Nonfiction

Essays

The Shapes of Grief

Witnessing the unbearable
Christina Sharpe
Books

Writing in Pictures

Richard Scarry and the art of children’s literature
Chris Ware
Books

Is Blasphemy Illiberal?

Salman Rushdie’s thoroughly modern controversies
Len Gutkin
Art

How Mike Kelley Became Himself

The artist’s search for subcultural America
Jonathan Griffin
Objects of Desire

Richard Pryor

A fiction
Hilton Als
Essays

The Path to Playwright

Discovering my literary hero in an unlikely place
Sonya Kelly

Browse

Nonfiction

Two cartoon characters superimposed onto painting of a storm.
Essays

The Brink of Destruction

Revisiting John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended”
Edward Hirsch
September 20, 2021
Graphic with two bathtubs on pedestals and a leaf dropping from the faucets
Essays

Suicide in Fiction, Reconsidered

Why we need stories about living after a suicide attempt
Morgan Thomas
September 7, 2021
Riot
Essays

In the Riot Grrrl Archive

Punk and the limits of individualism
Rachel Greenwald Smith
July 19, 2021
Lighthouse stairs
Essays

Lullaby

On motherhood and the pain of holding
Chloe Garcia Roberts
July 12, 2021
Black and white still showing Giulietta Masina smiling with a black tear at the corner of her eye
Essays

How to Come Back to Life

On reaching middle age and carrying on
Emily Ogden
June 28, 2021
Series of stills of author doing a poetry reading.
Essays

I Killed, I Died

Banter, self-destruction, and the poetry reading
Douglas Kearney
June 28, 2021
Black and white portrait of Machado de Assis
Books

Machado de Assis’s Afterlives

The Brazilian novelist’s overlooked politics
Ratik Asokan
June 28, 2021
Blue and yellow illustration with two faces on either side of a hanging lamp
Books

No-No Man

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s nihilist masterpiece
Roy Scranton
June 28, 2021
Graphic with book pages and blue designs of windows and cats
Essays

The Heart of Fiction

Storytelling, experience, and truth
Hernan Diaz
June 28, 2021
Essays

The Subject of Pain

On Louise Bourgeois
Madhu H. Kaza
June 28, 2021