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

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

Nothing Is a Memory

Remembering Bernadette Mayer
Daniel Poppick
March 27, 2023

Ode to Babel

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

Throwing Punches in a Dive Bar

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

You Were the Bird

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

A Moral Education

In praise of filth
Garth Greenwell
March 20, 2023

Charles Simic

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

Eliot Among the Ruins

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

A Faceless Compass

Johannesburg’s haunted streets
Ivan Vladislavić
December 6, 2022

Bottle Torches

A fantasia on Nari Ward
Ishion Hutchinson
December 6, 2022

Case Studies

A critic tracks herself
Margo Jefferson
December 6, 2022