Essays

Essays [ssa_access]

Martha Foley’s Granddaughters

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

Essays [ssa_access]

To Catch a Sunset

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

Essays [ssa_access]

The Next New Thing

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

Essays [ssa_access]

Imperfecta

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

Essays [ssa_access]

The Widower’s Lament

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

Essays [ssa_access]

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

Essays [ssa_access]

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

Essays [ssa_access]

Last Rites and Comic Flights

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

Ulysses at 100 [ssa_access]

The Believer

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

Capital of Willows

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

Test of Faith

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

The Examined Lie

A meditation on memory

Talk of the Town

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

Matters of Taste

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

The Wandering Years

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

My Mother’s Yiddish

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

Net Gains

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

Saigon Summer

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

● This week's archive pick

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