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

Two cartoon characters superimposed onto painting of a storm.

The Brink of Destruction

Revisiting John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended”

Edward Hirsch

September 20, 2021

Graphic with two bathtubs on pedestals and a leaf dropping from the faucets

Suicide in Fiction, Reconsidered

Why we need stories about living after a suicide attempt

Morgan Thomas

September 7, 2021

Riot

In the Riot Grrrl Archive

Punk and the limits of individualism

Rachel Greenwald Smith

July 19, 2021

Lighthouse stairs

Lullaby

On motherhood and the pain of holding

Chloe Garcia Roberts

July 12, 2021

Black and white still showing Giulietta Masina smiling with a black tear at the corner of her eye

How to Come Back to Life

On reaching middle age and carrying on

Emily Ogden

June 28, 2021

Series of stills of author doing a poetry reading.

I Killed, I Died

Banter, self-destruction, and the poetry reading

Douglas Kearney

June 28, 2021

Graphic with book pages and blue designs of windows and cats

The Heart of Fiction

Storytelling, experience, and truth

Hernan Diaz

June 28, 2021

The Subject of Pain

On Louise Bourgeois

Madhu H. Kaza

June 28, 2021

Interior view of library.

What Space is For

The forking paths of memory and return

Mairead Small Staid

June 28, 2021

Person moves out of view in a dark area.

Picturing Catastrophe

The visual politics of racial reckoning

Rizvana Bradley

May 25, 2021

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