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 ...

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

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

Though he is most often associated with New England, Robert Frost (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, taught school like his mother did before him, and ...

I think buying a wrap in a pharmacy is incredible. I once bought a huge wrap in a Walgreens in Manhattan. It came with a sachet of extra mayonnaise tucked into the packaging even though it was already ...

Doodling today is not what it was. Or is it? Google “doodle” and you’ll find the Google Doodle—what Google calls a “fun, surprising, and sometimes spontaneous” transformation of its logo by a team of ...

Sharon Olds published her first book, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven. The book is organized into four sections, “Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother,” and “Journey,” and it begins with its ...

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 ...

Isabella Hammad. Photograph by Alice Zoo. I wrote this lecture in August 2023 and delivered it at Columbia University at the end of September. Nine days later, on October 7, the military wing of Hamas ...

We were supposed to meet Louise Glück in New York, at the end of September, to see Verdi’s Requiem at the Met. My husband and I wanted to see Tannhäuser. Louise wanted to see the Requiem, and she was ...