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

A blurred photo of lights
Essays

In Centennial

The only ones left alive
Cathy Park Hong
January 1, 2020
An old photo of baseball players
Essays

Loss

When yearning is a pleasure
Sarah Manguso
January 1, 2020
Portrait of the author's mother
Essays

Stereopticon

Twelve ways of looking at my mother
Emily Bernard
January 1, 2020
Portrait of J. D. McClatchy
Essays

Still to Love

For J. D. McClatchy
Langdon Hammer
January 1, 2020
Obscured female form with words
Essays

The Skin You’re In

On living in—and losing—a body
Molly McCully Brown
January 1, 2020
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
Essays

Listening to the Provinces

A painter’s letters home
Shifra Sharlin
July 1, 2019
An image of an old coin.
Essays

The Virtues and Vices of Speech

On truthfulness, deception, flattery, and more
Giovanni Gioviano Pontano
and
G. W. Pigman III
July 1, 2019
A still image from film of a creature running through the woods who appears to look like Bigfoot.
essays

The Wild Man Within

Peter Matthiessen’s Bigfoot
Jeff Wheelwright
July 1, 2019
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
Essays

I Harbor a Stillborn Scribe of the German Tongue in Me

On Germans and Jewishness
Peter Wortsman
May 13, 2019
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
Essays

What We Leave

Stealing pants from a rockstar
Sara Schaff
April 15, 2019