Essays

Essays [ssa_access]

Capital of Willows

On a trip to North Korea, a writer remembers his troubled father, a victim of the “Forgotten War”

Essays [ssa_access]

Test of Faith

The Roman Catholic Church may forgive us our sins—but can it be forgiven for its own?

Essays [ssa_access]

The Examined Lie

A meditation on memory

Essays [ssa_access]

Talk of the Town

At the Concord Lyceum, Emerson tried out his lectures on his neighbors

Essays [ssa_access]

Matters of Taste

A work of literature and a bottle of wine require similar skills of their respective critics

Essays [ssa_access]

The Wandering Years

Read the travel journals of literary icon Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died yesterday at 101

Essays [ssa_access]

My Mother’s Yiddish

The music of my childhood was a language filled with endearments and rebukes, and frequent misunderstandings

Essays [ssa_access]

Net Gains

Nabokov’s profitable summer chasing butterflies and settling scores in the Utah mountains

Essays [ssa_access]

Saigon Summer

A spy’s daughter remembers the haunting unreality of embassy life in South Vietnam before the fall

Martha Foley’s Granddaughters

What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett

To Catch a Sunset

Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love

The Next New Thing

In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before

Imperfecta

Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing

The Widower’s Lament

After the death of the poet Wendy Barker, her grieving husband turns to the literature of loss

The World at the End of a Line

The grandson of one of American literature’s Lost Generation novelists reflects on his namesake’s love of the sea

The Goddess Complex

A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in northwestern India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking

Last Rites and Comic Flights

A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity

The Believer

When nobody would touch Joyce’s manuscript, Sylvia Beach stepped in

● This week's archive pick

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