Essays

Frost at Midnight

A new, beautifully edited volume of Robert Frost’s letters finds him at the height of his artistic powers while suffering a series of losses almost unimaginable to the fortunate among us.

December 16, 2021 issue

Finding Babel in the Drawer

“Speak the name of Isaac Babel,” Irving Howe wrote in a recently unearthed introduction, “and one phrase comes insistently to mind: a writer of genius.”

December 16, 2021 issue

In the Kingdom of Coincidence

I don’t have a theory of chance connections—I don’t see them as part of a divine plan or dictated by the stars—but, like other writers, I find them richly suggestive.

November 15, 2021

Quick Words, Long View

Like many of her narrators, Lydia Davis is a taxonomist of daily life.

December 2, 2021 issue

Arias in the Archive

Maria Stepanova wants to memorialize the dead in her family but is conflicted about the very possibility—and morality—of the quest.

November 18, 2021 issue

Murder Is My Business

In the true crime genre’s latest iteration, writers, reporters, bloggers, documentary filmmakers, and podcast hosts have taken a soiled brand and turned it into a collective exercise in retributive justice, recording and correcting the history of sexual violence.

July 22, 2021 issue

Uncanny Planet

A new collection of essays by Nathaniel Rich argues that there is no going back to whatever might be meant by “nature.”

July 22, 2021 issue

The Power of Questions

Jacqueline Rose’s latest book, On Violence and On Violence Against Women, takes up a subject she has not covered before: gendered abuse and harassment.

July 22, 2021 issue

‘The Roots of Our Madness’

John Berryman was central to American poetry’s personal turn, yet his Dream Songs made the racialization of that turn—and the whiteness of the lyric tradition—explicit.

April 8, 2021 issue

Living with Saint Death

Mariana Enriquez’s fiction is haunted by the specter of late-twentieth-century Latin American history; the bodies are never buried very deep.

April 8, 2021 issue