Books Staff Picks: Sapphics, Scandals, and SkiesThe Paris ReviewIn the May issue of Harper’s, Joe Kloc tells a story about a community of people called anchor-outs, who live “on abandoned and unseaworthy vessels” in California’s Richardson Bay, “doing their best, little
Books Fully Half KoreanThe Paris Review - Michael Croley“Why all the middle-aged men, Mike?” my writing professor asked me one afternoon during my junior year of college. She was curious (concerned? baffled?) why, in the two semesters we had spent together,
Books Why Does This Feel So Bad?The Paris Review - Jenny OdellContext is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears. Here’s an example. In the first year that I really got into bird-watching, used
Books Poetry Rx: Sometimes Sadness is Just What Comes between the DancingThe 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 week, Claire
Books The Empty RoomThe Paris Review - Luc SanteIn his new biweekly column Pinakothek, Luc Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past. The more empty the photograph, the more it implies horror. The void that dominates the photograph
Books Gone in Sixty SentencesThe Paris Review - Rachel KushnerEvery time I’ve attempted to start this side-winding meditation on Matthew Porter’s airborne muscle cars, cars that are things and also backlit silhouettes of things, I end up scrolling the new version
Books In the Name of Notre DameThe Paris Review - Chris KnappIn September 2016, police found a Peugeot with missing plates parked just steps away from Notre Dame; inside the car, they found seven cylinders of gas. The following week, four women—one of whom was a
Books Re-Visited: Saturday Lunch with the BrowningsThe Paris Review - Lucy ScholesIn her monthly column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, the British writer Penelope Mortimer’s 1960 short story
Books Redux: Everything Is a MachineThe 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
Abraham Lincoln So What If Lincoln Was Gay?The Paris Review - Louis Bayard“Why do you need him to be gay?” This is how a friend (urban, liberal, male) responded when I told him I was working on a historical novel about Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with Joshua Speed. The implication
Books The Royally Radical Life of Margaret CavendishThe Paris Review - Michael RobbinsTo Virginia Woolf, she was “a giant cucumber” choking the roses and carnations in an otherwise orderly garden of seventeenth-century literature. Several of her contemporaries felt similarly. Samuel Pepys
Books As Certain as Death and TaxesThe Paris Review - Souvankham ThammavongsaI lost my job of fifteen years, and as I was filling out my tax return to explain this loss, I thought, well, this was the one constant that had never changed. Taxes were always there. Every April, the
Books Staff Picks: Horses, Heaney, and HypebeastsThe Paris ReviewYou’ve probably seen Daisies, Věra Chytilová’s dizzying 1966 masterpiece, especially if you were a young woman in the early aughts browsing LiveJournal or Tumblr, where screenshots of its two heroines
Books Ms. Difficult: Translating Emily DickinsonThe Paris Review - Ana Luísa AmaralWhen she was translating Rilke into Russian, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva wrote in a letter to Boris Pasternak: And today I want Rilke to speak—through me. In the vernacular, this is known as translation.
Books Ms. Difficult: On Translating Emily DickinsonThe Paris Review - Ana Luísa AmaralWhen she was translating Rilke into Russian, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva wrote in a letter to Boris Pasternak: And today I want Rilke to speak—through me. In the vernacular, this is known as translation.
Books Cooking with Anzia YezierskaThe Paris Review - Valerie StiversIn Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. At one of my first jobs in New York, I worked with an elegant, slim, freakishly tall young woman
Books Poetry Rx: Ordinary SexThe Paris Review - Sarah KayIn 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 week, Sarah
Books On BelievingThe Paris Review - Hanif AbdurraqibHanif Abdurraqib’s new monthly column, Notes on Pop, muses on the relationship between songs and memory. To begin with a fact that is entirely beside the point (unless you are the owner of a Michigan code
Books Chantal Joffe’s Many FacesThe Paris Review - Olivia LaingHere’s the setup: palette, chair, mirror. The mirror is bandaged together with red-and-white tape that says FRAGILE, but let’s not make too much of that. The original plan was written on a scrap of paper:
Books Balzac and the Reassembly of FranceThe Paris Review - Jérôme DavidIn the 1820s, when Honoré de Balzac decided to become a writer, the novel was a minor literary genre in France. Like Voltaire, educated French people preferred poetry and grand tragedy, wherein virtue,
Literature SoonThe Paris Review - Jill TalbotI’m six, speeding my Bicentennial Huffy up and down the sidewalk, or wandering the edges of a playground as the PE teacher blows the whistle through his mustache to end recess, or grinning—blonde ponytails
Books Flowers for Yellow Chins, Bruised Eyes, Forsaken Nymphs, and Impending DeathThe Paris Review - Katy KelleherOnce you start knowing the names of plants, your landscape changes entirely. Trees are no longer just trees—they’re maples and aspens and silver birches. Meadows aren’t filled with blue, yellow, and red
Poetry Redux: The Geography of Self and SoulThe 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 Joys of ‘Breaking and Entering’The Paris Review - Belle BoggsRevisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Belle Boggs revisits Joy Williams’s novel Breaking and Entering. In college, I lived in thrall a
Books The Birth of TerrorThe Paris Review - Roberto CalassoFor we who are living at this moment, the most exact and most acute sensation is one of not knowing where we are treading from day to day. The ground is brittle, lines blur, materials fray, prospects Then
Books The Ragpicker: Frédéric Pajak’s 'Uncertain Manifesto'The Paris Review - Dustin IllingworthIn his monthly column, Archive of Longing, Dustin Illingworth examines recently released books, with a focus on the small presses, the reissues, the esoteric, and the newly translated. Read an excerpt
Lawrence of Arabia Dressing for Others: Lawrence of Arabia's Sartorial StatementsThe Paris Review - Isabella HammadIn the southwest Jordanian desert, among the sandstone mountains of Wadi Rum, there is a face carved into a rock. The broad cheeks and wide chin are framed by a Bedouin kuffiyeh headdress and ‘iqal, and
Books Staff Picks: Bangs, Barbie, and BodiesThe Paris ReviewI worry that I never quite say what I mean. I think about this especially when talking (and writing) about books. Finding language to describe other language is a strange task—the overlay of text on text
Books There’s No Dying in BaseballThe Paris Review - Jason NovakIn his new book, Baseball Epic, Jason Novak brings to life the stars of early-twentieth-century baseball. A selection of his portraits and biographies in miniature appears below. Jason Novak is a cartoonist
Books Revisited: ‘Guernica’The Paris Review - Nathan EnglanderRevisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Nathan Englander revisits Picasso’s Guernica. When I was eleven years old, my mother took me into
