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

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
From the Archives

The Burning Book: Genet and Cocteau

Edmund White
October 1, 1993
Black and white photo of light coming through windows in the apse of San Vitale in Ravenna with mosaics. Courtesy N.P. Sullo.
Essays

Days of 1952

On the rapture of experiencing art in solitude
James Merrill
April 1, 1992
From the Archives

Fiction in Review

Marilynne Robinson
April 1, 1992
From the Archives

From My Cornell Notebooks

Charles Simic
April 1, 1992
From the Archives

The Religion-Making Imagination of Joseph Smith

Harold Bloom
April 1, 1992
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
From the Archives

Short Talks

Anne Carson
July 1, 1991
From the Archives

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

James Merrill
December 1, 1989
From the Archives

The First Eighteen Lines of The Waste Land

Anthony Hecht
December 1, 1989