Emma Copley Eisenberg’s short story, “Lanternfly,” from our Spring 2026 Issue, is literally a beach read: it takes place on the Jersey shore, amid sunbathers and ice cream cones and crab bakes. It’s also a subtle, surprising exploration of art, gender, desire, and coming-of-age at all ages. We spoke with Emma, whose new book, Fat Swim, will be published next month, about her own creative process and how to write about creativity itself.

The Yale Review: The narrator of your story is what we might call literary-adjacent: he’s a librarian who gets a part-time job with a famous writer; he isn’t in an MFA program himself, but he knows a lot of people who are. There’s a lot of fiction, both classic and contemporary, narrated by writers or aspiring writers. What drew you to a character at the edge of the literary world? What perspective on the creative process—and creativity itself—does it give us?

Emma Copley Eisenberg: This story began for me with the image of a young man looking at an older man’s body on the beach. This sense of the narrator, Jules, being the one with the more “desirable” body, but nevertheless the one looking rather than being looked at, felt core to Jules’s character, and the dynamic of someone young and lost watching someone old and solid felt core to the story. I followed these hunches to learn that Jules is looking at Rob not only because he finds Rob’s comfortable way of being in his body interesting, but also because Rob has a way of being comfortable in the world, in the flow of life, that is connected to his identity as a writer and creative person. Jules can’t quite access either kind of ease, which makes sense because he’s young, and also is made more complicated by him being trans and having recently had top surgery.

So I think the sense that Jules is at the edge or adjacent, as you so wonderfully put it, is about both the world of art and labor and the world of the body. To be the assistant to an artist or to create the daily conditions (food, shelter, beauty) for an artist to do their best work is a vital and creative role too, and Jules gets pleasure and fulfillment from sitting at this edge, though I do think he is interested in what it would feel like at the center, which is part of why he wants to know Rob so badly. But artists at the center of creating are not always in the best position to know what is really happening in their art and what it means, right? So often people at the edges are much better at understanding and talking about what it means to be creative. In this story, the body is involved in Rob’s art making too, in ways that Rob understands intuitively but Jules is learning, page by page, to articulate.

One of the characters in your story has just embarked on a new novel, which seems to induce an almost altered state. Among other things, his relationship to his body changes while his mind is at work: he eats very little and has a lot of sex. How do you think about the relationship between creativity and physicality? Is it a kind of appetite?

Hehe, yes: Rob, the famous science fiction author who our main character is assisting, becomes a man on creative fire, sustained by seltzer and orgasms. At this point in my life, I know enough artists to know that absolutely everyone’s creative process is inextricable from their body, and that this relationship looks wildly different for everyone. I know people who have to run or lift weights in order to create and I know people who have to stay in bed and not move for days. I know people who eat pretty much constantly while writing—fruit and nuts and gummy fish and Sour Punch Straws—and people who take Rob’s approach. I pretty much only apply to residencies where I know the food will be good, because spending all day trying to make good art and then getting to eat a delicious and nourishing dinner prepared for you by someone else is the biggest stroke of luck and, I believe, absolutely necessary for the work ahead.

For many years I basically thought that my body was disgusting and a liability to my writing. What if that isn’t true? was a question I started to ask about five years ago. What if my body can sit at the table, come to the party, etc.? I think my writing got a lot better on a craft level and my books found more readers once I began examining and consciously talking to the part of my thinking self that was at total war with my physical self. I wasted a lot of time trying to write sentences about thoughts and feelings alone.

Luminous written insight can totally be accessed without any understanding of physical pleasure, but these are not usually the books I love as a reader, or that end up staying in my house after I’ve read them—I’d much rather spend a sunny morning reading Grace Paley than Ottessa Moshfegh, but that’s just me.

At the same time, some of my favorite writers have a troubled relationship to appetite—to want itself—or they also understand that struggle well. I don’t think the goal is to suppress that struggle or pretend it doesn’t exist, because it’s such a big and interesting part of being human. So many cultural and religious traditions, from Southern evangelical Christianity to bagel Judaism to East Asian beauty culture to Irish and Italian Catholicism and Modern Islam, all contain big doses of “body as disgusting liability,” so it’s no wonder that parts of so many of us believe this.

I think writers who believe in the body as a powerful source of energy and artistic knowledge are best served by being in active communication with the parts of themselves that also believe the body—particularly the fat body, the disabled body, the dark-skinned body, the body with visible scars or burns or skin irregularities—is disgusting and shameful. If these parts are not in communication, the result is often a deepening of the psychic war between brain and body, a passing on of that shame and fear to the reader—like making a shallow groove in the ice deeper and deeper.

I’ve written about this before, and I feel my perspective is sometimes mischaracterized—including in this magazine, in a piece by Garth Greenwell in response to my writing about Miranda July’s All Fours—as rooted in “offense,” or in an impulse toward moral policing. It’s not. When I come across evidence of a writer in unexamined war with their physicality, which often manifests across all POVs in a novel or across a body of work, what I feel is not personal offense but artistic disappointment that the writer’s capacity for imagination and empathy is so severely limited and collective grief that we as a culture are still so far away from understanding the essential link between the body and art making. That these limitations on the part of the writer work in tandem with the ways more powerful bodies tend to dominate how we talk about and see less powerful bodies troubles me also, but that trouble has pretty equal weight as these failures of craft.

“Lanternfly” is about change of so many kinds, on so many scales: aging, transitioning, making art. The titular symbol for all of this is an invasive insect that we’re supposed to kill on sight. How did you arrive at the lanternfly as a central image of transformation for this story?

My spouse is from the Jersey Shore, so my family goes there for a week each summer. One year, the beach was so overrun with spotted lanternflies that they were crawling all over us in the sand and even floated in clumps on the surface of the ocean. It was strange and gross and alarming! But underneath my alarm was another feeling, which was curiosity about these creatures and a kind of awe: So red! So powerful! How had they traveled all the way from China to the Jersey Shore? How potent they must be to earn a murder decree from the state! The contradiction that they were dangerous and gross but also beautiful started to work on me. There are so many things in our world that have no explanation, they just are—a thing that I think both characters in “Lanternfly,” the younger Jules and the older Rob, are struggling against. This is how writing a short story usually starts for me. I’ll start with an image and then ask, For whom would this image be super urgent?

What’s a popular piece of writing advice you don’t agree with? What’s a piece of advice that you stand by?

I’ve become really obsessed with the word plot and I generally disagree with the common understanding of it as action or incident that takes place externally. I don’t look down on plot (fun! immersion! movement!) and I don’t ignore it, I just think that “what is going to happen next” is only one way that plot can work. To me plot is closer to a kind of design or logic, the thing that connects the parts of a story to each other and orders them; the thing that the reader is tracking as it deepens. Most people would say the “plot” of “Lanternfly” is that a young man flailing in his life takes a job assisting a prominent older science fiction writer for a summer and ends up helping him troll the apps for sex, but I’d call that the premise, or the incidents. The plot of the story for me is about a young trans man at odds with his own body and mind becoming less at odds with it via a gradual process of learning how to live and love from someone older; as the days tick by and Rob writes his book and does sex act after sex act, Jules becomes more and more unburdened. There’s a logic there, though I didn’t set out with it and found it only in revision.

I do think that writing around the same time most days, in mostly the same place—a.k.a. a routine—has value. I think the body and the brain start to talk to each other extra hard at whatever time of day and in whatever place you pick, and that a kind of Pavlovian conditioning can happen, like an association getting stronger or a muscle getting more able to bear weight over time. Lately I’ve been writing at dawn, which is of course also when a lot of people pray, and I think this is working because my nighttime brain and my daytime brain are both online at the same time.

“Lanternfly” is drawn from your book Fat Swim, a collection of linked short stories that will be published by Hogarth this April. How would you describe those links? Why did you decide to braid the collection together in this way? Also: how? Tell us a bit about the mechanics of making the different stories connect.

I’ve always been a sucker for books and movies in which people are main characters in one part and side characters in another, in which people are connected in loose but powerful ways. Magnolia, for example, is a perfect film; so is Short Cuts, based on the work of Raymond Carver. Also books like Winesburg, Ohio or The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in which the characters live nearby one other and cross paths all the time, in both meaningful and totally mundane ways. Fat Swim takes place in and around Philadelphia, and has characters that recur: someone may be the star of one story and then pop up as an extra in another. Two characters date the same queer fuck boy. That kind of thing.

But I do also see Fat Swim as having a united plot that binds the book together with a singular logic. For me that logic is guided by two questions: (1) Is my body me or not me? (2) Do I get to say what it means, or do other people? These questions get posed in the book’s title story and then the rest of the book is different characters trying to answer them.

In the first third or so of Fat Swim, I think the characters are saying “My body is not me,” because other people are telling them what their body means and they are chafing against that. In the second third, people swing hard the other way, saying “My body is me and I get to decide what it means come hell or high water,” which is an idealistic but often untenable way to live. Sometimes the rubber meets the road, and when it does these characters are often totally destabilized. The last third, which includes “Lanternfly,” contains stories of synthesis, I think—of grief about the parts of being a person with a body that are painful and out of our control or just are, and delight at the knowledge that our bodies can contain what our brains can’t. These final stories are reaching for something more—more life than can be thought or experienced through our five senses, more knowledge than can be accessed by the words thinking or pleasure or pain. At the end of the book, the narrator of the final story asks a new question, which is, I hope, both comforting and unanswerable.

“Lanternfly” appears in our Spring 2026 Issue, which is available online and in print now.

In our Spring 2026 Issue, which is available online and in print now, Aria Aber writes about the Berlin club scene of her twenties and asks what remains when the party ends. Aber, whose debut novel, Good Girl, immerses readers in a fictionalized version of those nocturnal worlds, here turns to nonfiction to trace how clubbing and political awakening once felt inseparable—and to reckon with what that knowledge looks like when the underground gives way to an “experience economy.” We spoke with her about the challenges of writing about drugs, the distance between fiction and fact, and what a real party might still look like.

