August 21, 2026 On Sports If You Build It, Will They Come? On the Sperm Racing World Cup By Paul McAdory Ghadeer Bustani, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. In 1677, a medical student named Johann Ham approached the Dutch scientist and future “Father of Microbiology” Antonie van Leeuwenhoek with unsettling news: there were tiny creatures living in his semen. Or not in his semen, not necessarily. Some incorrigible friend—someone who certainly wasn’t Ham—had dislodged his wad in the company of an “unclean woman” and then transferred custody of his deposit by means unattested into Ham’s hands. Curious Ham had splashed the discharge under a microscope and, startled by its contents, brought his discovery and its medium to Van Leeuwenhoek for a second opinion. Examining the sample, the renowned microscopist, who had already described what we call red blood cells and protists in pioneering detail, glimpsed spindly tailed animalcules moving in the muck. He proceeded to set about procuring new goo from a close, morally uncompromised source. “What I here describe was not obtained by any sinful contrivance on my part, but the observations were made upon the excess with which Nature provided me in my conjugal relations,” he wrote some months later to the Royal Society of London regarding the remains of an emission he’d slathered under his powerful single-lens microscope. Read More
August 18, 2026 Bookmarks The Catalogue of Lost Things By Tarpley Hitt Every month, our desks at the Review pile up with dozens of soon-to-be published books, only some of which involve writers we have heard of, or subjects we know anything about. More often, we wind up with a mix somewhere between that of a cabinet of curiosities and a Little Free Library stocked by an indecisive grad student; this summer, for example, alongside many debut novels and NYRB reissues, we found an Italian chapbook of cat-themed poems from the eighties and a semiepistolary critique of psychiatry whose letters are addressed “Dear Neoliberalism.” While combing through these galleys for good ideas or good writing, I sometimes save passages I like. Here are a few I found in July and August. —Tarpley Hitt, online editor Read More
August 17, 2026 Redux James Joyce’s Baby Impressions and Other “Awkward Pleasures” of Literary Biography By Daisy Hildyard In the Lake District, 1994. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews for our readers from our archive. This week, we’ve unlocked our interview with Hermione Lee, selected from the archive by Daisy Hildyard, whose story “Two Lives” appears in our recent Summer issue. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces to your inbox every Sunday morning. Everybody dabbles in biography. If you have ever spoken at a funeral, rewritten your CV, or gossiped, you’ve had to deal with some of the questions that Hermione Lee discusses with Louisa Thomas in her Art of Biography interview. What is the shape of a life? What are the ingredients of an achievement? What specific person and what particular circumstances produced it? When something fails, do we have to find somebody to blame? Lee addresses these questions as matters of technique: the work of finding, or inventing, “a structure that is sympathetic to the subject.” Read More
August 14, 2026 At Work In the Studio with Chad Fore, the Writer Behind “Lil Spooky” By Owen Park Photograph by Kathleen McNamara. In the time between his first submission to the Review, in February of last year, and the publication of his short story “Lil Spooky” in our new Summer issue, the writer Chad Fore and I exchanged almost a hundred emails. I also read several of his stories, which tend to be somewhat autobiographical, at least in the sense that they often take place in one of Fore’s two neighboring hometowns—Piru and Fillmore, in Southern California—and are rich with the kinds of details and characters that feel impossible to invent. “Lil Spooky” follows its high-school-age protagonist, Brad Camacho, through his gradual—then all too fast—initiation into a local gang. In a humiliation ritual disguised as a tryout, he has to freestyle for members of the gang’s hip-hop arm, also known as the Sick Minded Clique, which records posse cuts in a “decrepit old shack” they call the studio, at the end of one of their driveways. Knowing what I did about Fore’s fiction, I wasn’t entirely surprised when, alongside the first draft of this story, he included the link to a song he was featured on when he himself was in high school. He and I talked about the musical influences of his characters and of his own past over lunch this spring, when, after all those messages, we were finally able to meet in person. I found he has an encyclopedic memory for rap verses, some by artists we both love, and others that he’s been writing in his head, he said, for twenty years. INTERVIEWER While we were editing “Lil Spooky,” you told me it was partly inspired by time you spent with your older cousin’s rap group in the nineties and early aughts. What drew you to that specific experience as a subject and how did you approach writing about it after so many years? CHAD FORE From the start I had in mind the type of story I wanted to write. When I think of friends from my hometown or family members who got involved in gangs or drugs or whatever—there were always opportunities before it got bad, where they could still get out of it. But then something happens, and they can’t anymore. I wanted the story to end at that moment where, without having been told anything, the reader would know that Brad’s in a different place, and now it is too late. There was one sentence that I almost cut. I went back and forth. Does this explain too much? Does it not explain enough? INTERVIEWER Which sentence? FORE “It was all pretend until the moment it wasn’t.” At a certain point you’ve fallen through the hole. That was the feeling I was trying to reproduce. Read More
August 12, 2026 Diaries The Bookstore-Slash-Skate-Shop Next to Ballerina Farm By Claire Carusillo Photograph by Claire Carusillo. June 12, 2026 Our shop is in an old service station in a charming alpine town nestled within Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. Here’s the oomph of it: Avery, the only person who works here besides Galen and me, sells coffee in a waiting room we’ve converted into a bar. In the first garage bay, Galen sells skateboards and enormous pairs of shorts. In the second garage bay, I sell books and art supplies and an assortment of Korean-formulated sunscreens. Some people have been calling the shop maximalist, but I’m actually quite particular about the goods we hawk. Sarah’s in from New York to help with our grand opening, and she prices our whole drinks menu and sets up the receipt printer. I’ve known her since I was nineteen, and she’s been doing stuff that I don’t want to do for fifteen years now. Once, during the pandemic, we went glamping near Moab and almost died overnight from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a backfiring tent stove. I thought it was because we’d eaten too much bread pudding before tucking in. She got us two free nights in an upgraded safari tent. The first book I sell on our first day in business is a used copy of Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School, for seven dollars. It goes home with a high school English teacher on a daytime date. The next is a used copy of The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin, also for seven dollars, to a studious young college student. The third is a copy of Stephanie LaCava’s I Fear My Pain Interests You, which goes to a girl who pays with her own money even though her parents are present. She seems to be around thirteen, and I worry for a moment that she’s not old enough to read a book with so many lecherous older men skulking through its pages. But nobody ever monitored my reading when I was that age, and I turned out pretty much fine. I read a lot of Janet Evanovich’s bounty hunter series. Read More
August 6, 2026 On Books No More Missionaries: Shiva Naipaul’s Jonestown By Andrew Holter Courtesy of The Jonestown Institute at San Diego State University, via Wikimedia Commons. From the outset there seemed to be little mystery as to the facts of the case at Jonestown. The victims included over nine hundred men, women, and children of People’s Temple, the majority of them Black Americans from the San Francisco Bay Area (which matters). The scene of the crime was an agricultural commune in the South American nation of Guyana (not a coincidence). The murder weapon (the word “suicide” here would be imprecise) was a blend of poisons mixed into a powdered drink called Fla-Vor-Aid. The culprit was the Reverend Jim Jones and his motive was simple: to spare his flock their impending annihilation at the hands of the United States government. Jones had talked about this prospect incessantly, obsessively, for a long time. There had been rehearsals. If the question is why so many people decided to kill themselves, the first answer has to be that a lot of them didn’t. Many syringes were found at the scene among the plastic cups. There was no meaningful notion of choice at Jonestown; Jones’s command to take the poison was enforced by men with guns. A third of the victims were children. Atrocities of that scale tend to have world-historic causes. But in the aftermath of that awful night on November 18, 1978, public inquiries mostly focused on the morbid explanations (cultology, groupthink, leader-worship, etc). Whatever else Jonestown was, it was the result of an accretion of human choices, many of them rational, and yet few writers investigated the political circumstances that had allowed a mad cleric to assume such earthly power in the first place. Read More