For the third year in a row, Virginia Quarterly Review has been nominated in the General Excellence category in the National Magazine Awards. We actually won it last year, garnering all sorts of glowing coverage in the process. Our competition this time around is Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, I.D., Metropolis, and Print.
We’re also nominated in the Fiction category for Binyavanga Wainaina’s “Ships in High Transit,” Kevin A. González’s “Wake,” and Dan Chaon’s “Shepherdess.” We won this category last year. We’re up against McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, Playboy, and Zoetrope: All-Story, which is some pretty stiff competition.
We’ll find out how we did at the awards ceremony, held in May at Lincoln Center. Disclaimer: I’m VQR’s internet guy; I do nothing that could have anything to do with these nominations.
Well congratulations to the VQR. I checked it out, and it appears a little too erudite for a slack-jawed troglodyte like myself. Still, good to know that kind of work is being done in C’ville.
While some pieces in VQR are a bit too much for me (like the piece analyzing the posed militia paintings in the most recent issue – I thought my head was going to explode), the great thing about the publication is that there’s always something for everyone. For example, I was fascinated by Pauline Chen’s essay in the Winter 2007 edition, “Morbidity and Mortality: A Surgeon Under Exam”. It starts off with her description of literally reaching her hand and arm inside of a patient’s body cavity.
You don’t have to read it all. In fact, you can just look at the art and read the frequent Art Spiegelman comic and get your money’s worth.
Good job, VQR.
I’m impressed with VQR. But my comment – really has to do with politics. Why is it that no public source that I normally check has mentioned that Sen. John warner’s pork-barrel,congressional earmark of #$17 million for an interchange in Cville to make the Meadowcreek Parkway has been highlighted in the whole highway brouhahad in Virgina? Do we citizens really believe that the money was a kind of alumini donation to the community for Warner’s happy days at UVA law school? More imporantly from a citizen perspective: has anyone noted that Senate candidate Warner was the key actor in diluting one of the most significant environemntal laws of the last half-century, the limits on federallly funded roads through public parklands? Check it out.
Rich Collins