—The Editors

The Yale Review: The club, as you describe it, is a place where sense is overpowered by sensation. “I could feel my notions coming undone in agitation,” you write. “I can’t remember what those notions were, or what replaced them. That isn’t the point.” What were the challenges of writing about experiences that, in a fundamental way, seem to defy language and narrative?

Aria Aber: Drugs, like dreams, are notoriously difficult to write about because they resist linearity and often lack appropriate physical references, both of which we expect from clear and “good” prose. Just last week a student of mine said that they usually hate “writing about drugs.” I think this is a common reaction. When I had started writing the first few sentences of my novel Good Girl, which is full of club scenes and descriptions of altered states of consciousness, a colleague of mine said, “No one wants to read about being high, Aria.” We were sitting on a picnic blanket near a lake and nibbling on cheese. I remember this because I made a pact with myself at that moment. How much would it take, I wondered, to prove her wrong? Apart from the fact that I don’t enjoy prescriptive advice, I didn’t agree at all, and I took it as a creative challenge.

Needless to say, I love writing about dreams and drugs. I love Denis Johnson, for example, whose prose is lyrical and gritty at the same time. I will never forget reading him for the first time and being flabbergasted that he had portrayed an acid trip so well. I will never forget these sentences: “I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened.” I love Ottessa Moshfegh, Michael Clune, and Hunter S. Thompson. And I love the mystics, who put into language transcendental experiences that might also defy clear narrative. I guess you have to trust yourself and your own weirdness in order to pull it off. To inhabit an altered, fractured, and mystical space on a sentence level requires a kind of playfulness, and a willingness to acknowledge the unsayable. To admit and embrace uncertainty, to resist and destabilize epiphany, all of which is probably related to Keats’s idea of negative capability.

Your debut novel, Good Girl, takes place in part at the club. What are the particular pleasures—or pitfalls—of fictionalizing a party? In turning to nonfiction, was there anything that surprised you about writing similar scenes in a different genre?

Fictionalizing the party scene was actually quite fun. There’s a ritualistic or almost preparatory nature to the way my protagonist, Nila, and her friends approach clubbing. There’s a set of unspoken customs to which they adhere during their pregaming and inside the club and at their after-parties, even though they purport to live in a lawless world of pure hedonism and libidinal impulses. It was a challenge to place scenes of conflict and action into these settings, but that was also a natural outcome of the narrative. After all, I didn’t want to write about just one particular, transformative club experience; I wanted to illuminate the world of a group of characters who live a big chunk of their lives at the party. They eat, drink, play, get high, dance, make love, break up, get together, fight, bond—and even brush their teeth—there.

It was much harder to embody these spaces in nonfiction, mainly because I don’t trust my own memory—it was so long ago, after all—and because I didn’t want to expose the lives of friends and acquaintances. But I also had trouble identifying what exactly my argument was: What was I trying to say about clubbing? How did the crowds at the rave resemble the crowds at a protest? How did the worlds of activism and clubbing compare, contrast, and diverge? Things that you can outline subtly in a novel you have to engineer into an argument in nonfiction. I’m much better suited for the fictional mode, I think!

You write that you haven’t been to a real party in over a decade—and the essay suggests that’s at least partly by choice. But with our “experience economy,” is a genuinely good party even possible to find these days? What would it need to look like?

I’m not sure, to be honest; I don’t think I’m in the mood for “a real clubbing experience” while the world is burning. It would just be escapism at this point, which isn’t necessarily bad. It’s important to have fun, to gain perspective, to have energy to do the real work, and so on. The DJ Sama’ Abdulhadi said that the dance floor is the only place where she doesn’t feel Palestinian. I think it’s important to acknowledge it for what it is. But it took me a long time to let go of my ideological conception of the party as this place where political awakening could be achieved and activism could be born, or at least enhanced, in a meaningful way. I guess the party, to me, was an extension of art making—and art is always so closely connected to politics in my mind. The question of how art and politics relate is something I will be thinking about for the rest of my life. But I am less rigid in my demands from a party these days, which naturally stems from the fact that I’ve distanced myself from that world to some extent.

However, I remember being in Palestine for a bit last November with a couple of friends and on my last night they took me to a bar in Ramallah. We were seated in the back of a private room for the goodbye party of an acquaintance. It was a group of many women and a few men. People were drinking and singing; one person played the tabla, another one the oud. I learned that the group of friends were activists, that they had been in prison together. The whole scene was very charged and moving to me. It wasn’t a rave, of course, but a much more intimate gathering. I felt oddly at home there, in a room with mostly strangers. Something about their connection, their liveliness, their insistence on joy in the midst of grief made me understand my own humanity. There it was, the essence of the real party: a reminder that you are alive, that you are in community with others, and that you are all going to die.

What’s a popular piece of writing advice you don’t agree with? What’s a piece of advice that you stand by?

I guess I don’t agree with the advice I outlined earlier—that no one wants to read about being high. But I also generally don’t react positively to prescriptions about art making. When I was younger, I would get enraged when writers I admired came up with strange writing rules I didn’t agree with. At a master class many years ago, a famous poet said that “the first line of the poem is the most important part.” I took it way too seriously and thought about how wrong this was for weeks on end. After a while, I understood that these types of rules are not to be regarded as commandments carved into stone but as fluid suggestions, little helpers that you can dance with or riot against. It’s up to you what you make of the rules. Reading widely is the key, a writer’s education. Restraint is important, I think. Form is important and should be, in some way, reflective of the content. I believe that verbs are kinetic, that syntax is the way the mind thinks, and that concrete and sensory details are what makes writing extraordinary. The most difficult and important aspect of writing is that you have to trust your intuition and sound like yourself. I read so much derivative work, so many people who try to sound like Louise Glück or Rachel Cusk or Garth Greenwell, and while all these masters have much to teach us, I want to read what you sound like.

“Night Knowledge” appears in our Spring 2026 Issue, which is available online and in print now.

Every year, we ask our staff: What was your most meaningful cultural encounter this year? We keep the remit deliberately broad—really nothing is off the table—and the result is a wide-ranging, idiosyncratic list. This year it features some of the most critically acclaimed hits of 2025, like Sinners and season four of Hacks, along with lesser-known gems like The Green Lives, by Sara Gilmore, and a performance by an award-winning organist. We hope the list will inspire and delight you.

—The Editors

The finale of The Summer I Turned Pretty, written by Jenny Han and Sarah Kucserka

If I were to be perfectly honest, I would tell you that the cultural event that most held my attention this year was the finale of The Summer I Turned Pretty. I would tell you that the denouement of twenty-six hours of TV watching was almost derangingly satisfying: the heroine strong but not deluded as to her faults, the hero upright and adoring. I would tell you that its depiction of Paris, both midnight dancing on the banks of the Seine and makeshift party in a bar, felt truer to my experience of living there at nineteen than most. I would tell you that the callbacks and Easter eggs were perfectly placed, with at least two Taylor Swift songs on the soundtrack to show you from whom the showrunner, Jenny Han, learned. And I would tell you that the finale dispersed a gloom that settled over my life, and made space for other sorts of art. If I were to be imperfectly honest, I would tell you that my richest cultural experience of the year was reading George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda for the first time, not seeing the finale of The Summer I Turned Pretty. But I couldn’t have read the one without watching the other. —Joanna Biggs, Deputy Editor

Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon, directed by Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater released two films—two!—in October. His film Nouvelle Vague roams 1959 Paris with director Jean-Luc Godard (played by Guillaume Marbeck) as Godard shoots his debut, Breathless (1960). Blue Moon takes place in 1943, at Sardi’s restaurant in Manhattan. It follows lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) on the night his ex–writing partner, Richard Rodgers, premieres Oklahoma! and secures a Broadway hit.

The films make mirror images. Both portray complicated artistic men. Godard is clever and insufferable, Hart witty and lonely. One is starting out, with youth and time to waste, the other crashing out, with dwindling options. Paris is open; New York is a windowless bar. Godard, an ambitious tyro, wants to change the world but can’t do so alone. His crew finds him exasperating; together they discover a new way to make films. Hart has already made an indelible mark on his field, but he has alienated himself from his collaborators. (“Blue Moon” was one of his hit songs.) He’s tortured by envy and alcoholism, in denial about his sexuality and future.

The costumes are beautiful, the dialogue electric, but homage and nostalgia are beside the point. A central theme of Linklater’s work has always been how people use their time and who they use it with. It’s a profound question. As an old Beach Boys song goes, “You need a mess of help to stand alone.” —Dan Fox, Senior Editor

Jack Whitten: The Messenger, MoMA

In the spring, I saw Jack Whitten: The Messenger, a MoMA retrospective spanning the six decades of the painter’s life. Each era seemed to follow a kind of rhythm, as if Whitten were struck with a new way of manipulating materials, which he’d then pursue obsessively, rapturously, until he’d almost exhausted it. First there were paintings made by dragging pools of paint across canvas with his own invention, part push broom, part squeegee. Then he moved off the floor, and with new handheld tools, also of his design, he made diagrammatic paintings that evoke a radar screen or a map. Each piece is an ancient relic but from the future—all born from the same strange alchemy. I felt awe mounting as I moved through the rooms. Toward the end of the show, I arrived in front of 9.11.01, an absolutely massive mosaic that Whitten completed at sixty-seven, memorializing that day, which he witnessed firsthand in Tribeca. Thousands of acrylic tiles form a loose pyramid infused with ash, hair, and animal blood. I usually leave a museum feeling oversaturated. But on that early-spring night, I left the MoMA vibrating, like I’d had brief access to a different frequency. —Will Frazier, Digital Director

Caught by the Tides, directed by Jia Zhangke

In June, a new friend invited me to see Caught by the Tides, a 2024 movie by the Chinese director Jia Zhangke. I like seeing films without much context (trailers are sacrilege), and I went into this one accordingly. Watching the movie felt like being inside another person’s dream: a wash of songs and cityscapes and close-ups of a beautiful woman’s face. Gradually, the face grows older and wearier, the landscapes more rural. I couldn’t fully grasp what was happening to the face’s owner; at some point, she stops dancing in fun wigs and instead begins to roam the industrializing countryside in search of her truant boyfriend. In an incredibly moving scene, the two finally reunite inside a supermarket during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hours later, on the subway ride home, I learned that the movie is actually a collage of footage filmed over the course of more than two decades, including scenes from Jia’s other works. (The star is his wife and longtime muse, Zhao Tao.) Somehow this context made it seem like even more of a masterpiece: a feat of slow artmaking, real-life romance, and conceptual documentary that I still can’t stop thinking about. —Maggie Millner, Senior Editor

Sinners, written and directed by Ryan Coogler

I do love my couch, but nothing compares to watching a film on the big screen. Last April, I had the immense pleasure of visiting the TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. The outing was engineered by my son, whose wish on our visit to Los Angeles was to see a film on opening night at the legendary theater. Our only option? Sinners.

