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

Monstrous Hybrids and the Conjuring of Legacy

A visit to a namesake scrapyard changes a novelist's sense of inheritance
Idra Novey
April 5, 2023
Ideas

Cancel Culture and Other Myths

Anti-fandom as heartbreak
Kathryn Lofton
March 27, 2023
Books

Nothing Is a Memory

Remembering Bernadette Mayer
Daniel Poppick
March 27, 2023
Essays

Ode to Babel

The ecstasy of Michael K. Williams
Roger Reeves
March 27, 2023
The Moment

Throwing Punches in a Dive Bar

Three years into the pandemic, what does care look like?
Jordan Kisner
March 27, 2023
Essays

You Were the Bird

Petite Maman and the axis between mother and daughter
Georgia Cloepfil
March 27, 2023
Essays

A Moral Education

In praise of filth
Garth Greenwell
March 20, 2023
Tribute

Charles Simic

Remembering a great poet and friend
Meghan O’Rourke
January 13, 2023
Annotating the Archives

Eliot Among the Ruins

The Waste Land remains prophetic, but what did it foretell?
Langdon Hammer
December 12, 2022
Essays

A Faceless Compass

Johannesburg’s haunted streets
Ivan Vladislavić
December 6, 2022