Hélène Cixous has never called herself a critic. She tends to shrug off, too, the other appellations she might be given: philosopher, theorist, novelist, memoirist, feminist. In her most famous work, ...

Never in my life have I managed to be unhappy when there was a pool around. I’m a Scorpio, a water sign. It’s a miracle I’ve ...

West End Girl strikes me as a rather neat, crowd-pleasing, bias-confirming presentation of nonmonogamy that casts male ...

No sooner did Bonaparte withdraw his breath than the soul went out of the new universe. Objects faded the moment that the ...

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages.

November 14, 2025 – “With her pen, Antonius rebuilds villages and cities, replants crops, observes the weather, curates ...

My death is starting to assume shape in the distance, however hazy. So is the recognition that nearly everything I own will ...

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack ...

Freud is right to associate fainting and death. Fainting is some kind of pantomime of dying. You abscond, momentarily, from the world.

At the time she was writing Little Reunions, Chang had been living in Los Angeles for two decades. She was born in Shanghai in 1920, to an aristocratic family in decline; shortly after her birth, her ...

My new job came with a research stipend. I’d never had one before—a few grand that would renew each year for five years and then end. What could I use it for? “Anything,” I was told, which seemed ...

The mind is always too simply seeking meaning, trying to boil some beautiful thing down to its conceptual essence. What can stun the mind into quietness? What can briefly flummox the mind in its quest ...