“There weren’t too many books by women that were taught in school, so I read those on my own, and the books I read were as accessible as the ones we were reading in school.”

‘Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise’ looks and reads as though it were composed by an otherworldly visitor with the whole of human civilization at her disposal.

  In the margin of the drawing Study for Looking at a Curve Ball in Cuernavaca are notes written by the artist, Karl Wirsum: Batter up 9 at Bats Last Bats Lost Summer Robert Catcher Umbrella Umpiro Manic Sword Fight Thrust Position He se…

  Sam Stephenson’s biography, Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View, was published late last month. Its subject, the photographer W. Eugene Smith, should be familiar to longtime readers of the Daily: since 2010, we have run Stephenson’s chronicle…

“We found ourselves marginalized within these campaigns and were expected to stay in the background, keep quiet and make the tea.”

Our new, redesigned website marks the debut of our complete digital archive: now subscribers can read every piece from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading our back issues right away; you can …

A few weeks before the end of 2014, Aaron Stern and Jordan Sullivan wrote me to request permission to reprint the poem “My Gift to You,” by Roberto Bolaño, which was published in our Summer 2012 issue. Stern and Jordan, both of whom are photogra…

Garth Greenwell’s “Gospodar,” which appeared in our Summer 2014 issue, is a slow-simmering story of unease, humiliation, and eroticism—it concerns a man’s experience with sadomasochistic sex in Sofia, Bulgaria. Greenwell, also a poet, is ex…

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!On Aidan Koch’s cover for our Summer issue, six panels depict a woman lounging and reading and ruminating at the shore. …

Watching a film about Claude Cahun.When Alan Pierson conducts, he stands with his feet together, sometimes springing onto his toes and then plunging forward at the waist. Other times, he takes a step forward, only to return immediately to his origina…

“Big, Bent Ears,” our ten-chapter multimedia series with Rock Fish Stew, has come to a close. Over the past seven months, this “serial in documentary uncertainty” has enfolded a host of writers, artists, and musicians, including Joseph Mitche…

Svetlana Alexievich, the latest Nobel laureate in literature, has said that “after twenty years of work with documentary material and having written five books on their basis I declare that art has failed to understand many things about people.” …

In his prose poem “Rounding Off to the Nearest Zero,” Albert Mobilio writes that “Driving, or at least driving alone, is, I’ve always found, conducive to thinking. The sense of forward motion, the calf’s calibrated flexing, the purposeful g…

 When I was going to school for classical music … I had about a month to get … my reading together. But I still learn by ear a lot faster. I can feel what I need to do. You can’t write out all those subtleties. I have to hear it, and then take …

Oren Ambarchi and Tyondai Braxton lead parallel lives in the world of experimental music. Ambarchi, an avid collaborator and one-third of the noise trio Nazoranai, played at Big Ears in 2014. Braxton, who has composed both avant-rock and classical mu…

On Aidan Koch’s cover for our Summer issue, six panels depict a woman lounging and reading and ruminating at the shore. Each panel exists both as a discrete event—here, she looks at her book; here, she shades her eyes—and as one sentence in a p…

What do crushed tulips, baseball, and Jonny Greenwood have in common?It’s the kind of question that would only be asked in “Big, Bent Ears,” Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss’s “Serial in Documentary Uncertainty.” The series’s seventh chapt…

On November 24, 2014, the JACK Quartet performed Matthias Pintscher’s Studies for Treatise on the Veil in a gallery at the Morgan Library, in New York, before a thirty-three-foot-long painting by Cy Twombly called Treatise on the Veil (Second Version…

Victor Moscoso has, as he says, always ridden two, if not three, horses at a time. As an art student, he made fine-art paintings and did “art jobs,” such as hand-painting grocery signs. Later, he made paintings and posters, and then paintings, po…

Last month, I got a peek at a private collection of work by the painter Jane Wilson. Tucked away in a Midtown East town-house office are a handful of her diminutive watercolors and a very large oil painting depicting one of Wilson’s characteristic …

We’re out until January 5, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2014 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year!Three years ago, PPP Editions published a limited-edition book called 100 Fanzines / 10 Years of Briti…

Three years ago, PPP Editions published a limited-edition book called 100 Fanzines / 10 Years of British Punk 1976–1985. I have a copy and keep intending to give it to any number of friends who know more about the Clash, the Mo-dettes, or Attila the …

[portfolio_slideshow include="80001,80002,80003,80004,80005,80006,80007,80008,80009" exclude="65536"] Gladys Nilsson was born in Chicago in 1940 and grew up visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, which she then attended from 1958 to 1962. In the mid…

