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3 weeks ago | 
yalereview.org | Laura Kolbe
Laura Kolbe Windbreak of dark hair on the ear-tops of my baby. Faint spade of dark down, shining between shoulder blades. Little second grin of scarce mustache: a boy disguised as his future. And hard to believe from my fair and ham-cheeked line. I used to tutor a girl who looked like my son does now: teem of charcoal curls and one terrific browkissing itself above the nose. Third grade, skinny, comfortable, wearing her casual bodylike a dish towel flung over a drying line.
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1 month ago | 
yalereview.org | Jonathan Lethem
Can treasure also be heavily used? The most functional piece of art I took for granted the longest was our ashtray, which provided routine and filthy service. It is made of pewter and depicts the biblical story Jonah and the Whale.
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1 month ago | 
yalereview.org | Tiana Reid
Tiana Reid In a 2004 essay, literary critic Hortense Spillers writes about Zora Neale Hurston in multiples.
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1 month ago | 
yalereview.org | Adrienne Kennedy
Adrienne Kennedy The floor in the living room had a wine-colored flowered carpet. It is where I saw and dreamed, although I did not know I was dreaming. I had my paper dolls. My paper dolls were very important to me. I kept them in a paper bag, but when I wanted to play with them, I spread them out on the living-room floor. I had many Shirley Temple dolls and many dresses. I enjoyed cutting out the dresses from the paper-doll book and dressing my dolls for the day.
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1 month ago | 
yalereview.org | James Surowiecki
James Surowiecki If you’re trying to understand what has happened to America over the last ten years, the fact that Donald Trump never planned, or expected, to become president is a good place to start. As the journalist Michael Wolff shows in Fire and Fury (2018),his book about Trump’s first three hundred days in office, Trump’s 2016 presidential run was something of a lark, less a serious attempt to take the White House than a branding exercise. The campaign was a discombobulated mess.
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2 months ago | 
yalereview.org | Paul Muldoon
How did this poem begin for you? Strictly speaking, this is a found poem. Perhaps even a foundling poem, in the sense it left successive versions of itself on my doorstep. Two years after we moved to our present address in lower Manhattan, we’re still getting items of mail intended for the previous owner. Together they give a clear sense of her personality, her political persuasion, her preferences in leisure pursuits.
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2 months ago | 
yalereview.org | Christopher Hawthorne
Christopher Hawthorne I hate to break it to my friends and colleagues in the very small world of architecture criticism, many of whom have spent the last month cataloguing the ways Brady Corbet’s film The Brutalist misrepresents the process of designing and constructing buildings, but this stem-winder of a Best Picture contender is not really about architecture.
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2 months ago | 
yalereview.org | Emily Bernard
Emily Bernard In Objects of Desire, a writer meditates on an everyday item that haunts them. it’s the most valuable thing I own: a dingy white mug bearing the term Monistat, the brand name of an antifungal medication often used to treat yeast infections. The mug is at least fifty years old. Among its stylish, whimsical, and colorful neighbors in my kitchen cabinet, it sticks out like a sore thumb, like a fungal infection itself. Right now, it sits by my side.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
yalereview.org | James Surowiecki
James Surowiecki Wednesday, January 15, 2025Inauguration Day Minus FiveAs I was driving my sons home from school today, they told me that this month in music class they’re studying the work of John Kander, who, along with his songwriting partner, Fred Ebb, wrote the songs for Cabaret and Chicago, as well as “New York, New York.” They had learned a new song that day, they exclaimed, and immediately launched into “Razzle Dazzle,” a tune from Chicago sung by the shyster lawyer Billy Flynn.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
yalereview.org | Andrew Martin
Andrew Martin When i first encountered The Line of Beauty in college, I remember feeling that Alan Hollinghurst had written exactly the novel I most wanted to read. Finally, someone had taken the crystalline prose, knife-sharp social observation, and vicarious lifestyle porn of the Great English Novel tradition and added the only things that could improve on it: unashamed, minutely described sex (gay in this case, though any would do) and copious hard drug use.