Books Staff Picks: Satire, Suzi Wu, and Starling DaysThe Paris ReviewMa Jian’s China Dream, translated by Flora Drew and published earlier this month by Counterpoint Press, is a short sharp-toothed satire of Xi Jinping’s China. The novel depicts a corrupt bureaucrat’s to
Horseback In Praise of Travel, Particularly on HorsebackThe Paris Review - Antoine CompagnonMichel de Montaigne is best imagined on horseback; firstly, because that was how he traveled around his own lands and between his estate and Bordeaux, as well as elsewhere in France—to Paris, Rouen, or
Books Tim Rollins and K.O.S.The Paris Review - Angel Abreu“Today we make history.” This was the constant refrain from Tim Rollins, as a group of teenagers filed into the South Bronx studio every afternoon after school. The group had named itself Kids of Survival
Poetry Poetry Rx: Then the Letting GoThe Paris Review - Claire SchwartzIn our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This column has
Books WinterThe Paris Review - Marin SardyStill sometimes late at night it slides in—what it felt like to think of my brother Tom outside. In the coldest seasons of his years of homelessness, it would rise up late in the day if I was alone in
Books Taking on Edward Abbey: A Interview with Amy IrvineThe Paris Review - Leslie JamisonAmy Irvine is a writer and a mother, a competitive rock-climber, an activist, a caregiver and a truth-teller. (She is also a friend.) Her latest book, Desert Cabal, is a fiercely tender and provocative
Books The Art of DoodlingThe Paris Review“Everyone is a collector in one way or another,” the English teacher–turned–art dealer David Schulson would tell his children. “Everyone has the impulse to collect.” What Schulson didn’t say is that the
Books Daša Drndić's ‘EEG’ and the Joys of PessimismThe Paris Review - Dustin IllingworthThe most convincing literary pessimists are superior stylists. They smooth their nihilistic impulses into pleasing shapes. Despair is largely inimical to art, while melancholy—its pensive, perfumed cousin—makes
Books A Trip to BohemiaThe Paris Review - Nadja SpiegelmanIn August 2017 my family and I traveled to the Czech region of Bohemia, my mother’s homeland and the setting of my new novel, The Organs of Sense. At the airport in Prague we rented a car and drove directly
Books Redux: Summer Surprised UsThe 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
Poetry Queerness, Cyborgs, and Cephalopods: An Interview with Franny ChoiThe Paris Review - Spencer QuongFranny Choi isn’t done thinking about cyborgs. When we met two weeks before the release of her latest collection Soft Science, she told me she was still discovering A.I. ideas she wished she could have
Books Somehow I Became RespectableThe Paris Review - John WatersSomehow I became respectable. I don’t know how—the last film I directed got some terrible reviews and was rated NC-17. Six people in my personal phone book have been sentenced to life in prison. I did
Books Literary Paper Dolls: FrannyThe Paris Review - Julia Berick and Jenny KroikBefore I was a tomboy or a clotheshorse or a loser or a teenager, I was a bookworm. In that happy valley before puberty, my greatest bliss was to be given both a book and the permission to play dress-up
Books Francesca Lia Block and 90s NostalgiaThe Paris Review - Frankie ThomasHas there ever been a novel with a more misleading opening sentence than Weetzie Bat? Francesca Lia Block’s 1989 debut begins: The reason Weetzie Bat hated high school was because no one understood. Based
Books What Our Contributors Are Reading This SpringThe Paris ReviewNo American novelist riffs like Paul Beatty. His superlative novel Slumberland established his comic mastery years before he won the Man Booker Prize in 2016. Set in Berlin just before (and after) the
Books Something Always RemainsThe Paris Review - Trevor PaglenSome people collect rocks. Others collect stamps. Peter Merlin, a former NASA archivist who’s become a leading expert on military aircraft and Area 51, collects the physical remnants of government secrets.
Books Visual Magicians in the Hills of ConnecticutThe Paris Review - Robert PranzatelliIn the hills of northwestern Connecticut there is a portion of the state, a rural and rural-suburban region, that I refer to as “Pilobo-land”: it includes Washington, New Milford, and other nearby towns,
Books More Obscene than de SadeThe Paris Review - Luc SanteIn his biweekly column, Pinakothek, Luc Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past. Fotonovela, fumetti, roman-photo—the terms betray the fact that the form never got much traction
Books A Mosh Pit of One’s OwnThe Paris Review - Vivien Goldman“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Virginia Woolf writes in 1929. The same applies to being a musician, in that Woolf really means autonomy, making your own space
Books Et in Arcadia EgoThe Paris Review - Anthony MadridOne winter morning, seventeen years ago, Nadya woke me up with the words “Anthony, get dressed.” She explained there was a house on 57th Street (Hyde Park, Chicago), with all the windows and doors open,
Books On NighttimeThe Paris Review - Hanif AbdurraqibHanif Abdurraqib’s new monthly column, Notes on Pop, muses on the relationship between songs and memory. I find myself most aware of silence when I am thinking about the many ways it can be punctured.
Harper Lee The Hidden Harper LeeThe Paris Review - Casey N. CepAt the end of the profile that Harper Lee wrote of Truman Capote when he published In Cold Blood, she speculated that “Kansans will spend the rest of their days at the tantalizing game of discovering It
Books Redux: Disappointment Is OilyThe 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
Books The Toxicity of Female Tokenism: An Interview with Kathleen AlcottThe Paris Review - Catherine LaceyThough Kathleen Alcott’s third novel, America Was Hard to Find, is set in the mid-twentieth century, its concerns are eerily current—nearly every character is caught between the stability of convention
Books Children With Mothers Don’t Eat HousesThe Paris Review - Sabrina Orah MarkSabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Turns out, for three months, Eli my five year old, had a small black pebble in his ear. Don’t ask me why it never bothered
Books The Ideal Place to Disappear: An Interview with Julia PhillipsThe Paris Review - Jennifer WilsonThe Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia is a sparsely populated land mass that sits atop the Pacific Ring of Fire. Forty percent of the land is covered by volcanoes, 29 of which are still active. There are hot
Books Feminize Your Canon: Mariama BâThe Paris Review - Emma GarmanOur monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. As a Muslim schoolgirl in Senegal in the forties, Mariama Bâ had to choose her life’s direction at
Books Books Only a Mother Could LoveThe Paris ReviewDear Mum, I know it’s not Mother’s Day in Scotland, but it is here in America, so: Happy Mother’s Day (Reprise)! The Queen has two birthdays—maybe you can have two Mother’s Days? Anyway, I’m only half
Books Cooking with Martial and CatullusThe Paris Review - Valerie StiversIn Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. In ancient Rome, poetry was pop culture, and being a poet was a viable living of sorts—you attached
Books The Winners of 92Y’s 2019 Discovery Poetry ContestThe Paris ReviewFor nearly seven decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers—John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Ellen
