Literature

Essays

Zadie Smith

Art for Our Sakes

Why should we go on making things?

June 11, 2026 issue

Meghan O’Gieblyn

Wishing It So

As AI erodes our attention spans and expressiveness, philosophers like Simone Weil and Arthur Schopenhauer offer profound insights on what it means to be an individual.

September 24, 2026 issue

Jarrett Earnest

Pop & Pleasure & Freedom

In his decades of writing about pop music, Jon Savage came to understand its liberatory power.

May 28, 2026 issue

Jed Perl

The Painter’s Shadow World

Morgan Meis’s Three Paintings Trilogy is the most exciting new writing about the visual arts to appear in a generation.

April 23, 2026 issue

Rachel Kushner

Obscure and Ill-Fated

Where did literature’s criminals come from, and where are they going?

July 27, 2025

Adelle Waldman

The Life and Death of the Suburban Novel

Why isn’t there a twenty-first-century Cheever?

August 28, 2025

Ben Lerner

Cardiography

After open-heart surgery

November 6, 2025 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Sad-Maxxing

Ashton Politanoff’s new novel tells the story of sad dads and washed-up jocks vying for a phantom ideal of masculinity.

October 8, 2026 issue

Essays by Ingrid D. Rowland

Ingrid D. Rowland

The Spell of Marble

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s immense artistic authority was based on his theatrical skill with the chisel.

May 12, 2022 issue

Olafur Eliasson: The weather project, 2003

Ingrid D. Rowland

Filling Our Eyes with Sunshine

No one who saw Olafur Eliasson’s The weather project has ever forgotten it.

September 26, 2019 issue

Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi holding Silvio Berlusconi's hand as he speaks next to a Roman statue of the goddess Venus, Benghazi, Libya, August 30, 2008

Ingrid D. Rowland

Berlusconi: Will Someone Please Pull the Plug?

The scandals that buzz ever more insistently around Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi are hardly the first that old Rome has ever seen.

November 10, 2010

Funerary stela of Lady Taperet, Third Intermediate Period, circa 850–690 BCE. Lady Taperet is praying to Atum, god of the setting sun, in the hope of eternally accompanying him on his daily journey. The hieroglyphs above her exhort the god to grant her everything she will need in the afterlife. The sky is represented by the blue body of the goddess Nut, who swallows the sun every night and gives birth to it every morning.

Ingrid D. Rowland

The Charms of Ancient Egypt

“The Egyptians, far from being obsessed with death, were captivated by life in all its forms: animal, vegetable, human, and cosmic.”

July 2, 2009 issue

Essays by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates

The Cruelest Sport

A romance of (expendable) maleness—in which The Fight is honored, and even great champions come, and go.

February 13, 1992 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

‘I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness’

Serial murder has emerged as the “crime of the 1990s” and our collective fascination is matched by a flood of luridly packaged paperback books on a vertiginous assortment of killers.

March 24, 1994 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

‘Who Do You Think You Are?’

Alice Munro’s voice can seem deceptively direct, but it expresses an elliptical and poetic sort of vernacular realism in which the ceaselessly analytic voice appears to be utterly natural, as if it were the reader’s own.

December 3, 2009 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

Left Behind in Lisbon

Maria Judite de Carvalho’s depiction of the lives of women in mid-twentieth-century Portugal is executed as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy.

February 10, 2022 issue

More by Joyce Carol Oates

The Latest

Leslie Fiedler, read by Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner Reads from Love and Death in the American Novel

Season 2, Episode 4 of Private Life

October 14, 2026

Jonathan Lethem

Second Chances

The reissue of Wilfrid Sheed’s 1966 novel Office Politics, about the dramas of running a literary magazine, raises the question of reprints and their popularity today.

October 22, 2026 issue

Frances Wilson

‘Writing on One Table’

Charles Lamb’s camp, mischievous, melancholic alter ego, Elia, owes much to his sister, Mary, with whom he lived for forty years, absorbing her “rambling chat.”

October 8, 2026 issue

Merve Emre

‘Let Us Fall for Whatever We Want To’

The marvelous short stories of Diane Williams have the flash and feeling of dreams.

August 27, 2026

Laura Marsh

Home Invasions

In John Lanchester’s novel Look What You Made Me Do, a couple’s private language is weaponized against them.

August 20, 2026 issue

Robert Glück, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest

Robert Glück on His Books, Frank O’Hara, and Dreams

Episode 19 of Private Life

July 1, 2026

Mary Turfah

Safety Is When There’s No One Dying

Israel’s assault on Palestine and Lebanon has reconfigured how children understand the world.

June 24, 2026

Adania Shibli

Dead Lands

Rather than letting ourselves tire of repeated stories, how might we allow them to inform us about something we couldn’t grasp otherwise?

June 17, 2026

Michael Gorra

Call My Agent

With their blend of taste and market savvy, literary agents have been both invisible and necessary in contemporary American fiction.

June 25, 2026 issue

Gary Saul Morson

Reassembling Bakhtin

Since Mikhail Bakhtin became widely known in the 1980s, his book on Rabelais has perplexed readers for its seemingly contradictory stance to everything else he wrote.

June 25, 2026 issue