Essays

The Path Is No Path: On Not Becoming a Poet

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What makes a poet a poet? There is of course no simple answer. You could argue that self-declaration is enough. You could also argue there must be a measure.
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Essays

Pressure-and-Release: Writing Shanghai’s Rooftoppers

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I remember crying the day I made a decision about his character: It seemed clear what needed to happen.
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Essays

Falling Out of Love with Lyric Poetry

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Bang out hundreds of pages of rhyming couplets about something other than your identity or your perceptions, and you, too, will likely fall out of love with lyric poetry.
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Essays

Spider Girl

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Essays

YA Isn’t Just for Young Adults

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When we have a child or teen at the center of a story, is the categorical difference between YA and adult in the plot, the stakes, or the voice and tone?
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Essays

The Quiet Exhilaration of Reading in Italian

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Reading Italian literature submerged me into a kind of intoxication—an explosion of sound and thought.
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Essays

José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature

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American readers have largely forgotten the single greatest writer to come from the Latin American Boom: Chilean novelist José Donoso.
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Essays

The Sublime Poetics of Linda Gregg

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Linda Gregg was looking to model truth, that finicky thing impossible to hold in its entirety.
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Essays Reviews

Éric Vuillard Is Rewriting the Writing of History

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Vuillard doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that his quest for murky truths sometimes forces him to speculate.
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Essays

The Book that Made the Bard: 400 Years of Shakespeare’s Folio

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The Folio is our gateway to Shakespeare; it's also a cautionary tale.
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Essays

How the World’s Most Famous Book Was Made

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The creation of Shakespeare's Folio was not straightforward, and the people who compiled it had their own aims with its publication.
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Essays

The Miracle of Photography

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The invention of photography, less than 200 years old, seems both strangely recent and perilously distant.
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Essays

Visions of Summertime Sadness and Solitude in ‘The Green Ray’

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Romance, like film, is in large part projection.
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Essays

On the Tyranny of Slush Piles

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The difficulty is that art, and especially complex art, fundamentally resists large-scale comparative evaluation.
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Essays

How the Federal Writers’ Project Shaped a Generation of Authors

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The Federal Writers' Project of the 1930s proved an education in art and empathy.
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Essays

How to Exclaim!

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Austen, Hemingway, Rushdie, and more offer lessons on how best to use the exclamation point.
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Essays

In Search of Writers’ Haunts

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I seek out the haunts of writers because pursuing the paths of those who have gone before affords me a degree of justification in my own pursuits.
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Essays

The Brief Liberation of Yu Xuanji

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Nearly 1,200 years after her death, Yu is still remembered as one of China’s foremost female poets.
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