Essays

Night Knowledge

What I learned at the club

An Unsettling Civil War Photograph

An image from the Battle of the Wilderness

Quiver and Fixity

What I found returning to Thomas Hardy in midlife

A Night’s Sleep

An insomniac’s lifelong pursuit

Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?

A critic considers the strange moral pressure we feel to read to the very last page

The Body I Couldn't Abstract

Motherhood reshaped how I see shame, art, and the female body

Browse

Essays

My Fountain Pen

April 1, 2018

Reading

April 1, 2018

Remembering a Memoir

An afterword to a new edition of French Lessons
April 1, 2018

Tolle, Lege

April 1, 2018

HMS Bounty

A moment in Venice
November 1, 2017

The Aquarists

Life, death, and fish
November 1, 2017

Turning the Soil

Cultivating our gardens in times of trouble
November 1, 2017

Whistleblower, Traitor, Soldier, Queer?

The truth of Chelsea Manning
November 1, 2017
Journals

A Journey Across Siberia

Penetrating the Soviet Union in 1967
July 1, 2015