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

Essays

The Republic of Letters

Edith Wharton at the Start of Her Career
Hermione Lee
April 1, 2007
From the Archives

On Some Functions of Literature

Umberto Eco,
translated by Martin McLaughlin
October 1, 2004
Graphic with loaves of bread and water bottles on a black and orange background. Illustration by Laura Padilla Castellanos
Essays

Loaf or Hot-Water Bottle

Closely Translating Proust
Lydia Davis
April 1, 2004
From the Archives

The Writer’s Audience

Wallace Stegner
January 1, 2003
From the Archives

Letter to a Young Novelist

Mario Vargas Llosa,
translated by Natasha Wimmer
July 1, 2002
From the Archives

Lincoln and Whitman as Representative Americans

David Bromwich
April 1, 2002
From the Archives

Ibsen the Pioneer

Stella Adler
April 1, 1999
From the Archives

The Mask of Art

Edmund White
April 1, 1999
From the Archives

An Open Book

Edmund White
July 1, 1997
From the Archives

Secret Maps

Holly Wright's Photographs of Hands
Charles Simic
October 1, 1996