My son advised me to go in blind; I’ve never been into vampires. We entered the theater and were hit with the smell of popcorn and a palpable must of cinematic history. Photos were taken with Darth Vader and Dorothy costumes in the lobby. We then found our way to our worn red velvet seats, which squeaked when we shifted. The ornate curtain rose, and to our surprise we were met with a huge state-of-the-art screen. The sound boomed. The theater was full, and boisterous, and everyone clapped. The depth of Coogler’s film astounded me—its nuanced depiction of race in Jim Crow Mississippi, its kinetic energy, its layers of horror and fantasy (and, yes, plenty of vampires), and its music and dancing, which somehow all enhanced one another. It was a perfect night, easily one of my top moviegoing experiences. —Jill Pellettieri, Editorial Director

Familiar Touch, written and directed by Sarah Friedland

I watched Familiar Touch, a film all about old people, the day after a wedding, an event full of young people. The sudden change of pace made me impatient. My first thought: This movie is too slow. An elderly woman in an assisted-living facility makes her way down the entire length of a hallway, one shuffle at a time. She floats in a lima-bean pool (some sort of hydrotherapy) for minutes on end.

Slow can be arty, indulgent, but this was not that kind of slow. This was don’t-break-your-hip slow. Can’t-remember-where-we’re-going slow. It did not awe me; it made me restless. It reminded me instantly, guiltily, of walks with my grandmother: her noisy breathing, the clack of her butterscotch lozenge, the same innocent question she asked five minutes ago.

And this is the deep, provocative power of the film, the first feature from director Sarah Friedland. Plenty of reviews will tell you it’s a tender, funny, profound portrait of aging in America. It is—and it’s beautiful too—but you should watch it because it’s not afraid to show us the speed at which life unwinds. Because you will catch yourself wishing it would hurry up. A foolish, youthful wish, which invites a question only you can answer: What are you hurrying toward? —Clare Sestanovich, Senior Editor

Yi Yi, written and directed by Edward Yang

I never doubted that I would enjoy Edward Yang’s final film, Yi Yi (2000), but its near-three-hour runtime meant that I could never find the perfect night to sally forth. This August, though, a new 4K print was touring, so I went with friends to see it at Lincoln Center.

What a gorgeous, surprising film! It is a sometimes slapstick, sometimes searing story of a Taipei family’s many complications: a grandmother in a coma, a granddaughter struggling with guilt, a child obsessed with photography. Best of all is Wu Nien-jen’s performance as NJ, who encounters a woman from his past while engaging in a marvelous friendship across linguistic barriers.

Halfway through, a poster for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace appears in the background. It took me back to when I was a kid, watching it with my best friend a few blocks from Lincoln Center. Two weeks later, he died. I thought of him at that moment, missing some of Yi Yi’s plot but still relishing the music, the dreamy shots, the colors. One of my friends next to me nudged me to offer a square of matcha chocolate. What a gift in this year of too many screens, with every vibration in the pocket a harbinger of stress, to disconnect, then reconnect with myself. —Adam Dalva, Contributing Editor

Isaac Chotiner

This year, no reading brought me greater pleasure than The New Yorker’s Q&A section. Staff writer Isaac Chotiner is a genius at entangling prominent figures in the webs of their own words, and this year his powers seemed to reach a terrifying apex. He made interviewees squirm on topics ranging from liberalism to the genocide in Gaza. My favorite is his interview with former Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, whose frequent contradictions and defensiveness prompted a dry reminder: “This is what you wrote your book about. I am not bringing this up randomly.”

His interviews often read like ruthless dismantlings, but Chotiner’s currency is not cruelty. It’s a relentless insistence on clarity. His hyperattention is enough to make interviewees who are used to being taken unduly seriously or dismissed out of hand implode. Readers are lucky to experience it from the safety of the sidelines.

Beyond his probing prowess, his most impressive skill may simply be convincing people to talk to him. If I ran a PR firm, I’d ask my clients to repeat a simple two-part mantra every morning: “What do we do when Isaac Chotiner calls?” “Hang up.” —Oliver Egger, Administrative Assistant

Memoirs from Beyond the Grave by François-René de Chateaubriand

Catastrophe can seem like the rule these days, not the exception. Plus ça change, say some, and their patron saint is the French Romantic writer and diplomat François-René de Chateaubriand, whose masterwork, the monumental Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, is undergoing a resurrection in English by translator Alex Andriesse. (The third of four massive volumes is due out this December.) The book is a near-endless rumination on Chateaubriand’s own life, from his upbringing on a remote French island among declining aristocrats to his experience of the revolutionary and subsequent Napoleonic years, each, it seems, more catastrophic than the last. I’d been aware of Chateaubriand’s literary reputation for a long time (not to mention his culinary legacy), but I’d always felt too intimidated or ill-prepared to dig in (less so, I should say, with the steaks). Once I did, what I found was a singular voice, a strange, beguiling, engrossing vision. Chateaubriand’s Memoirs is a testament to literature’s persistence not despite but in and through the terrors—and occasional joys—of living. As W. G. Sebald, another great catastrophist and reader of Chateaubriand, put it: “The few sentences, uttered at the right time . . . would be the correct response to the compulsion of the system, which madness, and power, and art and science are forever passing down to one other.” —Jack Hanson, Associate Editor

Hacks, cocreated by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky

Hacks is a comedy show for people who also like sobbing. Featuring Jean Smart as a Vegas comic trying to realize her long-simmering dreams of a late-night talk show career and Hannah Einbinder as the idealistic writer who helps her do that, it’s a dark, ugly, and scathingly smart take on female ambition. Sitting perfectly at the intersection of “delightfully queer” and “interested in stuff that isn’t sex,” the show is ruthless in its depiction of mentorship’s cruel intimacies. Every season gets better and better—tune in for season three’s desperate wandering in the woods, followed by season four’s workplace sabotage and mistaken-identity twist on The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. All kinds of comedy characterize the series: slapstick, satire, one-liners, and humor so grave it takes place inside a mausoleum. I recommend watching it like I do: with one of your best friends, a rotation of La Croix’s strangest flavors (Sunshine?), popcorn (nutritional yeast optional), and your dogs. We watch, we chuckle, we say, “Oh my God, wait . . .” And then we laugh deliriously. —Lacey Jones, Associate Editor

Cole Escola’s Pee Pee Manor, directed by Todd Oldham

This year, I fell down the internet rabbit hole that is comedian, actor, and playwright Cole Escola’s YouTube channel, where they post comedic shorts as well as short films they call “lost pilots.”

The short film Pee Pee Manor, posted in early March 2020, seesaws tonally between horror and comedy. Its protagonist, Donna Germaine, is a middle-aged woman on the run. New to town, she fakes her name and résumé and clinches a job as a real estate agent—if she can sell the wretched Pee Pee Manor, a house that is haunted by the ghosts of former inhabitants who were killed (in the campiest ways possible). The locals, of course, want nothing to do with it.

The fear, uncertain laughter, and determination that animate Donna’s face offered an unlikely balm in a year that offered mostly horrors. And unlike tickets to Escola’s Tony Award–winning Broadway play, Oh, Mary!, this short is blessedly free of charge. Watch it to find out the worst possible way to put out a lit cigarette. —Sam Karagulin, Assistant Editor

Mark William Lewis by Mark William Lewis

I love singers with deep voices—to me, baritones evoke introspection. Their voices can feel shadowy, even conspiratorial. Maybe it’s because my voice is deep, so it sparks in me a hope that perhaps I, too, can sing. One of my favorite baritones is Mark William Lewis, whose eponymous album was released in September. Lewis’s low croon sounds stark at times, but his virtuosity on guitar and his mesmerizing lyrics add streaks of warmth to what initially feels forbidding. He transforms the usual sound of traditional instruments (guitars, drums, harmonica) to build an atmosphere of modern alienation—yet somehow still leaves room for a palpable desire for connection. My year involved a long, life-draining commute; Lewis’s music helped me stay engaged in the deadening thrum of traffic. I appreciate the way he can make lyrics feel uplifting without singing them at a higher pitch. For example, on “Tomorrow is Perfect,” Lewis electrifies the lines “And life moves so fast these days / You never get, you never get to just be alone” by singing it antiphonally. It helps that the drums boom too. —Tobi Kassim, Senior Reader

Anna Lapwood at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan

This March, my sister flew to meet me in New York so we could go to an organ concert. Crazy? Maybe. But she’s been a fan of Anna Lapwood, the organ prodigy whose TikToks garner hundreds of thousands of views, for longer than most. Lapwood is a one-woman orchestra: her hands and feet play multiple lines of music across several manuals (keyboards), drawing sound from pipes sometimes tens of meters away from the keyboard. (Every organ has different configurations of pipes, and acoustics vary in every church, making each organ a unique, building-sized instrument.) Lapwood is also a gifted teacher, and between pieces she taught us about the music and her instrument.

