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

My friend gave me the packet of letters to keep, and I knew that one day I would try to make something out of it.” ...

It seems certain to me that, on the same walk, two beings, unless they resemble each other in some strange sense, could not ...

André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t necessarily sit at a cleared table in the ...

Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the premiere of The Crucible. In this interview, Arthur Miller discusses the writing of the play, and the McCarthy hearings that inspired it.

Jhaverchand Meghani (1896–1947) wrote almost a hundred books—novels, biographies, and collections of stories, poems, songs, ...

New books from Leonora Carrington, Michael Clune, John Gregory Dunne, Marlen Haushofer, Eloghosa Osunde, and Gary Shteyngart.

Vinca is a complex little plant, and periwinkle, named for its blossoms, is an equally complex color. A subset of violet, which is a subset of purple, periwinkle denotes a precise shade that appears ...

July 6, 2022 – “I’ve been collecting these theories of why writers write because so many writers have written about it.” ...

February 3, 2020 – Through her relationships with other women, one can trace the evidence of McCullers’s becoming, as a woman, as a lesbian, and as a writer.

August 25, 2016 – Reimagining the aimlessly wandering woman. I. I started noticing the ads in the magazines I read. Here is a woman in an asymmetrical black swimsuit, a ...

Last spring, a friend of a friend visited my office and invited me to Langley to speak to Invisible Ink, the CIA’s creative writing group. I asked Vivian (not her real name) what she wanted me to talk ...