Essays

Night Knowledge

What I learned at the club
Aria Aber

An Unsettling Civil War Photograph

An image from the Battle of the Wilderness
Rachel Eisendrath

Quiver and Fixity

What I found returning to Thomas Hardy in midlife
Jhumpa Lahiri

A Night’s Sleep

An insomniac’s lifelong pursuit
Vincenzo Latronico

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

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

Making Contact

Encounters with readers
Annie Dillard
July 1, 1988

A. Philip Randolph

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

Retrospect: Poetry in Review

Penelope Laurans
December 1, 1985

A Memoir of George Eliot

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

The Thought of Movies

Stanley Cavell
January 1, 1983

Byron and Mr. Briggs

With an introduction by Edward A. Hungerford
Virginia Woolf
March 1, 1979