As she played, I felt immersed in the music, buffeted by it, nearly brought to tears by the physical experience of the sound as much as the notes themselves. It was energizing, too, to hear Lapwood’s renditions of classical music (Maurice Duruflé’s “Prélude et fugue sur le nom d’Alain”), minimalism (Philip Glass’s “Mad Rush”), and movie soundtracks (a newly transcribed Pirates of the Caribbean suite), played as if they naturally belonged together. And why not? Lapwood is committed to sharing music of all kinds with all kinds of people. In her words: “If you came for Pirates, I hope you leave with the Duruflé, and if you came for Duruflé, I hope you leave with the Pirates.” —Caitlin Kossmann, Editorial Assistant

Mixtapes from Mississippi Records

In September, I (temporarily) moved to the suburbs. The last time I spent this much time in a car, I was in high school. I’m thirty-one now, different in many important ways, but like I did then, I still drive my beloved 2006 Honda CR-V, tape deck and all. For nearly twenty years, I’d relied on the early aughts’ answer to planned obsolescence: the cassette-tape-to-AUX-cord-adapter. But the sound quality was iffy, and I had finally broken up with Spotify, so I needed an alternative way to soundtrack my commute. Before I moved, my friend Sam gifted me a handful of mixtapes from the archival music label Mississippi Records. They’re mostly bootleg compilations, with themes like “ultimate summer fun mix #4,” “gospel,” and “difficult children’s music.” The labels are hand-scribbled, sometimes the tapes skip or crackle, and often I blow on the cartridge for good luck, hoping my tape deck doesn’t jam. They’re deliriously idiosyncratic, equal parts jubilant and mournful. They remind me that we don’t have to succumb to empty playlists of composite user data. Real people, with their imperfections and their curiosity and their care, have and will long continue to put their time, energy, and passion into the sounds that punctuate our days. Next up? “Wrong time to be right (postwar folk music).” —Dolma Ombadykow, Assistant Editor

The Green Lives by Sara Gilmore

In Sara Gilmore’s new book of poems, The Green Lives, the titles pay tribute to symbols left by migrant people on fences, buildings, and trees after the Civil War and the Great Depression. The symbols shared meanings with others on the road: a diamond meant “keep quiet,” a U meant “you may camp here.” These poems affected me deeply, as they seemed to speak directly to ongoing crises experienced by those I love who have been forced out of normalcy into “states of precarity and abandon, for which no understanding holds.” In the preface, Gilmore writes that through these poems, she “tried to articulate feelings that aren’t yet recognized as feelings.” She has succeeded. When I read these poems, old feelings rose to the surface—and they weren’t always my own. They were taking flight, hovering over the earth, as dispersed as pain. “No stone for the place, / just this weeping diminishment / inclined to weeping description.” —Hannah Piette, Assistant Editor

In case you missed it, we compiled our most-read poetry and prose from the year, too.

In December of last year, we asked Anahid Nersessian, the writer and critic, to review a group of recent books about divorce. What emerged instead, over several drafts and many months, was an account of the end of her own marriage, and an unrelenting inquiry into the ethical and formal problems involved in writing about a relationship’s demise. Nersessian’s essay, modeled after “Forty-One False Starts,” a 1994 essay by Janet Malcolm, resists narrative closure in favor of a sustained ambivalence. Each numbered start is both beginning and end. We spoke with her about how the essay took shape, what Malcolm’s example made possible for her, and why divorce poses a particular challenge—and temptation—for writers.

—The Editors

The Yale Review: In the piece, you acknowledge that you “did not set out to write an essay on divorce,” and in fact, the essay began as an assignment from TYR to write about some recent books on divorce, which you found lacking. Could you talk a bit about the process of writing this piece? Would you say that noticing what those books failed to do made space for what you wanted to attempt? What did you want this essay to do differently?

Anahid Nersessian: I don’t know if I found the books I was asked to review lacking, exactly. Many struck me as overfull. A hypothesis I was working with in an earlier version of the piece was, now that most states in the U.S. have no-fault divorce—meaning that neither party is penalized or rewarded if they’ve cheated or not cheated, been a selfish partner or a self-sacrificing one, and so on—the divorce novel and the divorce memoir become places where the writer can adjudicate on the page what goes unheard in court. She can vilify her ex or justify her own behavior, she can expose intimate evidence, she can insist upon her own virtue, she can lay it all out for the reader to judge.

The divorce book, then, is a forensic genre, but it’s not an objective one. You’re only hearing one side of the story. In that sense, it offers a very poor postmortem of a marriage. Romantic relationships are some of the most uncertain, fragmentary, even hallucinatory experiences we have. They rely on a fiction of mutual understanding and transparency, but like all fictions they require a suspension of disbelief. To stand on the other side of a marriage, at its end, and say “I know this is what happened” is either disingenuous or delusional. Nobody knows what happened.

What I’ve tried to do in this essay is capture the scattered and sketchy nature of divorce. Marriages end, but there are some forms of relation—like co-parenting—that continue. What do those forms look like, and how do they resist a conventional narrative?

Your essay is “after Janet Malcolm.” Can you tell us about how you drew on Malcolm’s work?

Janet Malcolm’s essay “Forty-One False Starts” was published in The New Yorker in 1994. It’s a profile of the artist David Salle, who became very famous very quickly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, only to find his career gently stalling. It didn’t tank, but it did hit some kind of wall, and other things happened too—he turned forty, his girlfriend left him, critics started saying his paintings were misogynistic. Malcolm can’t quite figure out if she hates him or feels bad for him or wants to impress him, and she can’t quite figure out what she wants to say about the art world or sexism or pastiche or postmodernism, so instead of writing a straightforward six-thousand-word article, she produces a series of forty-one fragments, each one of which approaches Salle briefly from a different angle and is then abandoned. The result is an essay that mimics the collage-like quality of Salle’s work but also the difficulty of his character and Malcolm’s own difficult response to it.

What I find interesting—and hard—about writing is that it formalizes experience. Personal writing does that quite obviously, but so does criticism, which is an aesthetic or sensual response finding a rhythm or pattern for long enough that it can be captured and put into words. I borrowed Malcolm’s form to try and convey the emotional ambivalence of getting divorced, which, for me anyway, was both intensely traumatic and profoundly liberatory, and to convey the way that my relationship with my ex-husband, who is also my co-parent, had to transform once our marriage ended. These sorts of metamorphoses aren’t linear, and that’s what “Forty-One False Starts” does so well: it’s an essay about conflict that is also internally conflicted. I’m moved by Malcolm’s humility, her willingness to acknowledge that she can’t master her subject.

You describe divorce as “a writer’s business.” Could you speak a bit more about that? What kind of formal or aesthetic problem does divorce pose for you as a writer?

Unlike a wedding, a divorce doesn’t happen in a day or an hour or an instant. There’s a lot of paperwork, a lot of bureaucracy, and it takes time. The emotional fallout is weirdly sutured to that schedule: How can you “get closure” when you’re still figuring out whose health-care plan the kids are going to be on?

This is an unfashionable idea, but personally, I’m not interested in works of literature whose explicit purpose is to get me to judge someone, and that includes deciding that the author is a person of great virtue and insight. The temptation when writing about the end of a relationship, any relationship, is always to vilify or forgive, diss or accuse or self-congratulate. But I really think that’s a misapplication of literature as a medium. What writers do, or can do really well, is inhabit a space just outside of judgment, where ethical questions are animated without necessarily being answered. The challenge of writing about divorce is to stay in that space even when it might feel more immediately gratifying to hand someone, like your ex, his ass, or to run a campaign commercial for your own personality.

What’s a popular piece of writing advice that you don’t agree with? What’s a piece of advice that you stand by?

I’ve never understood what “write what you know” means, because I don’t feel like I know anything. If I wrote what I knew, I’d never write. I do like this advice, though: Someone once told me to be careful that the thing you’re writing doesn’t end up being the biography of how you wrote it, meaning don’t just write down the ideas you have in the order you have them and call it a day. Make something, compose.

“When Does a Divorce Begin?” appears in our Winter 2025 issue, which is available in print and online now.

How do you know when a story is finished?

I’m asked this all the time. By students, by readers, by other writers who can’t seem to complete—or relinquish, or escape—some stubborn draft. It’s a reasonable enough question, but for a while I was surprised by it. Isn’t starting to write the hard part? Then, this summer, I read “Process,” a short story by Katherine Dunn, published this week on our website. In just half a dozen pages, Dunn’s story managed to tell me something new about the mystery and, yes, the misery of creativity. (About the misery, I was quite sure I knew it all.) Here is Dunn’s protagonist, Joseph Jaikins, a “dutiful” employee at a paint manufacturer who has, for the first time, tried painting himself:

Joseph himself thought it was a strange thing to do. It seemed presumptuous and, in some way he could not quite name, extremely risky. A queer vibration took over his chest, a continuous wave that traveled from his breastbone to his spine and back. Occasionally he could feel it expanding to fill him from armpit to armpit. The excitement frightened him at first. He imagined it was a sensation that would come to him when was dying.

This is the moment in which Joseph the artist is born—and yet what it evokes most strongly for him is death. As you’ll see for yourself when you read the rest of the story, this contradiction consumes Joseph’s life. If you think you’ve been tortured by the question of whether your work of art is finished, trust me—Joseph has you beat.

Poor Joseph, but lucky us. This vivid, visceral passage helps me understand that our obsession with endings is wrapped up with our confusion about beginnings—that the knife’s edge between creative acts and destructive drives is the uncomfortable place where so much brilliant art gets made.

