Nonfiction

Essays

When Does a Divorce Begin?

Most people think of it as failure. For me it was an achievement.
Anahid Nersessian
Books

Vanity Fair’s Heyday

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

Taking Offense

Reading through bad feeling
Garth Greenwell
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
Sepia toned photograph showing painter Joan Mitchell behind a canvas in her studio
Essays

The Unfolding of Time in Paint

My encounters with Joan Mitchell's panels
Rachel Cohen

Browse

Nonfiction

A still of Ayo Edebiri and Julia Roberts in Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt
Essay of the Week

What “After the Hunt” Gets Right

I left academia. Luca Guadagnino’s new film reminds me why.
Annie Julia Wyman
November 3, 2025
Essays

An Incomplete Mentorship

Ellen Bryant Voigt helped me become the writer I am today. After a falling out, we never spoke again.
Rachel Jamison Webster
October 30, 2025
Black-and-white photo of Ellen Bryant Voigt writing at her desk in 2015
Tribute

Ellen Bryant Voigt

Four poets remember a singular mentor
Catherine Barnett,
Victoria Chang,
Meghan O’Rourke,
and
Carl Phillips
October 28, 2025
Books

Thomas Pynchon Is Angry

In Shadow Ticket, the novelist takes on America’s indifference to history
Richard Beck
October 27, 2025
Taylor Swift in an embellished white military coat and booties under a cloud of confetti during the Eras Tour
Essay of the Week

How We’ve Misunderstood Taylor Swift

The Life of a Showgirl received mixed reviews from fans and critics. But it may be her most honest work yet.
Stephanie Burt
October 20, 2025
Essay of the Week

How Sober Should a Writer Be?

F. Scott Fitzgerald and the ambivalence of American drinking culture
Sloane Crosley
October 6, 2025
Grayscale image of an excavated Cycladic figure face down in the dirt on the island of Keros in July 1967
Essays

Cycladic Figurines and Their Mysteries

An excavation in fragments
Adina Hoffman
September 8, 2025
Books

Green, Lively, and Full of Decay

Why Claire-Louise Bennett’s epistolary style is the one for our times
Audrey Wollen
September 8, 2025
Essays

How Mrs. Dalloway Began

Slipping into Virginia Woolf’s sentences
Edmund de Waal
September 8, 2025
Black-and-white photo of an empty canal on the island of Murano in Venice, Italy
Essays

The Husband

My three trips to Venice, before and after marriage
Anne Enright
September 8, 2025