His first book of essays, Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature (2002) was a finalist for the 2003 PEN Award for the "Art of the Essay". The essay "When Writers Speak", which appeared in The New York Times Book Review, was included in The Best American Essays 2010, edited by Christopher Hitchens.
Many of Krystal's essays have stirred up controversy for their insistence that intellectual work not be limited or defined by sociopolitical concerns when executed in good faith.
A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from The Reader's Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs. The Free Press. 2001.
Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve. Wesleyan University Press. 1989.
Selected essays
"Closing the Books" (Harper's Magazine, March 1996), recounting Krystal's disaffection with reading, generated many irate responses and was the occasion of a lecture by Sven Birkerts at the New York Public Library (May 1, 1996): "The Time of Reading: A meditation on the fate of books in an impatient age".
"H. C. Witwer and Me" (The American Scholar, Spring 1998). Reprinted in Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love, edited by Anne Fadiman (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2005).
"Who Speaks for the Lazy?" (The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 1999) was a clarion call to those who find it hard to get any work done. Reprinted in The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence, edited by David Remnick (New York: Random House, 2000)
"Why Smart People Believe in God" (The American Scholar, Fall, 2001) anticipating the "New Atheism" of the twenty-first century.
"Easy Writers" (The New Yorker, May 28, 2012), a highly controversial piece about the distinctions between literature and genre fiction, elicited a notable response from Lev Grossman in Time magazine (May 23, 2012): "Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology: How science fiction, fantasy, romance, mysteries and all the rest will take over the world".
"What is Literature" (Harper's Magazine, March 2014) took issue with A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, and came down firmly on the side of the literary canon while recognizing the socio-cultural biases that inform it.
"The Shrinking World of Ideas" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 28, 2014) or how postmodernism and neuroscience have influenced the teaching of the humanities.
"Is Cultural Appropriation Ever Appropriate?" (Los Angeles Review of Books, July 15, 2017) questioned the validity of the debate itself.
