Criticism

Books

Searching for Seamus Heaney

What I found when I resolved to read him
Elisa Gonzalez
Seamus Heaney surrounded by books at London’s Royal Society of Literature in March 1995
Books

When Fact-Checking Meant Something

A new novel captures a bygone era in New York journalism
Susan Choi
Books

Andrea Long Chu's Problem with Authority

She built a critical voice on risk and provocation. Who is she speaking to now?
Sam Huber
Books

Vanity Fair’s Heyday

I was once paid six figures to write an article—now what?
Bryan Burrough
Film

Terrence Malick’s Disciples

Why the auteur is the most influential director in Hollywood
Bilge Ebiri
Books

Thomas Pynchon Is Angry

In Shadow Ticket, the novelist takes on America’s indifference to history
Richard Beck

Browse

Criticism

Red texture in cloth
Books

Conspicuous Erudition

The new black poetry
Jerome Ellison Murphy
April 1, 2020
Painting of an abstract storm
Books

Metafiction and #MeToo

A new way to write trauma
Maggie Doherty
April 1, 2020
Abstract ornamental pattern
Books

On Long Poems

Four recent books make length a virtue
Stephanie Burt
April 1, 2020
Susan Sontag, New York, February 2, 1978. Photograph by Richard Avedon. ©The Richard Avedon Foundation.
Books

Furious Permissions

For Susan Sontag, style was nourishment
Brian Dillon
January 1, 2020
Two Black Americans
Art

San Francisco, 1956

A photograph and its afterlife
Jim Lewis
January 1, 2020
Dark monsters
Books

Styles of Radical Illness

Anne Boyer diagnoses the lies we still tell about cancer
Laura Kolbe
January 1, 2020
Photo of Robert Lowell
Books

The Dolphin Letters

Revisiting Robert Lowell’s infamous book
Dan Chiasson
January 1, 2020
Group of people on stage in dim light
Music

From Films to Operas

New interpretations of It's a Wonderful Life, The Exterminating Angel, and more
Dewey Faulkner
July 1, 2019
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
Criticism

In the Time That Remains

Reflections on the poetry of Derek Mahon
Oana Sanziana Marian
July 1, 2019
A woman looks down mournfully in a still from the film Roma.
Film

On "Roma"

A review of Alfonso Cuarón's film
Charles Taylor
July 1, 2019