Essays

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

Alejandro Chacoff

The Unbearable Weight of Levity

In Clarice Lispector’s newspaper columns and crônicas, she seems sensorially overcharged by the quotidian, needing only the tiniest slice of existence to feed her writing.

April 6, 2023 issue

Evan Kindley

Departments on the Defensive

A new book by John Guillory explores the history of literary studies and casts a despairing eye at the future of literary criticism.

March 9, 2023 issue

Michael Gorra

Having the Last Word

The sketches in Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures are as close as she ever came to the autobiography she wouldn’t or couldn’t write.

March 9, 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

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

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

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

Season’s Readings

Vladimir Nabokov

The Christmas Story

“He felt the tickling vacuum that always accompanied the urge to write. In this vacuum something was taking shape, growing. A new, special kind of Christmas…. Same old snow, brand-new conflict….”

November 16, 1995 issue

The former Jewish district in Kraków, Poland

Shelley Salamensky

Diaspora Disneys

Hanukkah commemorates Jewish persistence against overwhelming odds, when oil lamps meant to last a single day stayed alight for eight. Five years ago, I heard of what seemed another miracle.

December 23, 2011

Louise Glück

Winter Journey

a poem

December 17, 2020 issue

John Richardson

Art for Christmas

Andrew Wyeth’s very titles—Groundhog Day, Hickory Smoked, Moose Horns, Logging Scoot—personify the American way of life, and the works themselves gladden hearts.

December 9, 1976 issue

Christopher Benfey

Christmas in July

My first summer job was trimming Christmas trees in July. I learned that pines, spruces, and firs do not grow naturally into their pyramidal shapes but struggle toward the light, as we all do.

December 23, 2017

Alfred Brendel

Some Winter Wonders

The great pianist on the great lyricist’s Winterreise.

June 4, 2015 issue

Elizabeth Hardwick

On the Eve: A Story

“The sky begins to cloud over in a sudden metamorphosis of intention. The word, snow, appears in the drift of voices.”

December 22, 1983 issue

The author in a “Snow Maiden” costume at her grandfather’s house for the New Year, Novorossiysk, Russia, 1980

Anastasia Edel

A Soviet New Year

Once a year, the Soviet people had the right to be hopeful. And so we were. The mayonnaise helped.

December 30, 2017

The Latest

Suzy Hansen

Twenty Years of Outsourced War

In Uncertain Ground, Phil Klay sets out to determine what twenty-first-century US foreign policy has done to the cocksure American mind.

October 19, 2023 issue

Jacqueline Rose

The Analyst

Stuart Hall was passionately committed to understanding how social formations affected the deepest parts of the mind.

September 21, 2023 issue

Namwali Serpell

Morrison Hall

A recent exhibit of Toni Morrison’s papers raised the question: How do you mourn a monument?

August 18, 2023

Fara Dabhoiwala

Life Is Short. Indexes Are Necessary.

In his new history of the index, Dennis Duncan traces its evolution through the constantly changing character of reading itself.

June 22, 2023 issue

Yasmine El Rashidi

A Life of Sheer Will

The Lebanese writer and painter Etel Adnan’s urgent need to see and document and create in every form earned her a cultlike status around the world.

June 8, 2023 issue

Kevin Lozano

The Oracle of Public Radio

In Michael Silverblatt’s long-running KCRW show, Bookworm, conversations with writers go past the imperatives of publicity.

May 6, 2023

Michael Hofmann

Bewitched by Goethe

In Johann Eckermann, Goethe found an amanuensis made in heaven.

May 25, 2023 issue

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

The latest releases from New York Review Books

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Lament for Julia

Susan Taubes

Firebird

Zuzanna Ginczanka

The Child and the River

Henri Bosco

My Stupid Intentions

Bernardo Zannoni

Need a House? Call Ms. Mouse!

George Mendoza

The Ruling Clawss

Syd Hoff

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