Literature

Essays

Ben Lerner

Cardiography

After open-heart surgery

November 6, 2025 issue

Susan Neiman

Where Wokeness Went Wrong

Symbolic struggles cannot be a force of resistance to the Trump administration.

December 4, 2025 issue

Adelle Waldman

The Life and Death of the Suburban Novel

Why isn’t there a twenty-first-century Cheever?

August 28, 2025

Christopher Benfey

Looking for Disneyland

Lately I have found myself returning to a puzzling episode from my childhood in Richmond, Indiana.

August 20, 2025

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Translation’s Drift

Two books look closely at both the limitations and the possibilities of the art of literary translation.

June 26, 2025 issue

Bathsheba Demuth

Where the Dogs Run

Along the Yukon River, declining salmon populations threaten the future of the region’s sled dogs—and the communities that rely on them.

August 15, 2025

Rachel Kushner

Obscure and Ill-Fated

Where did literature’s criminals come from, and where are they going?

July 27, 2025

Wyatt Mason

An Epistolary Critic

The correspondence of Guy Davenport is a syllabus for the twentieth century.

November 6, 2025 issue

Essays by Ingrid D. Rowland

Ingrid D. Rowland

The Spell of Marble

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s immense artistic authority was based on his theatrical skill with the chisel.

May 12, 2022 issue

Olafur Eliasson: The weather project, 2003

Ingrid D. Rowland

Filling Our Eyes with Sunshine

No one who saw Olafur Eliasson’s The weather project has ever forgotten it.

September 26, 2019 issue

Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi holding Silvio Berlusconi's hand as he speaks next to a Roman statue of the goddess Venus, Benghazi, Libya, August 30, 2008

Ingrid D. Rowland

Berlusconi: Will Someone Please Pull the Plug?

The scandals that buzz ever more insistently around Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi are hardly the first that old Rome has ever seen.

November 10, 2010

Funerary stela of Lady Taperet, Third Intermediate Period, circa 850–690 BCE. Lady Taperet is praying to Atum, god of the setting sun, in the hope of eternally accompanying him on his daily journey. The hieroglyphs above her exhort the god to grant her everything she will need in the afterlife. The sky is represented by the blue body of the goddess Nut, who swallows the sun every night and gives birth to it every morning.

Ingrid D. Rowland

The Charms of Ancient Egypt

“The Egyptians, far from being obsessed with death, were captivated by life in all its forms: animal, vegetable, human, and cosmic.”

July 2, 2009 issue

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

Darryl Pinckney

Love’s Anguish and Force and Terror

Nicholas Boggs structures his moving new biography of James Baldwin around the writer’s most important relationships with men.

November 6, 2025 issue

Ilija Trojanow, translated by Ambika Athreya

After Flight

Having lost the organic link to his past, the refugee contrives for himself a room to which only he has the keys.

September 10, 2025

John J. Lennon

Finding the Story

Running a nonfiction workshop in prison for three months, I saw how writing could let my peers forge a new identity. Then it came to an end.

May 21, 2025

Darryl Pinckney

Mornings with Murray

New York City always got the towering journalist Murray Kempton at full sail.

April 27, 2025

Natasha Wimmer

Rigorous Innocence

A new volume of essays and crónicas by the Argentine writer Hebe Uhart is often funny and sad in equal measure, as the stories follow her travels from Buenos Aires to Guadalajara.

April 10, 2025 issue