Project MUSE®: The Yale Review - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/789
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Yale Review.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 98 (2010) through current issue.Latest Articles: The Yale ReviewTWOProject MUSE®The Yale Review1467-97360044-0124Latest articles in The Yale Review. Feed provided by Project MUSE®A Night’s Sleep: An insomniac’s lifelong pursuit
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984431
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No one feels good at four in the morning.I don’t remember when my insomnia started, or rather I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t there, as an active presence or a latent (I almost said dormant) threat. I remember, as a child, having hot milk in the dark—Was it 4:00 a.m.? Was it 5:00 a.m.?—with my father, an insomniac like me. I remember summers spent with my cousins, who slept until midday. I woke at dawn or before and spent several hours on my own, careful not to make any noise, eating cookies slowly and reading stacks of old comic books illuminated by my uncle’s tiny desk lamp. I’ve sometimes said these hours made me a reader, but the claim is probably spurious, a way to find an upside to it all. In truth, I
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/789/image/coversmallA Night’s Sleep: An insomniac’s lifelong pursuit2026-02-26text/htmlen-USA Night’s Sleep: An insomniac’s lifelong pursuit2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®146682026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Night Knowledge: What the club taught me
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984432
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The party is dead, I said to a friend during a midnight walk in Paris last summer. Part of what I meant was obvious: our nights of hard drugs and loud techno and cheap drinks and no smartphones will never return. Walking past the shuttered storefronts and café tables glinting with candles and wineglasses, we reminisced about the underground clubs we’d attended: she in Ramallah, I in Berlin. We spoke about obscure basement rooms, and the wet earth under our feet at summer raves, and the chalky aftertaste of Ecstasy pills. We remembered needles scratching red vinyl records, and the DJs who climbed the apartheid wall, and the friends who died or drowned inside the illusion of the night. We acted as if we had nothing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/789/image/coversmallNight Knowledge: What the club taught me2026-02-26text/htmlen-USNight Knowledge: What the club taught me2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®284092026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Quiver and Fixity: Returning to Thomas Hardy in midlife
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984434
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It was not by reading Albert Camus that I first understood, through a writer’s eyes, what a foreigner was and how he felt; it was by reading Thomas Hardy. Jude the Obscure, his final masterpiece in prose, appeared in 1895. I read it in high school. It begins with Jude Fawley, eleven years old, an orphan, helping his teacher, Richard Phillotson, load his possessions onto a cart. The boy, a devoted pupil, doesn’t understand why his teacher is leaving the village of Marygreen. It’s to obtain a university degree, Phillotson explains, in a city called Christminster. After some parting words of advice, Jude is alone, abject, abandoned: The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner by the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/789/image/coversmallQuiver and Fixity: Returning to Thomas Hardy in midlife2026-02-26text/htmlen-USQuiver and Fixity: Returning to Thomas Hardy in midlife2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®387352026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Dogsbody
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984436
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My father named her after the Blizzard of 1966 that nearly blew his car off the road the day he brought her home. He wanted his children to grow up with a dog; whether he’d had his heart set on a malamute or if the breed just caught his eye around the time Dalene was born is anyone’s guess. “Alaskan Storm” was her registered name, but we called her Stormy. She was almost two when I was born and died when I was thirteen, having outlived my mother and brother and outlasted my first two stepmothers and one more brother, not to mention six or seven homes abandoned across Long Island, upstate New York, Colorado, Kansas. Of the twenty or so dogs I grew up with, she was one of two my parents euthanized. Two others were
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/789/image/coversmallDogsbody2026-02-26text/htmlen-USDogsbody2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®490192026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Lanternfly
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984437
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A week into my sojourn with Rob, we’d established a routine: black coffee in his swan mug; the slow, puffing two-block walk to the beach; the selection of the day’s spot and the digging of the hole for the umbrella; the rise and fall of a book on each of our bellies; lunch from the cooler and then a nap when the sky turned hazy. By late afternoon, Rob would wobble to the beach snack bar, returning with a sheaf of fries for himself and a Chipwich for me. Though covered in a fine layer of ice crystals, the Chipwich was soon soft. I ate the edges first, the mini chocolate chips crunching between my back molars.Good? Rob asked as I scraped bits of wet cookie from my fingertips with my teeth. His gray beard covered the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/789/image/coversmallLanternfly2026-02-26text/htmlen-USLanternfly2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®433132026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Vagina Art: Motherhood reshaped how I see the body
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984439
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When v was born in late 2015, shoved violently from my body on choppy Pitocin surf and handed to me by my husband, I knew from her face that it had been rough for her too. She eyed me warily.Respect, I thought.The adrenaline of labor didn’t subside but became the baseline of an anxiety so profound I was unable to sleep for days, then weeks, after her birth. When I closed my eyes, blue shapes slid across the screens of my lids; when I opened them, it felt as if something were obscuring the center of my vision, and only at the periphery, it seemed, could I occasionally catch glimpses of what was left of the world.The thing obscuring everything else was my daughter’s body.It was a frigid New England Christmastime
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/789/image/coversmallVagina Art: Motherhood reshaped how I see the body2026-02-26text/htmlen-USVagina Art: Motherhood reshaped how I see the body2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®350102026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Battle of the Wilderness: A haunting Civil War photograph
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984440
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This 1887 photograph shows the intersection of the Orange Plank and Brock Roads in northern central Virginia. It was on and around these roads that, twenty-three years before, Union and Confederate forces fought for two brutal days, May 5–6, 1864.Seen from the road, the forest rises like a dark wall. This wilderness was known as the Wilderness, which is a name that, like the ghost in Hamlet, simply called the Ghost, is so unclever as to make it oddly elusive—nearly allegorical. A few miles south of Virginia’s Rapidan River, the woods are about halfway between what were then the warring capitals of the North and the South: Washington, William H. Tipton, The Wilderness, the Orange Plank Road Looking southwest across
