Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Essays

Dan Chiasson

Road Maps for the Soul

The Philosophy of Modern Song can be read as a tour journal, refracted through one lonely song after another.

December 8, 2022 issue

Merve Emre

The Illusion of the First Person

A historical survey of the personal essay shows it to be the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.

November 3, 2022 issue

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

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

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

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

Sara Lipton

The Jewish Authenticity Trap

Dara Horn’s fierce, often insightful cri de coeur presents a strangely selective picture of Jewishness, cropping a rich, messy, diverse, and complex history to fit into a tightly focused frame.

November 24, 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

Essays by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates

The Cruelest Sport

A romance of (expendable) maleness—in which The Fight is honored, and even great champions come, and go.

February 13, 1992 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

‘I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness’

Serial murder has emerged as the “crime of the 1990s” and our collective fascination is matched by a flood of luridly packaged paperback books on a vertiginous assortment of killers.

March 24, 1994 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

‘Who Do You Think You Are?’

Alice Munro’s voice can seem deceptively direct, but it expresses an elliptical and poetic sort of vernacular realism in which the ceaselessly analytic voice appears to be utterly natural, as if it were the reader’s own.

December 3, 2009 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

Left Behind in Lisbon

Maria Judite de Carvalho’s depiction of the lives of women in mid-twentieth-century Portugal is executed as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy.

February 10, 2022 issue

More by Joyce Carol Oates

The Latest

Daphne Merkin

The Golden Age of Glossies

Women’s magazines were once a well-paying forum for inquiry into the interior life.

January 30, 2023

Christine Smallwood

Misreading the Cues

The “balanced-literacy” method of teaching children to read has predominated in American schools since the 1990s. It has been a failure.

February 9, 2023 issue

Ben Lerner

The Faces of Victor Serge

The radical writer’s novels are unsettling explorations of the tension between individual and collective life.

January 19, 2023 issue

Stacy Schiff

Writing the Furies

The essayist Judith Thurman has made a career of profiling complicated, often unstoppable women.

December 22, 2022 issue

Rebecca Giggs

The Sea, the Sea

Rachel Carson’s ocean books reveal an author profoundly engaged with the problem of how to convey ecological knowledge—and how to decenter human life.

December 22, 2022 issue

Natalia Ginzburg and Alba de Céspedes

On Women: An Exchange

“That article of mine spoke of women in general, and said things we all know: that women are not much worse than men and can also accomplish something worthwhile if they try.”

December 22, 2022 issue

Ishion Hutchinson

Far Away

When I moved from Kingston to New York, V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival became part of my internal rhythm of resistance in the city, my bulwark against losing the gift of fantasy.

October 21, 2022