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

Antique friendly robot. Photograph by Thomas Quine, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Read the first ...

Warhol’s resigned tone belies what he woke up to and lived in day after day: the great something that was his work, which is ...

Ingmar Bergman spareness, your love of astrological signs, fluted lines, specific and sharp as stalactites in the cave of ...

Yan Lianke’s story “ Plants, Stones, Dirt, and Sky ,” translated by Jeremy Tiang, appears in the Fall 2025 issue of The Paris ...

October 26, 2012 – “TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”Daniel Horowitz takes on Poe’s classic 1843 tale of ...

February 19, 2015 – 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 ...

January 22, 2013 – 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 ...

I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven. It has always been this way for me, even as a child. I prayed often, sometimes the requisite five times a day in my Muslim household. But I ...

I lay motionless for a long time by the little quicksilver stream that even now, at the end of summer, ran constantly down over the last granite steps of the valley floor, with that proverbial babble ...

Anne Carson and I met on Zoom last October, in the brick-red sitting room of her apartment in Reykjavik, the city where she and her husband, Robert Currie, have spent time each year since 2008. A ...

An encounter with Emerson’s essays. This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as ...