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/789/image/coversmallBattle of the Wilderness: A haunting Civil War photograph2026-02-26text/htmlen-USBattle of the Wilderness: A haunting Civil War photograph2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®137122026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Gaseosa
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984442
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Now the whole world knows her as the woman who gave up her body. According to official statistics, she’s the third person to become a gas in all of South America.Everywhere she goes, people get scared and run when they recognize her. To the inquisitive, invasive types who hang around to gawk, she responds with her own invasive inquisitiveness. Most who meet her find her too abstract to grasp, but she thinks of herself as one of a kind, a pioneer of a lifestyle that the mainstream deems absurd.When they try to imagine themselves in her place, many people conclude it would be simpler to be dead. Others ask why anyone would want to give up what little life they have. Such questions inevitably spiral and arrive at the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/789/image/coversmallGaseosa2026-02-26text/htmlen-USGaseosa2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®83652026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Ending It: Why we feel compelled to finish books
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984446
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Let’s say I have bought a book, a novel. I wait for a quiet hour, close the door to my room, sit in the most comfortable chair I have, maybe put up my feet. I know virtually nothing about this novel, about its characters and themes, nothing about the tone. Since I don’t know what to expect, I can expect everything. It’s all anticipation and promise, the delicious moment when the lights go down and the curtain rises. But as soon as I begin reading, there is a disturbance. It’s a voice in my head, and it’s asking: How long is this going to take? When will it end?Finishing the book should be straightforward enough. The writer has gone to the trouble of arranging the words one after the other. My task is to follow:
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/789/image/coversmallEnding It: Why we feel compelled to finish books2026-02-26text/htmlen-USEnding It: Why we feel compelled to finish books2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®160902026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Solvej Balle’s Philosophy of Time: The novelist who reinvented the idea of a day in the life
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984447
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More than two millennia after the fact, we still talk about that time Archimedes solved a mathematical problem in the bath. Descending into a public bathing pool and watching it overflow, he realized he could calculate the volume of any irregular solid by immersing it in a container filled with water: the object’s volume would be equal to the volume of water it displaced. Archimedes hit upon this method to solve a practical problem. The king of Syracuse had asked him to find out whether a golden crown was made of real gold or an alloy of cheaper metals. By measuring the crown’s volume, Archimedes could determine its density and compare it with a piece of true gold. He leaped out of the pool and ran home naked
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/789/image/coversmallSolvej Balle’s Philosophy of Time: The novelist who reinvented the idea of a day in the life2026-02-26text/htmlen-USSolvej Balle’s Philosophy of Time: The novelist who reinvented the idea of a day in the life2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®305302026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26Who Was Shakespeare? What Hamnet does— and doesn’t—get right
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984448
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In the fall of 2024, my daughter, a first-year drama student at Juilliard, was rehearsing for a school performance of The Winter’s Tale. She was cast in two roles—the lovelorn Prince Florizel and the clownish Young Shepherd—in a workshop that stressed process (close reading of the text) over product. The play would be staged once, in a black box theater, for an audience of other students and faculty. I would never see it.Because I couldn’t watch the performance—or, as I secretly wished, take the class myself— I embarked on my own haphazard Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, 2025.study of Shakespeare. I read a few of the plays and watched some filmed productions, starting with The Winter’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/789/image/coversmallWho Was Shakespeare? What Hamnet does— and doesn’t—get right2026-02-26text/htmlen-USWho Was Shakespeare? What Hamnet does— and doesn’t—get right2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®269192026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26The Elusive Poet of Desire: Why biographers can’t pin Cavafy down
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984449
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Before he became a world poet, Constantine Cavafy made himself a local legend. From 1907 until his death in 1933, he lived above a brothel in a working-class neighborhood of Alexandria, Egypt. (“Up here is the spirit; down there is the flesh,” he quipped.) Writers and intellectuals gathered in his rooms for impromptu seminars. Tall bookcases displayed ancient texts, historical treatises, dictionaries. The rugs and tapestries were frayed, the chairs fragile. Here Cavafy discoursed on prosody and the rise and fall of empires. Surrounded by family heirlooms, he presented himself, in his words, as “an ultra-modern poet, a poet of the future generations.” By the time they left, lightheaded from the ouzo and mastika he
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/789/image/coversmallThe Elusive Poet of Desire: Why biographers can’t pin Cavafy down2026-02-26text/htmlen-USThe Elusive Poet of Desire: Why biographers can’t pin Cavafy down2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®292782026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26James Schuyler’s Genius: Why our greatest poet of the everyday has become a poet of the moment
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984450
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It’s october and I sit down to type. I gaze out the window to where the house across the road is blanketed in thick wisteria, its waxy leaves turning a deep, plummy red. I get up, put on another sweater, and return to stare at the winking cursor on the screen in front of me. These lapses of attention may be just procrastination. Or perhaps they’re a kind of preparation for writing an essay about James Schuyler, a poet whose work is characterized by lost trains of thought, cleavings of the mind, and the strangeness of writing about your writing as you’re writing it. James Schuyler in the hallway of the Chelsea Hotel, New York City, 1988.I open the book on my desk—Schuyler’s Collected Poems—and leaf through the pages
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/789/image/coversmallJames Schuyler’s Genius: Why our greatest poet of the everyday has become a poet of the moment2026-02-26text/htmlen-USJames Schuyler’s Genius: Why our greatest poet of the everyday has become a poet of the moment2026-02-262026TWOProject MUSE®209142026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-26