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 stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
Essays

Unliving Hands

Lyric Distance in Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
Adam Keller
July 1, 2018
The tombstone of Naomi Wise.
Essays

The Murder of “Omie Wise,” 1808

Notes on a killing
Harold Schechter
June 29, 2018
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
Essays

The Colt-Adams Affair, 1841

Notes on a murder
Harold Schechter
June 25, 2018
A detail of a screaming face
Essays

Sensitivity/Enlightenment

A distinction
Feisal G. Mohamed
June 5, 2018
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
Essays

The Trunk Murders, 1931

Notes on a killing
Harold Schechter
May 27, 2018
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
Essays

Religion/Fundamentalism

A distinction
Feisal G. Mohamed
May 21, 2018
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
Essays

The Kidnapping of Little Charley Ross, 1874

Notes on a killing
Harold Schechter
May 14, 2018
Flemish painting of people paying taxes
Essays

Deep Politics, Shallow Politics

Feisal G. Mohamed
May 10, 2018
A typewriter. https://www.flickr.com/photos/22017189@N00/2621358221
Essays

100 Things About Writing a Novel

What to do—and when to do it
Alexander Chee
April 1, 2018
A still of Andy Griffith and Don Knotts in "The Andy Griffith Show."

Mayberry, USA

Visiting the inspiration for this quintessential American town.
Yunte Huang
April 1, 2018