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

From the Archives

Secret Maps

Holly Wright's Photographs of Hands
Charles Simic
October 1, 1996
From the Archives

The Burning Book: Genet and Cocteau

Edmund White
October 1, 1993
Black and white photo of light coming through windows in the apse of San Vitale in Ravenna with mosaics. Courtesy N.P. Sullo.
Essays

Days of 1952

On the rapture of experiencing art in solitude
James Merrill
April 1, 1992
From the Archives

Fiction in Review

Marilynne Robinson
April 1, 1992
From the Archives

From My Cornell Notebooks

Charles Simic
April 1, 1992
From the Archives

The Religion-Making Imagination of Joseph Smith

Harold Bloom
April 1, 1992
A stack of old issues of The Yale Review. Courtesy Pentagram
From the Archives

Short Talks

Anne Carson
July 1, 1991
From the Archives

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

James Merrill
December 1, 1989
From the Archives

The First Eighteen Lines of The Waste Land

Anthony Hecht
December 1, 1989
From the Archives

A Legend in My Life

My memories of the incomparable Greta Garbo
Vincent Price
July 1, 1988