Front page

Nonfiction

Our Most-Read Stories of 2020

The Editors 

A look at our readers’ favorite articles, poems, short stories, and interviews from 2020.

Portfolio: The Cultural Construction of Identity

Lorraine O'Grady 

Lorraine O’Grady tackles the knotty interrelations between text and image.

Notes Upon Arrival

Bhanu Kapil 

A diary of immigration and lost love.

The Anti-Extinction Engine

Anne Boyer 

Langston Hughes and my friend, the apocalypse actuary.

On the Need for Aesthetic Wildness

Maria Tumarkin 

Feminism, identity, and the willingness to be defeated.

Unbothered

Namwali Serpell 

American violence and the grace of black nonchalance.

The Heavy Air

Anne Boyer 

Capitalism and its affronts to common sense.

Interviews

The Body in Verse

Bhanu Kapil and Jonah Mixon-Webster


A dialogue on literary somatics.

Finding a Literary Inheritance

Alexander Chee, Julia Cho, Susan Choi, and Cathy Park Hong


Four Korean American writers on jeong, language, and the elusiveness of home.

The Merits of Imperfection

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum and Yiyun Li


Why literature’s best is usually deeply flawed.

Signal and Noise

Aleshea Harris and Douglas Kearney


A dialogue on presencing Blackness.

Unethical Reading and the Limits of Empathy

Namwali Serpell and Maria Tumarkin


Two writers on the ethics of pen and paper.

Poetry

For S., At The Boat Pond

Jean Valentine

 

From The Yale Review, Spring 1967.

The Couples

Jean Valentine

 

From The Yale Review, Spring 1967.

Fiction

The Reason Why

Yiyun Li  

In possessing us, he granted us possessions: unexperienced desires and wonderments, unwarranted griefs and disillusions.

You: A Short Play

Julia Cho  

A one-person show, you in dialogue with yourself.

On Sugarland: A Play

Aleshea Harris  

Aleshea Harris presents a new play and details the process that went into creating it.

Pandemic Files

Surviving COVID-19

Slavenka Drakulic 

Waking up after six days on a ventilator in Stockholm.

Reviews

Act Your Age

Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey

Swapping bodies, swapping ages, and re-inventing youth.

Interview

Cathy Park Hong on the Major Weight of Minor Feelings

The poet and essayist discusses Asian American consciousness, the myth of meritocracy, and the shifting boundaries of whiteness.

TYR Redux

Arendt: An Arguable Elegy

“Please, Richard, never speak of it –
don’t speak of it again.”

Richard Howard
The Yale Review, June 2008.

Editor's Note

Greetings from our new editor

Meghan O’Rourke welcomes you to the new Yale Review! Please join us for a conversation that has been 200 years in the making, by subscribing and by visiting our site regularly.