The Paris ReviewBooks Influencers in Islamabad The Paris Review - Sanam MaherJaveria Ali, a twenty-six-year-old photographer, was on a walk in an Islamabad market when she spotted a man ladling out cups of milky tea. He was wearing a turquoise shalwar kameez with a white scalloped
The Paris ReviewBooks Sex in the Theater: Jeremy O. Harris and Samuel Delany in Conversation The Paris Review - Toniann FernandezAt three in the afternoon on a Friday in late January, Jeremy O. Harris arranged for an Uber to bring Samuel Delany from his home in Philadelphia to the Golden Theatre in New York City. Chip, as the famed
The Paris ReviewBooks Redux: Pull the Language in to Such a Sharpness The Paris ReviewEvery week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to
The Paris ReviewEmily Dickinson Emily Dickinson’s White Dress The Paris Review - Martha AckmannThe first time the writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson met Emily Dickinson, he remembered five details about the way she entered the room: her soft step, her breathless voice, her auburn hair, the two daylilies
The Paris ReviewJean-Luc Godard Finding Anna Karina The Paris Review - Madison MainwaringAnna Karina’s rehearsal for her first major scene with director Jean-Luc Godard ended early. The scene was for the film The Little Soldier (1960), in which the male lead photographs Karina’s character
The Paris ReviewBooks Inside Jack Youngerman’s Studio The Paris Review - Cornelia ChanningLast week, my mother called to tell me, her voice wobbling, that the artist Jack Youngerman had died. He passed away on February 19, after a fall. He was ninety-three years old. I was ten years old the
The Paris ReviewBooks The Strange, Forgotten Life of Viola Roseboro’ The Paris Review - Stephanie GortonViola Roseboro’ (apostrophe intentional), the larger-than-life fiction editor at McClure’s, haunted magazine offices from the 1890s to the Jazz Age. A reader, editor, and semiprofessional wit, she discovered
The Paris Review Staff Picks: Menace, Machines, and Muhammad Ali The Paris ReviewAnna Kavan’s short story “Ice Storm” begins in winter, with the narrator leaving Grand Central Terminal to visit friends in Connecticut, to clear her head and make a decision (about what is left unspecified).
The Paris ReviewBooks National Treasure, Elizabeth Spencer The Paris Review - Allan GurganusWhen she died last month at the age of ninety-eight, the novelist Elizabeth Spencer was described as “a national treasure.” The author of nine novels, eight story collections, a memoir and a play, she
The Paris ReviewBooks Feminize Your Canon: Inès Cagnati The Paris Review - Joanna ScuttsOur column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. The French writer Inès Cagnati was not unknown during her lifetime, but she was deeply unwilling to play the
The Paris ReviewBooks 197,539 B.C. The Paris Review - Jeffrey YangNot long ago, I volunteered to take part in a performance at the contemporary art museum near my home. Very little is known about the artist who created the piece. Even in a recent obituary, his date death
The Paris ReviewBooks Fairy Tales and the Bodies of Black Boys The Paris Review - Sabrina Orah MarkSabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Noah, my eight-year-old son, and I go to Target. He is carrying a little stuffed monkey, and as we walk through the doors
The Paris ReviewBooks Russia’s Dr. Seuss The Paris Review - Anthony MadridLet me tell you something about children’s poetry: people tend to create it for the right reasons. I was taught this concept in connection to medieval lyric poetry. My teacher’s point was that art made
The Paris ReviewBooks Redux: My Prose Was from the Heart The Paris ReviewEvery week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to
The Paris ReviewBooks Harry Mathews’s Drifts and Returns The Paris Review - Daniel Levin BeckerThere are two ways, at least, into “Cool gales shall fan the glade,” the last poem Harry Mathews completed and the first one included in Harry Mathews Collected Poems: 1946–2016. One is to read it as twilight
The Paris ReviewBooks Be Yourself Again The Paris Review - Amina CainRevisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Amina Cain revisits Jean Genet’s The Maids. When I was writing my novel Indelicacy, I felt myself
The Paris ReviewBooks Staff Picks: Swans, Sieves, and Sentience The Paris ReviewWhen I was a dancer, performing Swan Lake was a rite of passage. My memories of doing so, though, involve only pain—the pain of standing in regimental lines for impossible stretches of time, of finding
The Paris ReviewFilmmaking Learning to Die: An Interview with Jenny Offill The Paris Review - Rebecca Godfrey“All around us things tried to announce their true nature,” observes Lizzie, the heroine of Jenny Offill’s new novel, Weather. “Their radiance was faint and fainter still beneath the terrible music.” Weather,
The Paris ReviewBooks The Photographer and the Ballerina The Paris ReviewWhen the photographer Sayuri Ichida moved to New York, in 2012, she found herself plunged into an ice bath of alienation, depression, and regret. Born and raised in Japan, she struggled to settle into
The Paris ReviewBooks How to Leave Your Lover with Lemons The Paris Review - Chantel TattoliThis Valentine’s Day, we bring you a bit of turn-of-the-century breakup slang. Back when my husband was my boyfriend, he mentioned an antique postcard that he’d picked up and mailed to his parents. On
The Paris ReviewLong-form Journalism What Men Have Told Me The Paris Review - Adrienne MillerAdrienne Miller was the literary and fiction editor of Esquire from 1997 to 2006. A man said to me, “I’ve always wondered why it is that your sisters aren’t better writers.” A man asked me, when discussing
The Paris ReviewBooks The Torment of Cats The Paris Review - Lucy ScholesIn her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. “If you want to write, keep cats,” Aldous Huxley famously said. As I read Bohumil Hrabal’s
The Paris ReviewBooks The Bird Master The Paris Review - Yoshiharu TsugeThe below is an excerpt from Yoshiharu Tsuge’s semiautobiographical manga The Man without Talent (translated from the Japanese by Ryan Holmberg). In keeping with the customs of the medium, both the panels
The Paris ReviewBooks Redux: Film Is Death at Work The Paris ReviewEvery week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to
The Paris ReviewBooks The Paris Review Wins the 2020 National Magazine Award for Fiction The Paris ReviewThe Paris Review is honored to be the recipient of this year’s National Magazine Award for Fiction, recognizing in particular three stories published in 2019: “Foxes,” by Kimberly King Parsons; “Under
The Paris ReviewBooks Witchcraft and Brattiness: An Interview With Amina Cain The Paris Review - Martin RikerI met Amina Cain in the early aughts, when I took over spot as roommate to a mutual friend in a Wolcott walkup in Chicago. Amina would come by with her new roommates, a perfectly friendly couple who nonetheless
The Paris ReviewBooks Zane Grey’s Westerns The Paris Review - Rae AmantroutRevisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Rae Armantrout revisits Zane Grey’s novel Riders of the Purple Sage. As I mentioned in my Art of
The Paris ReviewBooks Staff Picks: Scenes, Screens, and Snubs The Paris ReviewThis Sunday the Oscars, like seasonal depression or unwashed salad, returns with a grim inevitability. It also provides a good juncture to rave with righteousness about films that were overlooked. I wrote
The Paris ReviewBooks Cooking with Hilda Hilst The Paris Review - Valerie StiversIn Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The recipe for the work of the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (1930–2004) is equal parts language
The Paris ReviewBooks The Collages of Max Ernst The Paris ReviewFew bodies of work represent the splintering of the twentieth-century Western psyche like the collages of Max Ernst. Striking and playful, the German surrealist’s clipped-together creations, produced his
