Your backstage pass to the goings-on at The Yale Review.

Welcome to Back Matter, the new Substack from The Yale Review—the country’s oldest quarterly magazine of literature, ideas, and public life. Since 1819, TYR has been a meeting ground for writers, thinkers, and readers across disciplines and generations. We’ve published everyone from Virginia Woolf, President Willam H. Taft, and Bayard Rustin to Cathy Park Hong, Chris Ware, and Namwali Serpell. We like to say we’re the oldest “little magazine,” but we’re still asking the biggest questions.

Back Matter is where that conversation continues—off the page, and with you. Since our 2019 relaunch under editor Meghan O’Rourke, we have worked to build community through literature: in print, online, and by way of our annual literary festival in New Haven. This Substack is a new gathering space for lifelong learners, curious readers, and writers of every stripe.

Here you’ll find craft talks, writing prompts, and editorial advice; interviews with contributors; reading lists; behind-the-scenes reflections; and gems from our two-hundred-year-old archive. Some posts will be playful, some serious, and some experimental as we find our rhythm and voice in this new medium. We hope you’ll help shape it with us.

Subscribe for free to receive monthly posts, early event invitations, open submission alerts, and (soon!) subscriber-only content—like recordings of our panels, workshops, and conversations with writers you love.

P.S. New to The Yale Review? There’s no paywall online; browse weekly essays, poems, and reviews here. Our newsletter will keep you in the loop. And if you’re a print person (like we are), consider subscribing to our beautifully designed quarterly magazine. Every subscription supports our mission and helps sustain a vibrant independent literary culture.

P.P.S. We also have some limited-edition merch—designed with “little magazine” readers in mind and available only while supplies last. Shop now!