Essays

Questioning Desire

Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex is rare in its ability to speak to a plural audience—queer and straight, multiracial and multigendered—with the assumption that we have some common interests in sex and dating even if we have varied experiences of them.

September 22, 2022 issue

Miranda Seymour

‘Turbulence and Misery’

Anguish, provoked by her acute sense of physical and social inadequacy, was essential for Jean Stafford’s literary talent to flourish.

July 21, 2022 issue

Jarrett Earnest

A Proliferation of Beauties

The critic Dave Hickey almost single-handedly remade the practice of writing about art in the 1980s and 1990s, even as he provoked outrage in the institutional art world.

June 23, 2022 issue

Christopher Benfey

The Hum of Humanity

The autobiographical turn in Stanley Cavell’s later work illuminates his extraordinarily varied philosophical interests.

May 12, 2022 issue

Merve Emre

The Act of Persuasion

The drama of Elizabeth Hardwick’s life emanated from an elemental restlessness and a desire for sovereignty over her intellect and emotion.

April 21, 2022 issue

Simon Callow

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pianist

Jeremy Denk’s memoir is not just about piano lessons but about life lessons—how the artist creates a self.

April 21, 2022 issue

Christopher Benfey

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

Sharon Lin

Honing My Knife Skills

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

March 13, 2021

The Latest

Jerry Brown

On the Downbeat

Joan Didion was gentle in person, and quiet-spoken, but ferocious in her honesty.

September 22, 2022

Michael Gorra

Corrections of Taste

Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries traces a shift in English studies in which close attention to language, rather than literary history, became the paradigm for criticism.

October 6, 2022 issue

John Banville

The Imaginative Imperative

Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom is a defense of the autonomy of the arts against the stranglehold of relevance.

April 21, 2022 issue

Ursula Lindsey

Refusing Silence in Egypt

Even as the Sisi regime tries to obliterate the story of the Arab Spring, some Egyptian writers remain committed to its memory and ideals.

April 21, 2022 issue

Ange Mlinko

His Nemesis Was Stupidity

Baudelaire thought the scope of his influence would be limited by the perfection of his poetry, which sailed over the heads of the masses.

April 7, 2022 issue

Peter Brooks

Visions of Waste

The American Scene is Henry James’s indictment of what Americans had made of their land.

March 24, 2022 issue

Darryl Pinckney

Our Lady of Deadpan

Joan Didion’s genius was at exploring the paradoxes and contradictions in the stories we tell ourselves.

February 10, 2022 issue

Dan Chiasson

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