And Katherine Dunn’s career has something else to tell us about beginnings and endings. She died in 2016, but in the past few years her work has been enjoying a revival; with the posthumous publication and republication of her work, long-time fans of her cult classic, Geek Love, have been joined by new, devoted readers. We hope you’ll read “Process” and become a part of the “continuous wave” of Dunn’s genius.

And if you decide to take the “risky” step of starting (or finishing) a story of your own, here's a prompt: try inventing a character with a secret project or a secret talent. Maybe, like Joseph, they have a canvas hidden in their attic. Or maybe, like a certain famous inventor of literature, it's more of a monster. Either way, what does creativity—its stops and starts, its triumphs and disappointments—look and feel like for them? Characters come alive on the page when they're in action, and nothing is quite as vivifying as the act of creation.

—Clare Sestanovich, senior editor

In other fiction news, we’re thrilled to share that stories by two of our contributors won O. Henry Prizes this year: Ling Ma for “Winner,” and Daniel Saldaña París for “Rosaura at Dawn,” translated by Christina MacSweeney. They are included in the The Best Short Stories 2025, which is available now.

In case you missed it, our fall issue is here! It features new work by this year’s Windham–Campbell prize recipients and previous winners. Read it in full online now or order a print copy.

A little over a week left to send us your work! Our open submission period ends on September 30. Submit here.

Audrey Wollen’s essays move easily among theory, fiction, film, and fashion, carrying a style at once playful and exacting. In a piece for our spring issue, she writes about the handbag and the feminized labor of care, which she also spoke about on a recent radio program. In our fall issue, she turns to Claire-Louise Bennett’s latest book, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, tracing its textures and digressions with the same idiosyncratic attention. We spoke with Audrey about how an essay takes shape for her, what guides her critical voice, and why she thinks of language as a found object.

—The Editors

The Yale Review: Where does an essay begin for you—how does it crystallize from thought to form?

Audrey Wollen: A hunch, usually based on a glimmering coincidence inside a text, or a joke buried deep within myself, a joke I would struggle to explain to anyone else, which means it’s not really a joke at all, more like a secret internal wink, almost a glitch, which quickly transforms into a hungry, obsessive enthusiasm—this stage involves a lot of reading—which then tips over into panic!!!!, which again trips over itself and falls headfirst into a great slough of despond, and I have to live there for a bit, just wallowing in my inadequacy, until I manage to crawl out of the swamp, usually tugged helpfully by the rope of a deadline, and slowly, on my hands and knees, still muddy with childhood insecurities, damp with effort and shame, slowly I drag myself over to a sentence.

You say—half seriously—that the epistolary novel should be the “dominant form of our historical moment.” This feels instinctively true as an idea, both obvious and startling. Where did it come from?

I really appreciate you saying that the idea is both half serious and instinctively true—I try hard to strike that balance. I love when something feels correct in an amorphous way, like it can expand past the kernel of correctness into its own wobbly outer aura, which is usually a more playful place. A teacher once told me that some writers set their sights on a thesis and inch toward it, building up a stairway with steps of research and evidence, but that I skip ahead and just throw my writing very high into the sky, and once I’m up there, I have to figure out how to get back down again. I don’t think they meant it as a compliment, exactly . . . but it helped me understand myself more—and the kind of writing I enjoy.

Obviously, our historical moment is looping in the thrall of the short, disjointed moving image. At first glance, the eighteenth-century-style epistolary novel is so clearly not the dominant form that to propose it as such, even as a hypothetical “should,” is like throwing the bouncy ball of your mind really high and looking around quickly before you plunge back down. I think I was pulling from my memories of Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, which argues that the addiction at the core of our internet use is really an addiction to writing—constant, unceasing language production. This, for me, put the internet a lot closer to the doorstopper novels of previous centuries. Is the internet just everyone writing their own personal Tristram Shandy? And if the internet is one great communal novel, how do we then novelize the experience of being surrounded by it? And you can reverse this line of inquiry: What about the traditional epistolary mode, the extended syncopation of letters to and from different characters, is similar to scrolling through truncated snippets of beseeching videos, or the tip-tappity endlessness of the group chat? What have we carried with us, across these different types of narratives and media—what kinds of rhythms or desires are they all reaching toward?

In your previous essay for the TYR, “A Unified Theory of the Handbag,” you write: “We can revalue dependency, neediness, and the feminized labor of care as generative rather than limiting.” And in your new review essay about the work of Claire-Louise Bennett, you valorize a feminine way of thinking. Would you say there is a strand of feminism running through your work? How would you define it?

Yes. More than a single strand—it’s the whole loom, honestly. On a purely intellectual level, I think feminism, as we know it, is one of the most exciting ideas of the last 250 years. It is a relatively young nexus of thought with such huge, rolling waves of transformative implications that will take many more lifetimes to materialize fully. Obviously, we’re still in the messy, painful years of confusion and contradiction and wrongdoing. “Prerevolution” is a useful way for me to think about it, although I think feminism also asks us to reconsider what the ultimate shape of the revolution will be. But it is a privilege to be writing and thinking at the very beginning of a concept so massive, the beginning of a new way to be alive together.

One thing that’s really important to me is that I try to work from the premise that, despite and within great duress, femininity was invented, with agency and creativity, by its practitioners. And continues to be, every day. A lot of what is culturally or historically feminized has been written off (many times by feminists!) as, like, a tragic by-product of dehumanization, or a symptom of mass derangement, or evidence of ingrained passivity, or an elaborate tactic of the patriarchy to keep us down. Which, of course, gives the system of patriarchs all the credit for so much that is fun, beautiful, or profound in our lives, and simultaneously lets them off the hook for actual tactics that are much more gruesome and difficult to take in: constant war, constant rape, reproductive coercion and control, the ubiquity of domestic violence and police brutality, combined with limited access to health care, economic independence, public life, fair labor, and so on and so on. We spend ages arguing about whether or not this or that granular detail of women’s behavior or presentation is actually harmful to women. My whole life changed when I decided to assume that, generally speaking, girls do their version of girlness on purpose, for meaningful, perceptive, and intelligible reasons. Femininity is this bewildering communal archive, this endless technical library of survival, subversion, insight, and wit that has been passed through generations. So I try to write from that speculative position: What is this thing (like the handbag, care work, certain kinds of novels), and why did the practitioners of femininity invent it?

What’s a popular piece of writing advice that you don’t agree with? What’s a piece of writing advice that you stand by?

“Write every day.” It’s a nice idea! But it’s kind of the writing-advice equivalent of your mother shouting “Be good!” from the car window. You have to walk up to your gaggle of friends blushing. She means well. But the unscheduled day is the group of friends, you know? Bad in a good way. Impulsive, sweet, snickering, unmothered. The primary consequence of “Be good!” is that when you inevitably do the “bad” thing, you know you are supposed to feel guilty and maybe lie about it later when you get home. “Write every day” makes you feel like you have to lie to other writers about how much you write, and also like you should not be hanging out with the dangerous girl gang of free time. I’m picturing empty afternoons as a pack of smoking teenage girls in matching sateen jackets that have THE EMPTY AFTERNOONS embroidered in cursive on the back. They are the geniuses of life! You are lucky to be their friend! Avoid easy moralism that can be shouted from a still-moving car.

I think the most effective advice for me has been “Encourage the eccentricities of your own mind.” Our brains are really adept pattern-recognition machines, and we can reproduce patterns of thought really easily, and unfortunately, that is almost entirely what we are taught to do in school—and don’t get me wrong, there are great pleasures in patterned thought, long hallways tiled with perfectly fitted hexagons of thought—but it means, when writing, that we are often falling into pre-dug furrows. I try to practice the self-trust necessary to incorporate my own inner strangeness, sensory associations, sense of humor, and sense of despair into my writing, especially critical writing. Say I’m reviewing a novel and I read a chapter and for some reason it’s glowing pink for me, the whole section has a weird underglow of pink, or it reminds me of a scene in Buffy that I memorized when I was twelve, or a big cry I had a month ago, or a really witty thing a friend said to me last week, or there’s a guttural, gloppy, glyph-y gulf of g or u sounds that I keep falling into. The pleasure is trying to squeeze those eccentricities—that sometimes seem, on the level of argument, almost meaningless and hyperspecific to me—into the inherited pattern-machine of the sentence. Metaphor helps. Often, the most astute analysis can be found inside that underglow feeling.

Your writing moves easily among theory, nonfiction, film, classical fiction, TV, fashion. And it all seems very natural. Could you tell us a bit about your approach? How do you think about bringing such disparate sources into conversation with one another?

I think I benefited from a wayward path through higher education, particularly going to art school but not becoming an artist. I wouldn’t call myself an autodidact in literary criticism, but I try my hardest to mimic one. It doesn’t feel like it when it’s happening, of course, because there’s a lot of cultural pressure to have your career or your calling figured out right away, but taking the long way around made my world a lot bigger. I still try to find the scenic route, professionally speaking.

I think the true source of my ranginess is my dad, Peter Wollen. He always approached the popular, kitsch, folk, or “cult” object with great intellectual reverence while also being very invested in high theory, for lack of a better term. He started developing early-onset Alzheimer’s disease when I was about ten years old, so I didn’t get a lot of time with him, but the world he presented to me in our decade together was vast and curious and nonhierarchical. It was clear he felt great joy in leaping from discourse to discourse, field to field, and putting unexpected things next to each other. He diligently prioritized being an outsider and an enthusiast. This chimed with being a child, when you are automatically a newcomer to the entire world—it felt like we could access each other’s methodology very easily. I try to honor his memory by being as nomadic as possible in my frame of reference. It’s nice to think about all the different habits people have cultivated in their writing, all their quirks and concerns, as little altars for their dead, candles lit inside unsuspecting paragraphs.

There’s an image that recurs, somewhat transformed, in both of your recent TYR essays: a pebble turned over in the pocket of an old jacket, and a scavenged potato, picked up astray in a field. What is the appeal of a found object, and what do you think this has to do with essay writing?

