In the United States, this is a long weekend to celebrate Independence Day (and even longer if you have dogs who don’t love fireworks!). Long weekends are perfect for thoughtful, leisurely reading. To help augment reading lists, we’ve been releasing content from our most recent issue (88.1/2), but that is just the tip of the iceberg. We have released two complete issues digitally over the past few years: volume 85 and issue 87.1/2.

If you’re interested in venturing a bit farther down the back alleys of NDQ, check out our massive archive of past volumes. 

For example, 25 years ago in 1996, Phillip Booth contributed “Hot 5th of July” to the Quarterly, a poem that he later discusses in Jay Parini’s 1997 book Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Own Poems.

30 years ago, we published poet Elton Glaser’s essay “Hydra and Hybrid: Travel Writing as a Genre” and Elizabeth Libbey’s “Dressing for Cold Weather” (which might offer a kind of imaginative break from this years oppressive heat!). You can read more of her poems here.

50 years ago, when the Quarterly was a very different kind of magazine, you could read a short story Jesse Stuart, poet laureate of Kentucky, titled “Downstairs Again” or North Dakota native Ralph Kane’s essay on the “The Paradox of California Populism.”

100 years ago, when the Quarterly was more squarely focused on the society and history of North Dakota, you could read about the challenges facing education in the state by such local luminaries as Joseph Kennedy, Luella Hall, and Arland Weeks.

As you likely know, these days are particularly challenging for many cultural institutions, publishers, and little magazines. So even if NDQ doesn’t float your boat, If you can, consider buying a book from a small press, subscribing to a literary journal (like our UNP stablemate, Hotel Amerika), or otherwise supporting the arts.