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Essays

For our print subscribers: Deliveries of mail during the holidays from an overwhelmed US Postal Service have been inordinately slow. Our latest issue—the January 14 issue—was mailed on December 28. We know that some subscribers have still not received their issues and we hope and expect the issues to be delivered to everyone soon. Read the January 14 issue here.

Rachel Cusk

The Case of Yiyun Li

On ‘Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life’ and ‘Where Reasons End’

July 18, 2019 issue

Jia Tolentino; illustration by Joanna Neborsky

Jacqueline Rose

Song of My Self-Care

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion’

October 10, 2019 issue

Walter Benjamin; portrait by Maira Kalman, 2007

Peter Brooks

The Story of the Story of the Story

January 16, 2020 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Wendell Berry’s High Horse

October 8, 2020 issue

Clair Wills

A Woman’s Performance

July 2, 2020 issue

Teju Cole on the outskirts of Ramallah during the Palestine Festival of Literature, June 2014

Norman Rush

A Burning Collection

‘Known and Strange Things: Essays’ by Teju Cole

April 6, 2017 issue

Darryl Pinckney

The Anger of Ta-Nehisi Coates

‘Between the World and Me’ and its precursors

February 11, 2016 issue

Michael Gorra

Young Woman from the Provinces

Benjamin Moser’s ‘Sontag: Her Life and Work’

February 27, 2020 issue

The Latest

Gillian White

A Month in the Life

A new edition of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory helps us rediscover a poet whose experiments create a new relationship between poem and reader.

January 14, 2021 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

A Noah’s Ark of Books

Reaktion’s colorful ‘Animal’ series tries to capture the richness of biological life on Earth.

December 17, 2020 issue

Hilton Als

An Awful and Beautiful Light

Joan Didion and the granite of the specific.

December 17, 2020 issue

Dubravka Ugresic

An Archaeology of Resistance

An army of unqualified historians is toiling today, erasing antifascist history and legitimizing revisionist versions.

November 16, 2020

Claire Messud

The Dream of Pure Expression

A new translation of Paul Valéry’s poems also includes rousing extracts from his extraordinary notebooks.

December 3, 2020 issue

Colin Thubron

Cartographers of Stone and Air

On Tim Robinson’s intensely focused survey of a small patch of the Irish landscape and Lyall Watson’s sweeping inquiry into the mysteries and mysticism of wind.

December 3, 2020 issue

A mother and child in Central Park, New York City, 2015

Caroline Fraser

No Haven

In ‘This Is All I Got,’ a report about a year in the life of a homeless single mother in New York City, Lauren Sandler finds the intractable source of homelessness in the piratical inequities of the housing market.

October 22, 2020 issue

Jan Ekels (II): A Writer Trimming his Pen, 1784

Tim Parks

The Writer–Translator Equation

I have been dividing my working day between writing in the morning and translating in the afternoon. Maybe comparing the two activities would be a good way to test the writer–translator equation.

September 21, 2020

Honoré Daumier: Le Défenseur, circa 1862–1865

Janet Malcolm

A Second Chance

A trial jury is like an audience at a play that wants to be entertained. Witnesses, like stage actors, have to play to that audience if their performances are to be convincing.

September 24, 2020 issue