Criticism

Who Was Shakespeare?

What Hamnet does—and doesn’t—get right
Dana Stevens

James Schuyler’s Genius

Why our greatest poet of the everyday has become a poet of the moment
Mae Losasso

Terrence Malick’s Disciples

Why the auteur is the most influential director in Hollywood
Bilge Ebiri

Chaos Agent in Chief

What Michael Wolff’s Trump quartet tells us about the next four years
James Surowiecki

The Elusive Poet of Desire

Why biographers can’t pin Cavafy down
Langdon Hammer

Solvej Balle’s Philosophy of Time

How a novelist transformed a single day into a radical experiment in time
Clare Carlisle

Browse

Criticism

Still from the film Atlantics, 2019.
Film

In the Atmosphere

In Mati Diop’s Atlantics, every breath takes in the evaporated substance of history
Lindsay Turner
June 1, 2020
Abstract geometric image.
Books

Speech Acts

Eunice de Souza, a post-Independence Indian poet, explores the glitches in poetic voicing
Vidyan Ravinthiran
June 1, 2020
Dandelion seeds attached to stem.
Books

The Unthinkable

How do you put into words the boundless pain of losing a child?
David L. Ulin
June 1, 2020
Tove Jansson at her desk. ©Eva Konikoff/Moomin Characteers™
Books

Tove Jansson’s Genius

The radical imagination that built the visionary world of the Moomins
Evan James
June 1, 2020
Red texture in cloth
Books

Conspicuous Erudition

The new black poetry
Jerome Ellison Murphy
April 1, 2020
Painting of an abstract storm
Books

Metafiction and #MeToo

A new way to write trauma
Maggie Doherty
April 1, 2020
Abstract ornamental pattern
Books

On Long Poems

Four recent books make length a virtue
Stephanie Burt
April 1, 2020
Susan Sontag, New York, February 2, 1978. Photograph by Richard Avedon. ©The Richard Avedon Foundation.
Books

Furious Permissions

For Susan Sontag, style was nourishment
Brian Dillon
January 1, 2020
Two Black Americans
Art

San Francisco, 1956

A photograph and its afterlife
Jim Lewis
January 1, 2020
Dark monsters
Books

Styles of Radical Illness

Anne Boyer diagnoses the lies we still tell about cancer
Laura Kolbe
January 1, 2020