“Smart people say such dumb and disappointing things about translation.”

This isn’t that classic conceit where you tell a story about someone and it’s really just a story about yourself.

 

Kafka’s characters have no choice but to suffer Kafka. We readers, however, have chosen to submit to his machinery of our own free will.

In Ann Quin’s daring second novel, three is the loneliest number.

Kafka’s characters have no choice but to suffer Kafka. We readers, however, have chosen to submit to his machinery of our own free will.

“A Farce Written in Human Blood,” pp. 70–89 This is the fourth entry in our Mating Book Club. Read along. So here he is, after all this setup: Denoon—the anthropologist beyond anthropology, the man who until this chapter had been kept behind th…

A writer stands outside a story yelling, “Open Sesame!” and the story, as if a seed, opens. And treasure is found inside. That treasure, of course, is just another story, and it all begins again… Or else, say the writer is no different from an…

Wounded in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Yoram Kaniuk moved to Greenwich Village to become a painter. Nineteen and broke, he came to center a rarefied circle of fellow painters, musicians, writers, and actors—Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Willem d…

This week “Ask The Paris Review” received a number of doozies, including a question about writer’s block. It occurred to us we should kick that one over to a real writer—ideally, a voluble one. Joshua Cohen, author of Witz and Cadenza for the Schneid…