Essays

Essays

The Unfolding of Time in Paint

My encounters with Joan Mitchell's panels
Rachel Cohen
Sepia toned photograph showing painter Joan Mitchell behind a canvas in her studio
Memoir

The Talented Ms. Highsmith

I worked for the novelist in her final months. I thought she wanted to kill me.
Elena Gosalvez Blanco
A Closer Read

Taking Offense

Reading through bad feeling
Garth Greenwell
Essays

How Mrs. Dalloway Began

Slipping into Virginia Woolf’s sentences
Edmund de Waal
Essays

When Does a Divorce Begin?

Most people think of it as failure. For me it was an achievement.
Anahid Nersessian
Dan Fox as a child with his nain, or grandmother, in the chicken-filled yard of Siambr Wen, near Llanrwst, North Wales, UK
Essays

What Happened When I Began to Speak Welsh

By learning my family's language, I hoped to join their conversation.
Dan Fox

Browse

Essays

Two cartoon characters superimposed onto painting of a storm.
Essays

The Brink of Destruction

Revisiting John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended”
Edward Hirsch
September 20, 2021
Graphic with two bathtubs on pedestals and a leaf dropping from the faucets
Essays

Suicide in Fiction, Reconsidered

Why we need stories about living after a suicide attempt
Morgan Thomas
September 7, 2021
Riot
Essays

In the Riot Grrrl Archive

Punk and the limits of individualism
Rachel Greenwald Smith
July 19, 2021
Lighthouse stairs
Essays

Lullaby

On motherhood and the pain of holding
Chloe Garcia Roberts
July 12, 2021
Black and white still showing Giulietta Masina smiling with a black tear at the corner of her eye
Essays

How to Come Back to Life

On reaching middle age and carrying on
Emily Ogden
June 28, 2021
Series of stills of author doing a poetry reading.
Essays

I Killed, I Died

Banter, self-destruction, and the poetry reading
Douglas Kearney
June 28, 2021
Graphic with book pages and blue designs of windows and cats
Essays

The Heart of Fiction

Storytelling, experience, and truth
Hernan Diaz
June 28, 2021
Essays

The Subject of Pain

On Louise Bourgeois
Madhu H. Kaza
June 28, 2021
Interior view of library.
Essays

What Space is For

The forking paths of memory and return
Mairead Small Staid
June 28, 2021
Person moves out of view in a dark area.
Essays

Picturing Catastrophe

The visual politics of racial reckoning
Rizvana Bradley
May 25, 2021