Criticism

Art

How Mike Kelley Became Himself

The artist’s search for subcultural America
Jonathan Griffin
Books

The Polycrisis

Why can’t we stop talking about nonmonogamy?
Brandy Jensen
Books

Is Blasphemy Illiberal?

Salman Rushdie’s thoroughly modern controversies
Len Gutkin
Books

Poetically Speaking

A new book makes the case for bewilderment as a critical virtue
Brian Dillon
Books

Writing in Pictures

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

Chantal Akerman’s Elusive Interiors

What the filmmaker’s portrayal of women reveals—and withholds
Emily LaBarge

Browse

Criticism

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
Photo of Robert Lowell
Books

The Dolphin Letters

Revisiting Robert Lowell’s infamous book
Dan Chiasson
January 1, 2020
Group of people on stage in dim light
Music

From Films to Operas

New interpretations of It's a Wonderful Life, The Exterminating Angel, and more
Dewey Faulkner
July 1, 2019
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
Criticism

In the Time That Remains

Reflections on the poetry of Derek Mahon
Oana Sanziana Marian
July 1, 2019
A woman looks down mournfully in a still from the film Roma.
Film

On "Roma"

A review of Alfonso Cuarón's film
Charles Taylor
July 1, 2019
Illustration with three black and white photos of men and a box holding a pasture with running horses
Criticism

One Man’s Modernism

J. R. R. Tolkien
James Trilling
July 1, 2019