Essays

Essays

My Year of Stalking Rachel

The quest to see without being seen
Becca Rothfeld
An image from Ingmar Bergman's Persona
The Moment

On Rereading

Remaking the world
Victor Brombert
Essays

The Wrong Daddy

Morrissey and the cult of the wounded white male
Jeremy Atherton Lin
Letters

Merrill's Last Letters

Writing to the end
James Merrill
Essays

And Finally I'll Say Goodbye

Remembering my mother, Jean Valentine
Rebecca Chace
Jean Valentine at her desk
Essays

The Ugly Side of Sisterhood

On envy and twinship
Jean Garnett
The author with her sister in childhood.

Browse

Essays

An abstract print by Jacob van Heemskerck.
Essays

Naming, Being, and Black Experience

Yale’s first Black professor on the presence or absence of names, their status and their scope.
Michael G. Cooke
December 1, 1977
Detail of a microchip
Essays

Creativity, Poetic Language, and the Computer

What's distinctly human about writing a poem?
Marie Borroff
June 1, 1971
An old photograph of a churchyard cemetery. Courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Essays

A Journal of the Plague

The 1918 Influenza
Francis Russell
December 1, 1958
Blue stamps from WWII ration book
Essays

Note on the Home Front

I shall never forget that first winter of gasoline rationing
Eve Riehle
September 1, 1945
A photograph of a London street during WWII.
Essays

After a Visit to England

London during the Blitz
Thornton Wilder
September 1, 1941
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
Essays

Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour

Vita Sackville-West
September 1, 1929
A painting of a woman reading at a table.
Essays

How Should One Read a Book?

To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it
Virginia Woolf
September 1, 1926