Essays

Essays

Night Knowledge

What I learned at the club
Aria Aber
A Closer Look

An Unsettling Civil War Photograph

An image from the Battle of the Wilderness
Rachel Eisendrath
Essays

Quiver and Fixity

What I found returning to Thomas Hardy in midlife
Jhumpa Lahiri
Objects of Desire

A Night’s Sleep

An insomniac’s lifelong pursuit
Vincenzo Latronico
Essays

Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?

A critic considers the strange moral pressure we feel to read to the very last page
Michel Chaouli
Essays

The Body I Couldn't Abstract

Motherhood reshaped how I see shame, art, and the female body
Megan O’Grady

Browse

Essays

Essays

The End of Books

What happened when a dumpster arrived behind my university's library
Sheila Liming
May 26, 2026
Annotating the Archives

Robert Frost at Midlife

In his poems for The Yale Review, the poet reckoned with mortality, imperfection, and the limits of form
Kamran Javadizadeh
April 6, 2026
Essays

Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?

A critic considers the strange moral pressure we feel to read to the very last page
Michel Chaouli
March 16, 2026
Memoir

Dogsbody

Dale Peck
March 16, 2026
Essays

Night Knowledge

What I learned at the club
Aria Aber
March 16, 2026
Essays

Quiver and Fixity

What I found returning to Thomas Hardy in midlife
Jhumpa Lahiri
March 16, 2026
Essays

The Body I Couldn't Abstract

Motherhood reshaped how I see shame, art, and the female body
Megan O’Grady
March 16, 2026
Ideas

Who Was Shakespeare?

What Hamnet does—and doesn’t—get right
Dana Stevens
March 10, 2026
On Writing

My First Book Outed Me

How writing poems changed the course of my life
Carl Phillips
January 26, 2026
Portrait of Audley “Queen Mother” Moore
Essay of the Week

The Forgotten Visionary of Reparations

Queen Mother Moore called for liberation, not just compensation
Robin D. G. Kelley
January 19, 2026