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

The Novels of Turgenev

Virginia Woolf
December 1, 1933
From the Archives

Social Issues Before the Supreme Court

Felix Frankfurter
March 1, 1933
From the Archives

Goethe

Thomas Mann
June 1, 1932
From the Archives

Aurora Leigh

Virginia Woolf
June 1, 1931
From the Archives

Memories of a Working Women’s Guild

Virginia Woolf
September 1, 1930
From the Archives

Augustine Birrell

Virginia Woolf
June 1, 1930
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
Essays

Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour

Vita Sackville-West
September 1, 1929
From the Archives

Street Haunting: A London Adventure

Virginia Woolf
October 1, 1927
A painting of a woman reading at a table.
From the Archives

How Should One Read a Book?

Read it as if one were writing it
Virginia Woolf
September 1, 1926
From the Archives

The Powers of the President

William Howard Taft
October 1, 1914