Essays

Essays [ssa_access]

Our Farm, My Inspiration

How a weekend getaway became a poet’s muse

Essays [ssa_access]

Tutors

My many mentors at Oxford, from Lincoln College to All Souls, linger like spirits in the mind

Essays [ssa_access]

At Sixty-Five

After the excesses of youth and terrors of middle age, a writer faces the contingencies of being old

Essays [ssa_access]

One Road

Driving through postwar Yugoslavia was nearly impossible, but a young poet and his new wife struggled through the desolate landscape to Athens

Essays [ssa_access]

Kodachrome Eden

With purple prose and oversaturated images, National Geographic reimagined postwar America as a dreamspace of hope and fascination

Essays [ssa_access]

On Friendship

The intimacies shared with our closest companions keep us anchored, vital, and alive

Essays [ssa_access]

Mortify Our Wolves

The struggle back to life and faith in the face of pain and the certainty of death

Tuning Up [ssa_access]

Joyas Voladoras

Revisiting an ode to the heart by one of our best-loved writers

Essays [ssa_access]

Rites of Passage

When a quirky old man who lived on the Cape died, I thought I didn’t care

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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