El desafío de VQR

Virginia Quarterly Review es una revista que en los últimos años ha ganado parte importante de los premios que entrega National Magazine Awards. Pero su prestigio lo ha conseguido porque apuesta por la excelencia, por llenar los espacios que la prensa tradicional dejó de lado y porque aprovecha las espaldas que le da la Universidad de Virginia. VQR paga US$300 por página a sus colaboradores, los envía a cualquier parte del mundo en donde haya una buena historia, golpea a las petroleras que explotan a la población que vive en el delta del Niger, critica la política de Bush en Afganistán, acude en auxilio (periodístico) de los muerto de Darfur, le dice "liberación" al triunfo norvientamita a comienzo de los 70 y manda a narradores latinoamericanos en busca de historias no tradicionales en su propio continente. Pero no es una revista de las que se podría tachar de políticamente correcta, aunque a veces toca esa frontera. Más que eso, VQR es una pista de lo que debieran buscar las revistas universitarias: independencia, perfil, debate y atrevimiento. A continuación dos artículos sobre VQR.


http://www.slate.com/id/2138219/
http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/nyrm/legere_bob.html
Over the past two days, New York media gossip turned away from its usual concerns—like Graydon Carter's latest hairdo—to consider an improbable question: What is the Virginia Quarterly Review? On March 15, the nominations for the annual National Magazine Awards—the Oscars, if you will, of the magazine world—were announced. To the astonishment of glossy magazine types everywhere, a small journal in Virginia garnered not one nomination, as is sometimes politely handed down to such journals, but six. This made the Virginia Quarterly Review the second-most-nominated magazine, behind the Atlantic, which received eight, and ahead of The New Yorker, Harper's, New York, and National Geographic, all of which received five. It was as if a scrappy farm team had demolished the Yankees in an exhibition game.

I first heard about VQR two years ago, from my friend David Baker, a poet and critic, and got a subscription soon after. The issues arrived on my desk, thick and fat and glossier—also more colorful—than I'd expected. Many New Yorkers assume that journals with the words "quarterly" or "review" in the title have the stuffy predictability of a baked potato, and perhaps unsurprisingly VQR's most vocal champions to date have been poets, critics, and novelists who live in the world beyond New York.

So far, it has received only a sliver of the media attention devoted to The Believer or N+1, to name two small magazines to have made an impression recently. (Disclosure: I'm a poetry editor at the Paris Review, so I've left the magazine—which is under new editorship—out of this discussion entirely.) But, in its new incarnation, edited by Ted Genoways, VQR is easily as good a magazine as its hipper peers—a journal that makes a practice of emulating the best on offer in the Atlantic and The New Yorker, while publishing lots of poetry and fiction.