2003 debut novel, The Quality of Life Report. The book–about a New York television reporter who moves to the midwest–pokes fun at liberals, coastal elites and P.C. culture, and makes jokes about gender, race and class, all […]
Virginia Quarterly Review
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Quotes, Science & Nature
The Telescope That Sees into the Heart of Hawaii
Trevor Quirk reports on how native Hawaiians protested the construction of a telescope on spiritual grounds — the presence of which cuts to the very question of who gets to decide what happens on Hawaiian soil — and who the soil belongs to.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Twisting History to Tell Universal Truths
Readers often wonder how much of an author’s real life ends up in their novels. In 2013 in the Virginia Quarterly Review, novelist Nina Revoyr described how she combined elements of her life with the real lives of silent-film era actors Sessue Hayakawa and Mary Miles Minter in her book The Age of Dreaming. Revoyr […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Eating During the San Francisco Tech Boom
They have astonishingly well-paid jobs that they don’t like. Some plan to stay only until their options are vested. Then they will move on to their “actual” careers. This population of the possessed waiting to be dispossessed spends an inordinate amount of time comparing the gourmet kitchens of different website headquarters. The top digital companies […]