Our Most-Read Prose of 2025

Blue text on brown background reads "Most Read Prose 2025"

This year, The Yale Review’s most-read prose explored the allure of the past. Bryan Burrough reminisced about his tenure at Vanity Fair during the heyday of magazine publishing. Elena Gosalvez Blanco’s memoir about working for Patricia Highsmith showed us how scary—murderous, even—it can be to live with a tortured genius. Susan Choi remembered her days as a fact-checker at The New Yorker. Sharp criticism by Maggie Millner, Stephanie Burt, Christopher Hawthorne, and Garth Greenwell looked to simpler times, whether to childhood or to early sexual encounters. Richard Beck found darkness under American optimism in Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel. A story by the 2025 Nobel laureate, László Krasznahorkai, imagined a Ukrainian soldier dying with algorithms on his mind. And Audrey Wollen weighed in on an object that makes us human: not the hand ax but the handbag. Read again, or for the first time, and enjoy an antidote to the future.

—the editors

“Vanity Fair’s Heyday” by Bryan Burrough

Burrough looks back on what it was like to work at Vanity Fair during the Graydon Carter era—when he was paid $498,141 a year.

“The Talented Ms. Highsmith” by Elena Gosalvez Blanco

Blanco recounts the strange and unsettling experience of working as an assistant to novelist Patricia Highsmith.

“Is Mary Oliver Embarrassing?” by Maggie Millner

Millner reckons with Oliver’s reputation as an unserious poet—and finds new meaning in her well-worn verses.

“How We’ve Misunderstood Taylor Swift” by Stephanie Burt

The Life of a Showgirl received mixed reviews, but Burt argues that it may be Swift’s most deliberate—and honest—work yet.

“America the Brutal” by Christopher Hawthorne

Hawthorne, an architecture critic, contends that The Brutalist is not really about architecture.

“An Angel Passed Above Us” by László Krasznahorkai, translated by John Batki

A new short story from this year’s Nobel laureate follows two dying soldiers, one trying to soothe the other with a techno-utopian fairy tale about a world neither will ever see.

“Taking Offense” by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell asks what we can do with the art that upsets us—and why staying with bad feeling might matter.

“When Fact-Checking Meant Something” by Susan Choi

Choi remembers the early days of her career working as a fact-checker in The New Yorker’s storied fact-checking department.

“A Unified Theory of the Handbag” by Audrey Wollen

Wollen asks if an unassuming accessory was the secret to evolution.

“Thomas Pynchon Is Angry” by Richard Beck

Beck looks at how Pynchon takes on America’s indifference to history in his latest book, Shadow Ticket.