Michigan Quarterly Review


Michigan Quarterly Review attempts to combine the best qualities of a literary journal with the intellectual rigor of an academic or scholarly journal. Investigative and speculative essays mingle with imaginative writing from the likes of Philip Levine, (the late) Arthur Miller, and Joyce Carol Oates—our contributing editors—and new writers whose reputations lie before them. Recent special issues have explored "The Documentary Imagination," "Viet Nam: Beyond the Frame," and the "Secret Spaces of Childhood."

Writing from MQR is regularly reprinted in prize anthologies and textbooks. Recent topics include Holocaust poetry, pastoral, cinephilia, robotics, 9/11, art vandalism, Samuel Beckett, Shanghai, dictionaries, good and bad medicine. We publish poetry and fiction that engage in such topics as well as the perennial subjects of self, family, sexuality. The editor insists on "answerable style"—that is, language that is equal in gravity, complexity, clarity, and wit to the subjects it explores.