I think of language itself as a kind of found object, a scavenged thing. We pass it among ourselves, across time and space, and no one owns it as an entirety. We can only buy and sell flecks of it—and even that ownership is a little silly, a little imaginative, because it really couldn’t be easier to steal. It’s wonderfully unsecured. It’s part of the commons. I think if you’re lucky, that part of writing can feel very palpable, almost physical. When you are working on something, you can actually feel being part of a larger, reticulated body of knowledge, and you can feel the thrill of finding something and taking it without having taken it from anybody, because it already belongs to whoever needs it. Borrowing in order to share. It’s a state of nourishing, untethered indebtedness. A lot more of life should feel like that.

Earlier this week, we opened for general submissions (in case you missed it!), which got us thinking about the books that have most shaped our own writing lives. Most of us who work at The Yale Review are writers ourselves—poets, essayists, novelists, critics, historians. So when we asked some members of our editorial team to share a book that helped them with their own writing, we expected a wide-ranging list. Some of the books below offer models for argument or form. Others reveal what a sentence can hold, or what kind of logic a poem might follow. Each of them, for our writer-editors, grants a kind of permission.

This post includes a recommendation from a new member of The Yale Review’s editorial team: Clare Sestanovich, who joins us this fall as a senior editor and lecturer in English at Yale. And although not new to TYR, we’re glad to welcome Dan Fox—also a senior editor—as a lecturer at Yale, as well.

What are the books that helped you with your writing—or that always make you want to write? Let us know in the comments. And if you’re ready to share your own work, submit to The Yale Review before September 30—details here.

1. Love’s Work by Gillian Rose

I am always searching for books that combine feeling and thought, and this memoir by the British philosopher, written as she was dying of cancer, is exemplary in both. I can be too sentimental in my writing (or at least my first drafts; I have great editors) and this book sets a high bar for the thought feeling or felt thought I am often attempting to capture. —Joanna Biggs, deputy editor

2. Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose

This is a brilliant, absorbing group biography of some 19th-century British writers and their spouses, and endlessly instructive for writers of researched nonfiction. Most valuable for me was Rose's handling of other scholarship, which she treats as a species of gossip. Her sentences fold the posthumous dramas of research and criticism—of discovering and debating what can be said with confidence about the dead—into the social and intellectual dramas which preoccupied these figures while they were alive. Was Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill's marriage consummated? Did George Eliot and George Henry Lewes make a virtue of being ostracized? People wanted to know, and still do. —Sam Huber, senior editor

3. Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures by Mary Ruefle

In the course of a history of science dissertation that had become as much about literary analysis as scientific practice, I struggled to write about writing. I remember sitting on a train—I think it was to DC but it might have been New York—and reading Mary Ruefle’s essays just for fun. They were rigorously thoughtful but also open-ended. They were lucidly written. They were energizing. I realized, sitting on that train, that if I was going to talk about the poetics of scientific writing, it would be perfectly acceptable to borrow writing techniques from a poet-essayist. The way Ruefle wrote about the work of metaphor seemed to speak directly to the ambivalent morality of the science I was studying, and to the scientists’ own grappling with that ambivalence. Ruefle modeled a mode of argumentation that leaned into polyvalence without sacrificing clarity. She helped me develop a new, essayistic voice. Mary Ruefle is the reason I finished my dissertation. —Caitlin Kossmann, editorial assistant

4. Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer

This is a book I come back to again and again for its sweep and scope, its offhand genius, its placement of political and literary history right up against lewd dreaming and domestic parental life. Each time I rediscover it, this epic poem feels both more ambitious and more permission-granting than the last. —Maggie Millner, senior editor

5. Souvenir by Michael Bracewell

I believe every writer should attempt a description of a picture or a piece of music once a week. Not easy, but superb calisthenics. When I need to remind myself how it’s done properly I open Souvenir by the British critic and novelist Michael Bracewell. Barely a hundred pages long, described as “a eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early ‘80s,” Souvenir is a memoir that eludes the first person, a marvel of brevity and ekphrasis that teaches me how to look at and listen to the city. Bracewell suffuses songs with the specific feeling of walking through London in spring or sitting on a commuter train in winter. He spots tectonic cultural shifts in the cut of a suit, prophetic intimations about art and money in the design of a West End bistro. I return to this book every year and, like all my favorite works of art, it outruns my capacity to describe what it does to me. —Dan Fox, senior editor

6. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life by Theodor Adorno

Negativity gets a bad rap in this country. The wrong attitude can get you a long way if you do it right; it keeps you thinking that things, no matter how good or bad, can always be otherwise. The popular impression of Adorno is of a top-tier, world-historical crank—his pronouncements on modern social phenomena, delivered with unwavering confidence, are as likely to enrage as edify—but the German-Jewish philosopher of music, history, and the catastrophe of modernity was hardly cantankerous for its own sake. When a supposedly rational, democratic society gave itself over to reactionary nihilism and reality-shattering violence, Adorno found in negativity—as well as irony, its charming cousin—a kaleidoscope for reimagining the world. Minima Moralia is comprised of 153 fragments and short essays on a dizzying range of subjects, which Adorno wrote in exile in England and the US during the war which destroyed tens of millions of lives as well as a culture that, because of (not despite) its awe-inspiring achievements, was always headed that way. Yet for Adorno, to focus on how the everyday reflects this calamity was not just to pour the baby enthusiastically out with the bathwater, but to demonstrate how the very fact of being able to witness the world and discuss it critically is evidence of the possibility—and maybe only that—of redemption. I started really reading Adorno only in the last few years, and, though I have problems with much of what he says, and even with his methods, in our late hour I find his sang-froid and willingness to interrogate even his own attachments not only bracing, but genuinely uplifting. Reading Adorno reminds me that to write is to insist on one's right to be intelligent, to refuse the bullshit, to live well. —Jack Hanson, associate editor

7. Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems by Charles Wright

Lately, when I start to feel stuck, or sense I’ve overworked a poem, or that I’m trying to force meaning, I flip open to a page of this edition of selected poems by Charles Wright. His poems move loosely by observation, meditation, and speculation, with sly wit and offhand wisdom, and I’m reminded just how much a poem can contain. They form their own landscapes, but the literal landscape they often evoke is Virginia, where I’m from, and I like how strange, or strangely familiar, it becomes in his hands. —Will Frazier, digital director

8. Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi is my favorite living novelist because her work so totally reimagines the tie between density and genius. She pulls off the impossible: books that go down breezy and then gut-punch you with their brilliance. Right now I'm reading Peaces, which, in true Oyeyemi fashion, refuses to issue a divide between the fanciful and the literal. The book makes me reconsider the kinds of thought fiction enables, and it's pushing me to experiment with the conceptual space between the “as” of simile and the equations of metaphor in my own fiction. —Lacey Jones, associate editor

9. Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison

My first copy of Why Did I Ever was a loan from a classmate. We were in the same writing workshop, which seems fitting, because most writing workshops would have no idea what to do with this book. Comprised of 536 fragments—some as short as a sentence, none longer than a page—Why Did I Ever tells the story of a woman named Money, a struggling script doctor whose problems in work and life (and money!) have no easy diagnosis, much less any obvious treatment. Here the workshop would pause to question whether “story” is quite the right word: readers, like Money herself, may find themselves adrift in a narrative that flits from one non-scene to another, that never bothers to introduce characters, that starts every conversation in its middle. But who cares! Or rather, it’s exactly why I care, and why I’ve returned to this book so many times. Robison invents a form that captures—beautifully, hilariously, often tragically—what it feels like to inhabit a life that doesn’t develop the way a plot should, a mind that makes its own rules. In the years since I first borrowed Why Did I Ever, I’ve bought my own copy—two, actually, so that now I can be the one to loan it out. —Clare Sestanovich, senior editor

As we approach the dog days of summer, we at The Yale Review are all about to hit pause for the coming few weeks as our team travels, rests, and regathers before the fall. Before we go, we’re sharing some thoughts from our deputy editor, Joanna Biggs, about note-taking—how it can be a way of listening, of writing, of living. It comes with a prompt for your notebook, which you can try wherever you find yourself in these final weeks of summer.

When Joan Didion’s Notes to John were published earlier this year, many critics wondered aloud if they ought to have been. Loose leaves found in a folder on her desk after she died, the new book was in fact post-therapy notes written during a critical time for Didion’s family between 1999 and 2003. Would Didion have liked us to see her so rawly? Is it wrong to publish someone’s notes, by definition unfinished, and personal ones at that? But when I read the book, I liked the notes so much more for being unrefined. We have plenty of Didion Refined! Here’s an exchange she captures from a therapy session on December 13, 2000, which is also about not being perfect:

“Most people do make accommodations. You look at this from a very special point of view. You have an unusual purity of intention. You’re extremely intelligent, absolutely logical. You demand that everyone else live up to this standard.”

I said I didn’t live up to it myself.

“Always being right doesn’t necessarily make you feel good about yourself.”

I said I supposed he was saying that I wasn’t always right.

The Didion hallmarks are there: the deadpan tone, the tart precision, the mild skepticism. But a question comes to mind: How did she remember what her therapist, Roger MacKinnon, said well enough to capture a whole thought, and the words in which he expressed the thought? Throughout Notes to John, Didion keeps her speech reported, while quoting MacKinnon’s words. But her training as a reporter was in a time of Dictaphones and spiral notebooks, remembering and listening, and this time the reporting was personal: her daughter’s drinking had gotten out of control, and she had come to analysis at her request. She was keeping the notes for her husband, so that he could go to therapy without going to therapy, as it were. (John went once or twice with Didion, but otherwise didn’t.) She may also have had a book in mind; she might have been one of those people—not uncommon in writers—who doesn’t know what she thinks unless she writes it.