I’ve twice visited Gary Panter’s studio, a large room tucked away on the third floor of his house in Brooklyn; the table at which he works—he lays his canvases flat to paint—sits roughly near the center of the room and is surrounded on all …

Congratulations to Hermione Lee, who has won the 2014 James Tait Black Prize for her biography of the Booker Prize–winning novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. One judge described Lee’s biography as “a masterclass in writing of this type … the perfe…

I remember reading Joe Brainard’s accumulated aphoristic memories for the first time. I remember the way each entry built on the one that preceded it, even when they had little to do with each another, and I remember the texture of the entire enter…

Toward the end of college and for several years after, I kept two postcard photographs taped above my desk: one of Anaïs Nin, the other of Frank O’Hara—the mother and father of my literary interests at the time. Nin was a gateway for me into f…

On view as part of the New York Public Library’s recent exhibition “Play Things”—on prints and photographs that deal in some way with games and recreation—was a series of nine baseball cards made in 1975 by artist Mike Mandel. Originally pa…

The opening to Betsy Karel’s new book of photography, Conjuring Paradise, is a poem by Kay Ryan titled “Slant.” It wonders at the randomness of loss, suspecting that its arbitrariness may be otherwise: Does a skew
insinuate into the visual plane…

The Paris Review’s interviews have long featured single manuscript pages from among the subjects’ writings. They are meant to show the author at work, his or her method of self-editing, of revision—an illustrative supplement to the process desc…

In 2010, Danielle Dutton founded Dorothy, a publishing project, with the aim of producing books that appeal both to fiction readers and to poetry fans. Her own writing—she is the author of two novels, Attempts at a Life and S P R A W L—likewise emb…

I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen…

Kate Beaton makes comics about the Bröntes, Canadians, fat ponies, the X-Men, Hamlet, the American founding fathers, Raskolnikov, gay Batman, Nikola Tesla, Les Misérables, Nancy Drew, Greek myths, and hipsters throughout history. Little is spared h…

Forlorn Funnies, the title of cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier’s periodical of short prose comics, aptly characterizes all of his work: bleak subjects leavened by drollery and gags reigned-in by finely drawn anxieties. The author of the graphic nove…

In 1985, Jamey Gambrell took her first trip to the Soviet Union as a reporter for Art and America. Her dispatches brought fresh news of the underground art scene to the United States and introduced her to a wealth of artists in Russia, including Mo…

Join Geoff Dyer as he discusses his new book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, with Lorin Stein, at Greenlight Bookstore, 686 Fulton Street, in Brooklyn. The event begins at 7:30 PM.

Last night, The Paris Review took home an Ellie in the category of Essays and Criticism for John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Mister Lytle: An Essay.” In a long night of long speeches, Lorin Stein did us proud.

After moving from Tambov, Russia, to Egypt with her Armenian parents in 1921, Ida Kar spent five years in Paris. She had been educated at the prestigious Lycée Français in Alexandra, but her stint on the Left Bank, at age twenty, formed the foundat…

Swamplandia! is twenty-nine-year-old Karen Russell’s first novel. But the Miami native is already well known in literary circles for her debut story collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006). The overlapping themes in St. Lucy’s…

In 1939, Neiman Marcus published their first Christmas book, a catalogue of extravagant, humorous, astonishing, and often jewel-encrusted gifts. Over the Top: 50 Years of Fantasy Gifts from the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book, recently published by …

Lynda Barry is many things: a cartoonist, best known for her long-running strip, Ernie Pook’s Comeek; the author of two illustrated novels, Cruddy and The Good Times Are Killing Me; and the sought-after instructor of the workshop “Writing the Unthi…

The Nobel Prize committee announced this morning that Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has won the 2010 award for literature, praising him “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, re…

Catch Lorin Stein in the Golden State this week, at three events. Tonight: San Francisco
The venerable City Lights hosts a conversation between Stein and Oscar Villalon, former book critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, as part of the city's LitQ…

Well, slightly West. First stop: Pittsburgh
Tomorrow, September 29, Stein will join Bob Hoover, books editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, to reveal “The Sordid Confessions of a Subversive Big-Apple Editor.” The free event starts at 6:30 P.M. a…

Join editor Lorin Stein at the first event of his whistle-stop tour. At 3:30 P.M., he'll be at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW, in Washington DC, to present the new Fall issue. If you're in DC, don't miss it!

“Once things leave my files,” Etel Adnan wrote to me, “I never know where they are, and don’t think about them anymore, otherwise you lose your mind.”