September 14, 2026 Redux You Have to Ask Questions: Svetlana Alexievich, Unlocked By The Paris Review Svetlana Alexievich with a cameraman in Kabul, 1988. Courtesy of Svetlana Alexievich. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, to read alongside our inaugural Art of Oral History interview with Alexievich, we’ve unlocked “Voices from Chernobyl” from issue no. 172 (Winter 2004). “If you cut straight to the part you need, which is what journalists do, it won’t be interesting, and it won’t be the truth, either. Not the whole truth,” the Nobel Prize–winning Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich tells Elena Kostyuchenko in The Art of Oral History No. 1, published in our new Fall issue. “You have to ask questions, of course. Your job is to scour away the banality and return people to their true selves, to make them face what they rarely tap into.” Read More
September 11, 2026 Dispatch Kiss The Ring: Richard Wagner’s Opera Festival in the Age of AI By Krithika Varagur Richard Wagner Theater, Bayreuth, 1908, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Nothing at Bayreuth, the hundred-and-fifty-year-old opera festival created by and dedicated to the works of Richard Wagner, adheres to the pleasure principle. It can take years to get tickets to the Festspielhaus, the purpose-built Festival Theatre on a Green Hill (more of a slope) on the outskirts of town. Those who manage to do so must then sit on hard seats without cushions, which Wagner feared would hurt the acoustics. The operas tend to be epically long and there are no subtitles, in German or otherwise. The opera house itself is so hot that patrons regularly faint. And then there’s the sticky appeal of der Meister himself, whose visionary musical greatness is marred by his unapologetic antisemitism, and later co-opting by Nazism. Wagner, who died in 1883, was a nineteenth-century man—“furrowed by all the century’s features, burdened with all its drives,” per Thomas Mann—but few prefigured twentieth-century German nationalism like he did. Hitler (born in 1889) idolized Wagner and made his music the soundtrack to Nazi rallies. Read More
September 10, 2026 First Person My Grandfather in Grundy, Virginia By Zaina Arafat Photograph by Aaron F. Stone, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. In the late seventies, my grandfather left Nablus and took a job as head surgeon at a hospital in Grundy, Virginia, a coal-mining town tucked between Kentucky and West Virginia in the Appalachian Mountains. Grundy is the rural county seat of Buchanan County and home to Buchanan Mine, the deepest operating longwall coal mine in the United States. Neil Armstrong was rumored to have visited and signed the guest book, after the miners disputed Armstrong’s claim that he was the first man to walk where no man had ever set foot. They did that every day, the miners said. Read More
September 9, 2026 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Fall Issue By Emily Stokes There’s a Russian phrase that translates as something like “kitchen talk” and refers to the kind of conversation that, in the postwar Soviet Union, could happen only around the kitchen table. Previously, apartments had been almost always communal, with stovetops shared by multiple households. Suddenly, in poky single-family khrushchevka, a new social culture arose. In a steamy kitchen, you could share risky anecdotes, engage in political debates, and read from samizdat, especially if the tap was running and you put a pillow over the phone. The spirit of kitchen talk is still alive in the work of the Nobel Prize–winning Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich, the subject of The Paris Review’s inaugural Art of Oral History interview, which appears in our new Fall issue. (To mark the occasion, we have given the Russian version of the interview to our friends at Meduza.) The sessions between Alexievich and her interviewer, the Russian investigative journalist Elena Kostyuchenko, who was not long ago pronounced a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin, took place in Alexievich’s apartment in Berlin, where Alexievich has lived since she was forced to flee Minsk in 2020. Her books—on the Second World War, Chernobyl, and the collapse of the Soviet Union—are drawn from hundreds of interviews, mostly with strangers. The best conversations, she explains to Kostyuchenko, happen behind closed doors, without anyone present who might act as a social censor (Alexievich has harsh words for husbands), and unfurl slowly and intimately. “Just like we’re talking right now,” she says. Read More
September 4, 2026 At Work A Poem Is Full of Meat: Dorothea Lasky on Mother By Luke Dunne Dorothea Lasky, via Wikimedia Commons; licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (left). Mother, Wave Books (right). Across ten collections of poetry and prose, Dorothea Lasky has shown herself to be a writer of formidable range. One of her books is based on The Shining; another, about Sappho, is forthcoming. Memory, her most recent collection of nonfiction, includes essays about fashion, Satanism, David Hockney, roses, anger, and Bernadette Mayer. But this omnivorousness belies a unified sensibility, one drawn to the uncanny, outré, and polychromatic (emphasis on the latter). Read More
September 3, 2026 Dispatch At the Conformation Show: Chasing the Ideal Dog By Hannah Berger All photographs courtesy of Hannah Berger. The Meadow Event Park in Doswell, Virginia, lies on a few hundred acres of flat land abutted by farms and an amusement park called Kings Dominion. It’s the kind of place where animals and vegetables get sorted out. When I told a shearing friend I was heading there, he told me he’d just been there, too, for “sheep stuff.” The crest of an orange roller coaster peeked through the trees as I parked beside several RVs, all of them accompanied by some form of outdoor pen. Just inside the Farm Bureau Center, the doormats were already covered in fur. I was attending a two-day conformation dog show, where more than four hundred purebred dogs were competing to determine which one adhered most closely to an ancestral ideal. Shows like this date back to 1859, when a gunsmith named W. R. Pape organized a competition judging fifty or sixty gun dogs—pointers and setters, bred to hunt—at the corn exchange in Newcastle upon Tyne. Winners got guns. Today, their descendants, plus nearly two hundred other breeds, bred solely for display, compete in fluorescent event spaces for big ribbons. Read More