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

Objects of Desire

Omega Constellation

Unwinding what I lost
Alexander Chee
April 10, 2024
Essays

When Metaphor Gets Literal

What my mother’s coma taught me about reading poems
Jennifer Grotz
April 3, 2024
Objects of Desire

Antique Medical Slides

Specimens of my past and future self
Leslie Jamison
March 20, 2024
The Moment

The Story Wars

The conflict between Red and Blue America is a clash of national mythologies
Richard Slotkin
March 11, 2024
Books

Gender Wars

Two scholars excavate the origins of today’s trans backlash
Paisley Currah
March 4, 2024
Essays

Heat Maps

Desire in the dark
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
March 4, 2024
Essays

Lessons of the Line

Charles Simic and me
Dana Levin
March 4, 2024
Annotating the Archives

The Common Reader

Virginia Woolf in The Yale Review
Claire Messud
March 4, 2024
Objects of Desire

Jars with Well-Fitting Lids

Seeing loss more clearly
Catherine Lacey
February 14, 2024
Essays

Free All Necks

How the groundbreaking work of artist and teacher Alma Thomas inspired a generation of Black students
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
December 11, 2023