Essays

‘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

Life’s Merry-Go-Round

From Rilke to Rodgers and Hammerstein, the carousel has embodied the sadness of lost innocence. And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges—even on Donald Trump.

January 25, 2021

To Err Is Poetic

The poetry canon is dotted with mistakes large and small; why do some critics seem attached to reading these errors as intentional?

February 11, 2021 issue

‘A Very Lonely Business’

“How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom,” Virginia Woolf wrote. Is there a tradeoff between motherhood and artistic creativity?

February 11, 2021 issue