“Jefferson had helped create his own country. But he wanted black people to leave it. All of that made me think about the idea of a nation—what does it mean to be a nation of people? How do you create one?”

“The point of view I take is the point of view of Diogenes, which is that when a man owns a lion, a lion owns a man. The thing about technology is that it owns us.”

CHAIR

When I was small my parents would host a lot of parties. I don’t know if they had more friends then or were just, as people say, “at a more social place in their lives,” but at least once a month there would be a bunch of adults in our apartment, drinking crappy wine and trying to play our untunable piano. There is something powerful for a child about your parents having people over. It’s not anything that happens at the parties but the evidence they give you that people feel safe where you live. That must go back to the savanna. Sometimes things happened at the parties that I was probably too young to see, but nothing scarring, just grown-up scenes.

Jonathan Meiburg on biodiversity, the striated caracara, and the similarities between playing music and paying close attention to birds.

Unexpectedly, given the title, this is a deeply personal book, an engaging and subtle piece of nonfiction full of history and wit.

John Jeremiah Sullivan speaks with Kevin Barry about being a ginger-haired goth and the absolute agony of writing.

I live in the southeastern part of North Carolina, in a county that went for Trump. I’m one of those people who shouldn’t have been surprised but was. I had to leave town the morning after the election and did not want to go. The night before, ly…

We’re away until January 4, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!Dear Lorin,Did I ever tell you about the thing I did with The Ice Plant? You know them—they make oddly compelling photog…

Dear Lorin,Did I ever tell you about the thing I did with The Ice Plant? You know them—they make oddly compelling photography books. Last year they did one about some candid “found photos” of the Rolling Stones, pictures taken in the South that…

At our Spring Revel last month, John Jeremiah Sullivan presented the Hadada Award to Frederick Seidel. Sullivan’s remarks follow, along with three of Seidel’s poems, which were read aloud that night: “Downtown,” read by Zadie Smith; “Fred…

Ten years ago I was on the highway from Tennessee to Kentucky—can’t even remember the reason for the trip—but I kept the car radio on the AM band, set to “Scan,” because I’d noticed, over several years’ driving around this part of the…

This week, our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, stepped in to address your queries. Dear Paris Review, I live in the deep south and was raised in a religious cult. Still with me? Okay. I’m attempting to throw off the shackles of my re…

In the current issue of The Paris Review our Southern Editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, writes about the discovery of an elaborate prehistoric cave-art tradition in, of all places, Middle Tennessee, and about the archaeologist Jan Simek, the onetime Ne…

Last year the writer Denis Johnson came to Wilmington, North Carolina, where I live, for a conference. Ben George, who edits the magazine Ecotone and was hosting him, graciously asked me to tag along. There were memorable days. Granted, I would file …

Dear Lorin, A time comes when it’s healthful to put aside obscurantism and turn to bedrock, if only briefly. And while I flatter myself in thinking you know me as a man not prone to get overly excited about digital-remastering projects, neverthele…

Five years ago GQ assigned me to write about Axl Rose, who was mounting a “final comeback” with his Chinese Democracy, release of which had already been postponed by more than a decade. The album title was meant as a punch line. Q: When will Guns N…

Brothers and sisters, with all respect, your declaration of war is an admission of defeat. We beg you to reconsider this folly. First you tell us—in what begins to sound like a rage-filled howl against the light—that there is “no such word as snuc…

Dear Lorin,

I'm told a publication calling itself The Awl has blogged about our use of snuck for sneaked, calling out the whole Paris Review masthead for this “transgression of English.”

Transgression against English, they undoubtedly mean. If …

  Dear Lorin, It’s strange that, right as you confer on me the undeserved (but I hope not wasted) honor of Southern Editorship, this region would reclaim its hold on the American imagination. I refer to the underwater live feed of the oil lea…

Paul Jacob Marperger, member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, is one of those figures you could know nothing about and not really be missing anything, but when you do know him, worlds open. Born Nuremberg, 1656; died Dresden, 1730. He is sometimes tagged as the first professional economist. 

Over the past few decades, in Tennes­see, archaeologists have unearthed an elab­orate cave-art tradition thousands of years old. The pictures are found in dark-zone sites—places where the Native American people who made the artwork did so at personal risk, crawling meters or, in some cases, miles under­ground with cane torches—as opposed to sites in the “twilight zone,” speleologists’ jargon for the stretch, just ­beyond the entry chamber, which is ­exposed to diffuse sunlight.

When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly.

Select documents from the sources referenced in “The Princes: A Reconstruction.”