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

Why Han Kang’s Nobel Matters

My mother’s generation experienced unspeakable violence. Han found the words for it.
Yung In Chae
October 15, 2024
Essays

A Head Is a Territory of Light

Seeking answers about my migraines
Tan Tuck Ming
October 8, 2024
Tribute

Fredric Jameson

The Marxist critic who remained open to mystery
Caleb Smith
October 3, 2024
Objects of Desire

Richard Pryor

A fiction
Hilton Als
September 9, 2024
Essays

The Path to Playwright

Discovering my literary hero in an unlikely place
Sonya Kelly
September 9, 2024
Essays

The Shapes of Grief

Witnessing the unbearable
Christina Sharpe
September 9, 2024
Objects of Desire

Vintage Merch

Buying someone else’s history
Hanif Abdurraqib
September 9, 2024
Essays

The Frictions of Interracial Love

How one fundamental difference can color every aspect of marriage
Anne Anlin Cheng
September 5, 2024
Annotating the Archives

The Poet as a Young Critic

In Thom Gunn’s early work for The Yale Review, he valued style above all else
Langdon Hammer
June 27, 2024
The Moment

A Reviewer’s Life

The material constraints of writing criticism today
Christine Smallwood
June 10, 2024