I felt I knew Didion better from reading her notes; I felt there was more of her there. And it got me thinking about notes as a form of their own. A friend told me that one of the important parts of training to be a therapist is writing down what happened after each session, putting the spoken into words as a prompt to listen well in the session itself. Note-taking was listening. I remembered the moment in Lydia Davis’s essay on note-taking when she showed how her daily writing in subway cars often formed the basis of a story or essay. Note-taking was writing. I remembered Garth Greenwell, Lena Dunham, and Brandon Taylor’s Substack posts about their note-taking systems. Note-taking was thinking. I remembered Mary Wollstonecraft’s Hints for a second volume of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Note-taking was the tip of a new book.

I remembered that I had a burst of note-taking last summer, and dug out my half-finished notebook. (OK, quarter-finished.) I’d been spurred by Davis’s essay, which is concrete about what sort of note-taking is helpful to a writer. I’d taken notes at a show at the Whitney Museum in New York City, during an early morning at the beach while my boyfriend surfed, on eating a tiny dark fig. I’d written quotations from my reading, and things my friends said that I wanted to remember. But I hadn’t tried to write down a conversation, not once. And I wondered why.

Was it too hard? Would it invade the privacy of the people I loved? Would I find it horrible to write down the stupid things I had said? Would it be too gauche to take out a notebook as I chatted with friends? Was I unable to listen closely enough to do it, always distracted by my own thoughts?

So I thought I would challenge myself to take notes on a conversation this summer, like Didion. I can leave myself out of quotation marks, as she does, and listen to what is being said, whatever it is. My first attempts might be brief and messy, as they should be. And instead of the airlessness of journaling, the mind pivoting around itself once more, I might be able to understand myself differently in the improvisation of a conversation. Join me?

—Joanna Biggs, Deputy Editor

Prompt No. 2: Notes on a Conversation

Sometime in the next few weeks, take notes on a single conversation—not after the fact, but in the moment or just after. Keep yourself outside the quotation marks. Don’t worry about mess or gaps. Just try to catch what was really said, as best you can. Then put the notebook away until later in the fall. See what you find when you return to it.

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In 2023, The Yale Review published Garth Greenwell’s “A Moral Education,” an essay on Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater and the kind of moral work that art can do—by drawing us into discomfort and ambivalence. In our summer issue, out this week, we published a new piece, “Taking Offense,” which offers a close (or “slow,” as Garth prefers) reading of a scene from Miranda July’s All Fours, and which is a sort of continuation of that earlier line of inquiry. We asked Garth how the two essays connect, what larger project they’re part of, and how, for him, an essay begins to take shape.

—The Editors

The Yale Review: Both essays push back against the idea that art can be inherently harmful, while still taking seriously the impact it may have. Has there ever been a point, for you, when a work’s offense becomes disqualifying—not just difficult, but ethically or aesthetically untenable? Was it still legible to you as art?

Garth Greenwell: With the possible exception of students in my seminars (and really not even then), I never want to make anybody read something they don’t want to read. I think it’s fine to put down a book that seems to you failed or offensive in some way. And I don’t think that needs to be an agonized choice; as the kids say (or used to say), it doesn’t always have to be that serious. Sometimes you’re just not in the mood for something. Last year, in a burst of pre-Oscars enthusiasm, I started watching Coralie Fargeat’s film The Substance. About 45 minutes or so in (around when Margaret Qualley pulled the chicken leg out of her navel), I decided it wasn’t an experience that I wanted to keep having. This wasn’t a moral or even a critical response—there were things about the film I admired very much. (Its ferocity; Demi Moore.) I just didn’t want to keep watching it.

I think that’s fine; I also think it’s good to be open to the possibility that on another day you might have a different response. Moods are important, and they change. Certainly, I would love for a friend whose aesthetic sense I trust to convince me to give it another go. One real service criticism can provide—and this is something I try to do in the Miranda July essay—is to make the case for a value in a work that may not be immediately legible. I found a value in this potentially upsetting scene from All Fours that some readers didn’t find; I wanted to make the best case for it I could.

Two other thoughts: First, I think that, when we feel alienated or repulsed by a work of art, it’s often helpful to reach for technical / aesthetic terms of evaluation before moral ones. Both the Roth and the July essays are in large part expressions of a resistance to the impulse (in myself above all) to moral vanity: to use one’s critical response to a work of art as a way of establishing one’s own moral (or political) bona fides. Often this turns into a weird kind of power play: one senses in certain critics a desire to establish their superiority to a work of art, even to humiliate the artist who made it. I don’t think that can ever be good for our souls.

And my final thought: however fierce my response against a work of art might be, however much it might offend or repulse me, I try very hard to resist the desire for a work of art not to exist. I always want to cultivate a productive response—an essay, another work of art—as against a repressive one. If you find yourself advocating for books or paintings to be banned or burned, something has gone badly wrong in your moral and aesthetic thinking.

In “Taking Offense,” you write about what it means to dwell in bad feeling. In “A Moral Education,” you write about finding mystery in the grotesque. Do you see these as different modes of attention? How are they related?

That’s an interesting question. I do think that they are both modes of attention, and it seems to me that attention—attention to the particular, to the individual—is where all moral relation starts. To make an abstraction of a human being is to embark on something it makes sense to me to think of as evil. Evil may be necessary: we can’t live without abstraction. Politics, it seems to me, is always, necessarily, a compromise with evil understood in this sense. (This is in no way to suggest that politics can’t also be noble, oriented toward service; even if one believes politics is always compromised, the question of what constitutes a better or worse politics is always urgent.) Art, as I understand it, is the great expression of devotion to the particular; and so it is a way of preserving something—preserving reality—against that compromise. In art, access to the abstract (the epiphanic, the transcendent) depends on devotion to the particular, and it carries the particular with it. (Art doesn’t arrive at the universal or epiphanic by leaving the particular behind; the particular is the vehicle for the universal.)

Art is always bigger than anything we can say about it; grand statements about art, like those above, are always absurd.

In both essays, I’m interested in the kind of moral relations, the kind of thinking, the mode of existence, that can happen when we try to cultivate interest instead of judgment. I’m intrigued by what happens when we resist certainty, especially the certainty of apparently self-authorizing responses like outrage or disgust.

There’s a clear continuity between these two essays—the concern with moral response, with how we read through discomfort, with the stakes of aesthetic judgment. Are these part of a larger project? Can you share what else that includes?

The Roth essay is part of a forthcoming essay collection, which attempts to examine three concepts I think are central to current conversations about art, and whose use in those conversations seems to me distorted or mistaken: “relevance”; “morality” or “moral education”; and “affirmation.” Understood more properly, more amply, I think those terms can help point toward values central to artmaking. I’ve written the essays to try to clarify, for myself above all, what that more proper or more ample understanding might be.

I’m not sure if the Miranda July essay will be part of that book. It’s the second essay I’ve written on the sex writing in All Fours (the first appeared on my Substack), and yes, I do think it’s clearly connected to the essay on Roth. In some sense this new essay, which does a close—or, as I prefer to call it, a “slow”—reading of a single scene, is an attempt to demonstrate, in a more concrete way, some of the processes of moral education I suggest are at play in Sabbath’s Theater. I think there’s a Rothian energy in July’s book, as I note in the essay; but July also seems to me more hopeful than Roth is. The narrator of All Fours isn’t Mickey Sabbath: she’s more concerned for others; she undergoes a more demonstrable (if still partial) education.

This isn’t to make any claim that the narrator of All Fours finds some kind of “redemption”: some grand, dramatic, final moral realization. I think the novel stays firmly in a middle ground of complicated, compromised moral relations. But what interests me in the scene is how July shows her narrator putting bad feelings to use—by which I mean using bad feelings to find some at least marginally better (more humane, more pleasurable) way of living, if only for a few hours, with another.

What’s a popular piece of writing advice that you don’t agree with? What’s a piece of writing advice that you stand by?

Ah, but I don’t believe in advice, really. Every artist’s path is an individual path; nobody else can follow it. Nobody knows how anything works: nobody knows how to write a novel or an essay or a poem. We’re all of us always feeling it out. The only advice I believe in is a kind of life advice: be adventurous. Strive to be interested in more things, try to love more things. And even that won’t be right for everyone.

There is one piece of advice I believe to be true for almost all young artists: Live cheaply.

Where does an essay begin for you—how does it crystallize from thought to form?

Most commonly, an essay begins with enthusiasm. This is especially true of the pieces I write for my Substack newsletter, which often take a particular work or fragment of art—a sentence, a poem, a painting, a piece of music—and attempt to understand what in it I find so compelling. This is totally self-serving; it’s the form my own aesthetic education takes.

Also fairly often, a question won’t let me go; I need to think through it at length. An example: in an essay that should be published later this year, I try to think about what is maybe my most profound, most difficult relationship with a book: Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. The more I’ve read and talked about that book over the decades, the more I’ve become convinced that it is built on a fundamentally homophobic logic: that it presents a world in which durable love between men is impossible—not for historically contingent reasons, but because durable love between men is a logical absurdity. So how is it that, when I read the novel as a fourteen-year-old queer kid in the pre-Internet American South, I felt that it saved my life? I’ve been wrestling with that essay for years. (I wrote a Substack about the process back in September 2023: “On Being Discouraged.”) I don’t think I’ve really answered the question to my own (or anybody else’s) satisfaction in the essay I was able to write. But I think I’ve come closer than I have before.

Finally, least commonly, sometimes an essay comes from an irritation. The last essay I have to write for my forthcoming book will take on the idea of “autofiction,” which I think is vague and useless—worse than useless. Even in a case like that, though, my irritation needs to somehow attach itself to an enthusiasm: more than I want (though I do want) to discredit the idea of “autofiction,” I want to suggest a richer, more ample way of thinking about certain literary traditions and practices.

What are three things you've learned over the years about essay writing—whether mistakes not to make, aspects of process, or revision strategies?

