Essays

How will John Updike’s writing measure up twenty years from now?

The talk-show host recurses into himself, courtesy of Lawrence Lessig.

Mark Doty, Billy Collins, and Robert Pinsky get excited about a Thomas Hardy poem, plus CAPTCHA poetry, classifying profanity, and more.

I’d put up $20 that one of these six books will make the NYT Best Books of 2009.

My father wanted out. In a matter of days we’d trotted through a vigil for a Cuban childhood interrupted. I had anticipated creeping toward these emotional watersheds. But Hurricane Gustav had thrown us off, tightened the trip’s deadline...

The best poetry of the year counted down.

Susana Osinaga Robles is the nurse who washed Che’s corpse. She’s a small woman of seventy-four with wavy hair and swollen legs. Her story begins on October 9, 1967, in Vallegrande, a town lost in the far reaches of eastern Bolivia. Those...

The police archive sits in a cemetery of confiscated cars at the edge of Zone 6 in Guatemala City. Behind the high wall of the police-headquarters complex, the cars are piled three, four, even five high, their rusted bodies giving the area...

 I thought of waiting until tomorrow to begin but decided that elegies are better written in the middle of the night—and an elegy for Mahmoud Darwish is best written in a country where one feels foreign, gazing at a dark horizon with a...