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

The Moment

Reading During a Genocide

What Etel Adnan's novel taught me
Isabella Hammad
March 11, 2025
Memoir

Scenes from Childhood

The unseen world of the great playwright
Adrienne Kennedy
March 11, 2025
Essays

The Broken Cadillac

When you wish you could refuse an inheritance
Jennifer Stock
March 11, 2025
Essays

The Comforts of Geological Time

How to grieve when you don’t know how
Edmée Lepercq
March 11, 2025
Objects of Desire

A Dingy White Mug

Holding on to my Nashville childhood
Emily Bernard
February 11, 2025
The Moment

Memecoins, Monologues, and Sharpies

A diary of Trump’s inauguration week
James Surowiecki
January 24, 2025
Most-Read Prose White Text on a Plum-Colored Background
From the Editors

Our Most-Read Prose of 2024

December 17, 2024
Essays

In Search of Zabihollah Mansouri

Was Iran’s most famous translator secretly its most prolific author?
Amir Ahmadi Arian
December 10, 2024
Essays

In the Steps of Yvonne Rainer

What failing dance class taught me about writing
John Haskell
December 10, 2024
Objects of Desire

My Face

When I look in the bathroom mirror, I see my past and future selves
Melissa Febos
December 10, 2024