Essays

Don’t Get Too Comfortable

Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had is a collection of brief essays about how a person navigates the moral dilemmas of ownership and privilege.

May 27, 2021 issue

The Writer Apart

Who is the “nonpolitical” man Thomas Mann tried to defend even as he couldn’t escape politics?

May 13, 2021 issue

The Companionship of Nature

Running like a troubled thread through Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights is the tension between a profound human need for the solace of animals and the acknowledgment, even the insistence, that they are creatures apart.

April 29, 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

The Struggle and the Scramble

Cynthia Ozick’s writing hurtles forward with the force of anticipation and intellectual surprise.

April 8, 2021 issue

Honing My Knife Skills

How mother and daughter reconciled different ways of being Chinese-American—in the kitchen.

March 13, 2021

The People We Know Best

Readers love fictional characters almost as if they were real people. Literary scholars are just starting to take them more seriously.

March 25, 2021 issue

The Bloodhound

A distinct thread of anger runs through all of Nicholson Baker’s work: anger at what people with power get up to in the shadows, anger at how they lie about it, anger at how we forget.

March 11, 2021 issue

Promethean Women

Both Mary Wollstonecraft, darling of twentieth-century feminists, and her visionary daughter Mary Shelley continue to influence us today.

February 25, 2021 issue