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

Corgi jumping from floating dock into water after a tennis ball with great abandon
Criticism

It Me

The trouble with memes
Marta Figlerowicz
May 19, 2021
A stack of books
The Moment

On Rereading

Remaking the world
Victor Brombert
May 19, 2021
An image from Ingmar Bergman's Persona
Essays

My Year of Stalking Rachel

The quest to see without being seen
Becca Rothfeld
May 19, 2021
The Smiths vinyl among records on a shelf
Essays

The Wrong Daddy

Morrissey and the cult of the wounded white male
Jeremy Atherton Lin
May 19, 2021
The author with her sister in childhood.
Essays

There I Almost Am

On envy and twinship
Jean Garnett
May 19, 2021
people walking in front of a building, black and whtie photo
Essays

We Have a Body

The deaths of patients—and colleagues
Suzanne Koven
May 19, 2021
Adam Zagajewski. Courtesy Donostia Kultura
Tribute

Adam Zagajewski

Remembering a poet of the human soul
Ilya Kaminsky
May 6, 2021
A woman at the beach with a watermelon
Essays

The Wild, Sublime Body

Learning how to be human
Melissa Febos
March 10, 2021
A version of the California flag with "Twitter" replacing "California" in the banner's text section
Essays

Against Abdicating Power to Big Tech

We can’t rely on Big Tech to reign over online speech
Claire Bond Potter
February 1, 2021
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
Pandemic Files

My Summer of Julien Gracq

Reading a French novelist’s examination of liminal space in a plague year
Seth Lerer
January 11, 2021