I’m sorry to be annoying, but I don’t think one learns things in this way—or only trivial (though maybe helpful) things. I’ve learned how to set up my notebooks in ways that feel congenial to me; I’ve learned how to take notes; I’ve learned how I like to name my files to keep revisions organized. But about writing? I don’t believe in tips, strategies; all meaningful writing for me, whether fiction or nonfiction, comes from a place of bewilderment. Bewilderment before an artwork, before a question, before a dilemma; meaningful writing happens in a space of not-knowing, of non-understanding. Certainly it starts from such a space, and I don’t think it ever leaves it fully behind. In some paradoxical way, art lets us make meaning out of bewilderment without resolving bewilderment—indeed, often it makes meaning by deepening or magnifying bewilderment. I’m drawn to the essay form because it makes space for a kind of thinking that isn’t, or doesn’t need to be, instrumentalized: a kind of thinking that can be meaningful even if it doesn’t resolve anything or arrive anywhere. It’s radically un-optimized, radically inefficient; and so it accommodates kinds of thinking, kinds of being, that are elsewhere (in our ever-more optimized, ever-more efficient age) harried nearly out of existence.

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In Rec Letter, you’ll find recommendations from our editors—offered as occasional tributes, informal prompts, or general enthusiasms.

We hadn’t planned this post for Back Matter this week, but we’re pausing to honor the life and work of Edmund White, who died on Tuesday at the age of eighty-five. One of the most influential gay writers of the twentieth century, White helped define and elevate queer literature in America with his candid, witty, explicit, and deeply intelligent explorations of sex, identity, and desire.

Yesterday, we published a moving remembrance of White by novelist and memoirist Yiyun Li. Her tribute captures the joy, irreverence, and deep companionship that defined their years-long friendship.

Between 1993 and 2012, Edmund White contributed to The Yale Review five times—writing essays on Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau, and Oscar Wilde; a review of composer Ned Rorem (with a zinger of an opening line); and a short story. Naturally, we recommend revisiting those. But White’s oeuvre is vast, and we wanted to offer a few entry points into his work—for readers discovering him for the first time, or returning in appreciation.

Here are six places to begin:

1. Forgetting Elena (1973)
White’s first novel is a satire of gay life on Fire Island, written in the style of Japanese court ladies Sei Shōnagon and Murasaki Shikibu. As White said in an interview with Damon Galgut for Lit Hub, the novel’s protagonist is “an amnesiac hoping to convince others he remembers everyone and everything, but fakes it by playing off the social cues they send.” And it is one of TYR Editor-in-Chief Meghan O’Rourke’s favorite books.

2. Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978)
This short, lyrical novel is perhaps White’s most enigmatic and poetic—more explicitly spiritual, even theological, than his later work. It was recently republished by McNally Editions with a foreword from TYR contributor Garth Greenwell.

3. A Boy’s Own Story (1982)
Probably White’s most widely read novel, and for good reason. This semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman helped usher queer fiction into the literary mainstream. It’s the first in a trilogy, followed by The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997).

4. The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (2001)
A sensuous, idiosyncratic guide to the city White called home for many years. TYR recommends packing it in case you find yourself, say, on a week-long fling with a fashion photographer in Paris—a scenario White would have approved of, and almost certainly described.

5. The Humble Lover (2023)
White’s last published novel is a meditation on unrequited passion—funny but achingly sincere. A wonderful choice for anyone who has ever experienced the sweaty heights of bliss and the clammy pits of abjection after falling hopelessly in love with a beautiful ballet dancer.

6. His interview in BUTT Magazine (August 16, 2006)
Conducted by Gert Jonkers, this conversation captures White at his most obscene, charming, and unbuttoned. A fitting farewell: unrepentant and utterly alive.

Thank you, Edmund White, for your candor and your art. May the angels treat you right. We’ll keep reading.

—Samuel Ernest, Assistant Editor

Have a favorite book by Edmund White? Tell us in the comments below. Or, if you’re just getting started, let us know what’s first on your list.

From the Editor’s Desk

I’ve always loved the “back matter” of a good book—the acknowledgments, the endnotes that reveal a quieter story beneath the surface. It’s where writers drop their guard, where the making becomes visible. As a lifelong reader and aspiring writer, I’ve always found something exciting in that glimpse into the back room where writing is made. Our new Substack, Back Matter, is meant to offer just that: a space behind the scenes at The Yale Review for readers and writers alike.

Our Summer Fiction Issue launches online next week, and it’s one of my favorite issues yet. Print subscribers are starting to receive their copies now, and we wanted to offer our Substack readers a first look at the issue. In it, you’ll find stories by Rachel Cusk, Bryan Washington, Sigrid Nunez, and more—each exploring how longing of one kind or another rearranges the shapes of our lives.

We’re experimenting here with something new: a writing prompt in each newsletter, drawn from the fiction, essays, and poems we publish. These aren’t “prompts” in the how-to sense, but small invitations—windows into thinking about form, voice, and process. Consider them short dispatches from our writing desks to yours.

The Summer Issue: What You’ll Find Inside

When I was a child, my mother took my brother and me, on the first day of summer vacation, to the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street—back when it was a cavernous, quiet place full of used textbooks, Greek columns, and hidden treasures. We each picked twenty books, packed them in a wooden wine crate, and took them with us on a monthlong canoe-camping trip through remote islands in Maine.

When I think of summer reading, I think of the kind of immersion I experienced as a child—lying in a sleeping bag with a flashlight and a crate full of novels on a quiet island, the air thick with pine, the lake dark beyond the tent flap. Fiction became a second landscape, laid like an interior weather over the long, quiet days.

We wanted this issue to re-create that kind of transport: an encounter with stories that immerse, unsettle, and reorient. Some highlights:

• Rachel Cusk’s Into the Light, a mythic, near-biographical story of a woman artist, explores the tension between art and life.

• Bryan Washington’s Crossings is a quietly devastating account of intimacy, dislocation, and ambivalence, set in Tokyo.

• Scholastique Mukasonga brings her sharp wit and clarity to The Edge of the Lake, set in a Catholic girls’ school in Burundi.

• Samanta Schweblin gives us Welcome to the Club, a fable of suicidal ideation that is eerie, spare, and unforgettable.

• Sigrid Nunez, in The Rabbit’s Foot, reflects on class, memory, and survival through the story of a woman who once cleaned hotel rooms for the rich.

• Jenny Erpenbeck’s Junk excavates the psychic residue of twentieth-century war through the clutter of a Berlin apartment.

• Sarah Bernstein’s The Shanda traces shame and silence across generations in a quietly unsettling story.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter here, and you’ll be the first to read the issue when it arrives online!

First Lines: Seven Sparks for Summer Writing

“The artist B was married three times, two of them to the same man, though on the latter occasion his right leg was missing.” —Rachel Cusk

“First I spot him holding hands with his husband.” —Bryan Washington

“Who does a death belong to?” —Sarah Bernstein

“He was a duke, or an earl—he was some sort of nobility—and not the first of his kind to visit the hotel.” —Sigrid Nunez

“I jump into the water at the end of the dock and sink down, holding my nose.” —Samanta Schweblin

“It all started with our history and geography teacher.” —Scholastique Mukasonga

“Of course it’s nice when the eye can be at peace . . .” —Jenny Erpenbeck

What makes a good first line? Tell us your favorite—and why. Or try this week’s generative prompt below.

Prompt No. 1: On Ghosts, Geometry, and the Second Self

Inspired by Rachel Cusk’s “Into the Light”

Write a short essay, story, or hybrid text that explores the tension between public and private selves—between the life we live and the form we chase. You might begin with a place imbued with personal mythos (a riverbank, a gallery, a house once lived in), or with an object that stands in for something unspoken (a lost key, a painting, a bowl).

Consider the ghost that haunts your work or your home. Where is it located: in the room, in a parent, in the body? And what form would it take if you could make it visible?

What's Coming Next

In upcoming Back Matter posts, we’ll be sharing:

• A reading list in honor of the late Edmund White, a longtime TYR contributor

• Pieces from Garth Greenwell, Katie Kitamura, and a second writing prompt, drawn from Bryan Washington’s unforgettable story of reconnection in Tokyo

• Summer reading picks from TYR editors

• Notes from the editorial margins (what we loved, why we cut a paragraph, what we debated in a fiction meeting)

• Introductions to some of our staff and contributors
  

Drop a comment and let us know what you think! We hope this space grows into something reciprocal—a two-way channel between the magazine and its readers.

Thanks for reading—and writing—with us.

Warmly,

Meghan O’Rourke
Editor of The Yale Review

We are The Yale Review. If you don’t know us: we’re the country’s oldest quarterly magazine of literature, ideas, and public life. Since 1819, we’ve brought writers and readers into conversation across backgrounds, disciplines, and generations, publishing everyone from Virginia Woolf, President William H. Taft, and Bayard Rustin, to, more recently, 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 our new Substack—a place where that conversation continues, off the page and with you. Since our 2019 relaunch under editor Meghan O’Rourke, we’ve worked to build community through literature and ideas: in print, online, and at our annual festival in New Haven. Back Matter is a new kind of gathering space—for curious readers, lifelong learners, and writers of every stripe.

Here, you’ll find:

• writing prompts inspired by our pages;

• notes from the editing desk;

• reading recommendations;

• archival finds;

• musings on craft;

• and soon, recordings from our live events!

Back Matter offers something new: a slightly looser, more conversational way to be part of The Yale Review community.

Our archive inspired us to launch Back Matter. In its early years, the magazine included a recurring feature called Library of the Quarter—later Reader’s Guide—where editors shared what they were reading and thinking about. Back Matter picks up that tradition, but with a broader, more open-ended scope. We hope you’ll join us.

You can continue to read The Yale Review online without a paywall, and our weekly newsletters will keep you up to date on new essays, poems, and reviews, as well as issue launches and archival highlights. (We suggest you sign up for it, if you haven't yet, as it is the best way to follow the work we publish.)

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