Essays

Night Knowledge

What I learned at the club

Aria Aber

An Unsettling Civil War Photograph

An image from the Battle of the Wilderness

Rachel Eisendrath

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

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

The Body I Couldn't Abstract

Motherhood reshaped how I see shame, art, and the female body

Megan O’Grady

Browse

Essays

Louise Glück

Making an art of conversation

Sam Huber

October 19, 2023

Louise Glück

The poet who taught me to write books

Meghan O’Rourke

October 18, 2023

Lou Reed Didn’t Want to Be King

A biography tries to pin the rocker down

Hannah Gold

October 16, 2023

Are Twins Kinda Gay?

What Dead Ringers reveals about pop culture's latest obsession

Helena de Bres

October 9, 2023

10 Ways Ms., Sassy, and Jezebel Changed Your Life!

How contradiction drove fifty years of feminist media

Maggie Doherty

September 18, 2023

How Emily Wilson Reimagined Homer

Her boldly innovative translation of the Iliad is an epic for our time

Emily Greenwood

September 18, 2023

In the Shallows

Why do public intellectuals condescend to their readers?

Becca Rothfeld

September 18, 2023

Lorraine Hansberry’s Queer Archive

The playwright’s lesbian fiction has gone largely unpublished. But she wanted you to read it.

Alec Pollak

September 18, 2023

The Choice Plot

Why are so many new novels obsessed with whether–and how–to have children?

Sanjena Sathian

September 18, 2023

Unfathomable Life

As a philosopher, I thought I understood risk. Then I tried to get pregnant.

Anna Hartford

September 18, 2023

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