October 23, 2026 On Architecture Turner Brooks’s Spatial Memories By Alessandro Tersigni As a child, Turner Brooks would lie awake in the smallest bedroom of a creaky seaside house in Maine. From below, he could hear his grandparents talking in the living room, and from the window, the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean. These two sounds became, for him, as much a part of the bedroom as its Dutch wallpaper—what he would come to call a “spatial memory.” Years later, while studying at the Yale School of Architecture, one of Brooks’s classmates glossed the idea like this: “if you removed the floor, walls, and ceiling, the space would still be there.” Read More
October 22, 2026 History Murano Parsnips: The Unexpected Literary History of the Dildo By Izabella Scott Frontispiece from The School of Venus, or the Ladies Delight (1680), by Michel Millot, via Google Books. Public Domain. The first dildo named in English literature appears in a brothel on Valentine’s Day. Thomas Nashe’s The Choise of Valentines, an erotic farce written in the early 1590s, follows Tomalin, an impatient lover visiting a sweetheart in the bordello where she works. He pays the hostess (a “foggy three-chinned dame”) and hurries upstairs through the building’s “crankled wayes.” But his reunion with Mistress Francis is urgent and disastrously brief. “I faint! I yeald!” he cries. Left unsatisfied, Francis briskly reaches for her “little dildoe.” Read More
October 20, 2026 On the Internet The Uncanny Catharsis of the AI Emomercial By Jean Garnett All photographs courtesy of Jean Garnett. The tears are the first tell, and what stops my scrolling: that’s not how tears work. The tears gather in wide, frightened eyes and spill over into droplets, but instead of sliding down the cheek and being absorbed into the skin or dripping off the face, these droplets dangle like snot from the eyes, transparent swells dragging down mucous threads. The eyes belong to a woman, a Pixaresque figure with a large head on a hunched body, who is crying in her cubicle. In subsequent versions she may be crying in the bathroom, or at the wheel of her car, or at her son’s soccer game or her daughter’s rehearsal dinner, but the cause of the tears is always the same: the woman is sad because she is aging, and she is aging because she is sad. She is a rumpled Möbius strip of cause and effect, agedness the total fact of her life. Naturally, the woman has failed, or is failing, to hang onto her husband: “You used to light up,” he says in one video. “You just don’t look like yourself anymore.” Or she overhears him telling a friend that she has “let herself go.” Or he has already left her for a much younger woman. Or he’s having an affair with a colleague who has not “let herself go.” Read More
October 19, 2026 Redux John Steinbeck, Unlocked: “East of Eden is Going to Take a Bad Beating” By Hazel Byers John Steinbeck in 1949. Photograph courtesy of Los Angeles Daily News via Wikimedia Commons. LICENSED UNDER CC BY 4.0. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, we’ve unlocked the two parts of John Steinbeck’s Art of Fiction interview from issue no. 45 (Fall 1969) and issue no. 63 (Fall 1975). “I have noticed so many of the reviews of my work show a fear and a hatred of ideas and speculations,” wrote John Steinbeck in an unsent letter to his editor, Pascal Covici. “It seems to be true,” he continued, “that people can only take parables fully clothed with flesh. Any attempt to correlate in terms of thought is frightening. And if that is so, East of Eden is going to take a bad beating because it is full of such things.” Read More
October 16, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Geoffrey G. O’Brien on “Ray of Light” By Geoffrey G. O’Brien Joshua Clover in 2014. Photograph by Joe Mabel. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Geoffrey G. O’Brien dedicated his poem “Ray of Light,” which appears in our recent Fall issue, no. 257, to Joshua Clover, the poet, scholar, and writer who passed away last year at the age of sixty-two. Clover’s life and work resisted easy categorization—the Marxist and “physicist of syllables,” as Jorie Graham once called him, wrote for both the academic and mainstream press, inflecting his poetry and prose with political critique and social theory, popular music and blockbuster films. “Again you sing how / Music and poetry lie / Between joke and gift, idea and gun,” O’Brien writes. “Hoping to be both / While destined to be neither.” Read More
October 14, 2026 Diaries My Tamagotchi Diary By Angie Sijun Lou Photograph by Angie Sijun Lou. In the opening scene of Angie Sijun Lou’s short story, “Bubble,” which appears in our recent Fall issue, no. 257, the narrator goes with her father to a parent-teacher conference—an intervention of sorts, regarding the fact that the unnamed sixth-grader “had spoken fewer than thirty words over the past academic year.” During the conference, as her teacher threatens to hold her back barring better socialization, the girl plays with a Tamagotchi Angel—a high-maintenance, limited-edition digital pet which, as it happens, was also based on a toy Lou received in real life. Read More