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

Psychology and Afro-American Biography

Arnold Rampersad
August 1, 1989
From the Archives

A Legend in My Life

My memories of the incomparable Greta Garbo
Vincent Price
July 1, 1988
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
From the Archives

Making Contact

Encounters with readers
Annie Dillard
July 1, 1988
From the Archives

Women's Rights: Unspeakable Issues in the Constitution

Nancy F. Cott
June 1, 1988
From the Archives

A. Philip Randolph

Remembering the civil rights leader and my friend of over four decades
Bayard Rustin
April 1, 1987
From the Archives

Retrospect: Poetry in Review

Penelope Laurans
December 1, 1985
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
From the Archives

Singing with the Fundamentalists

Annie Dillard
January 1, 1985
From the Archives

A Memoir of George Eliot

Soph’ia V. Kovalevskaia,
translated by Miriam Haskell Berlin
July 1, 1984
From the Archives

A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be

Ursula K. Le Guin
December 1, 1983
From the Archives

The Thought of Movies

Stanley Cavell
January 1, 1983