9/11: Ten Years Later

4.6/5 ( ratings)

Like all magazines and newspapers, The New Republic struggled, in the wake of September 11, 2001, to make sense of an event that had left the world a less-comprehensible place. Figuring out how to commemorate the anniversary of 9/11 in subsequent years has also been challenging. As our literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, wrote on the two-year anniversary, “It is still difficult to believe what for two years we have known.” The same could be said of the ten-year anniversary.

The compilation of pieces reprinted here is not comprehensive, but we have done our best to curate a collection that, at the very least, gathers and preserves. This, after all, was one of the crucial functions of writing in the wake of September 11. “All around us, on the ground or fluttering in the air,” wrote David Grann for TNR in the wake of the attacks, “were thousands of pieces of paper. They had been blown out of the World Trade Center and were still swirling.” The fragments of lives inscribed on the charred sheets that Grann gathered at Ground Zero were and are wrenching, both in their banality and their poeticism: desk calendars; part of a novel; an e-mail that said, simply, “I’ll see you at two. Love S.”

The entirety of Grann’s article, along with the work of many other authors, is republished here. We hope that, in some fragmentary way, these essays provide a fitting remembrance.