Dan Piepenbring on the life cycle of a hoax, the nature of truth in a time of alternative facts, and our 2015 April Fools’ Day prank.

Tarantino’s newest film about the Manson murders ignores some of the strangest parts of history.

  In 2012, having published four books and won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome. There, she experienced what she described as “a radical transition, a state of complete bewilderment.” A set of preconceptions had h…

  The rubber stamp is the official weapon of officialdom. Anyone who’s used one knows why: it feels great to smash a carved piece of wood and rubber onto a piece of paper, leaving an imperious mark where once there was empty space. Properly …

We’re retiring our daily arts-and-culture links roundup. Here’s the very last one.

I checked the whole archive. There’s squat. We’re sorry.

In today’s roundup: how to swear fealty to the real Satan; poetry is easier to read than you think it is; the Barbara Pym diet; and more.

In today’s roundup: an exhibition about flapper-era designs, the joys of taxidermy, and more.

In today’s roundup: a new book celebrates the forgotten joys of the card catalog; a gallerist fights ageism in the art world; and more.

At Matthew Marks Gallery, a new group show by Northern Californian artists casts an admirably wide net.

In today’s roundup: the indignities of life as a governess; Thoreau as a destroyer of forests; a hallmark of lesbian cinema turns twenty.

In today’s roundup: the closet as a psychic space, Stephen Greenblatt on overcoming xenophobia, the miracles of Roman concrete, and more.

In today’s roundup: we’ve lost sight of the value of hideous, Rabelaisian, grotesque laughter; also, greasy-spoon diners are dying.

Churchman envisioned these works as a comment on “what’s lost and found in the process of translation”; they borrow from images in print and online.

In today’s roundup: Albee’s will and its complications; becoming “Didionesque”; and more.

In today’s roundup: the eternal waxing and waning of the short story, woodblock prints of brothels, and more.

In today’s roundup: a man intent on destroying monuments of the ten commandments.

In today’s arts and culture news: the renaissance of the McMansion, the persistence of Monocle magazine, and more.

In today’s roundup: remembering the least popular Brontë sibling; digging up Salvador Dali’s grave; dissing Andy Warhol; and more.

Ma paints with ink on translucent acrylic glass, giving her landscapes a sumptuous, shadowy dimension in which women emanate a golden light.

In today’s arts and culture roundup: the grossest trend of the French Enlightenment; Iran’s cavalier approach to copyright; and more.

In today’s arts and culture news: the Museum of Failure; communist banquets gone awry; Bulgakov’s eternal toiling; and more.

In today’s roundup: Yayoi Kusama and the rise of selfie art; literature in an age without privacy; the elusive jazz pianist Craig Taborn.

“Who but the sun persuades the lame to dance / as if their canes were maypoles?” A poem by Baudelaire from our archive, perfect for solstice celebration.

In today’s arts and culture news: the psychic power of the corner; JFK misunderstood as a fan of the arts; the sex of butterflies; and more.

Scherer paints rambling manses as seen through a funhouse mirror, their baroque furnishings collapsing into a labyrinth of distorted décor.

In today’s roundup: a neuroscientist puzzles over the elusive story of human consciousness; famous literary typos; Housman’s Britishness.

The Paris Review is renowned for our parties, and we take pride in that. But sometimes things get carried away. Literally.

In today’s roundup: Shakespeare troupes face hate even though they have nothing to do with Caesar; Virginia Woolf’s rising star.

When you’re living in a patriarchy, every day is Father’s Day. Stories by Junot Diaz, Jonathan Lethem, Tama Janowitz, and Benjamin Percy form an anti-dad quartet.

In today’s arts and culture news: a new book attempts to persuade liberal arts students to move to Palo Alto; art conservation is harder than ever.

In today’s roundup: our earliest conceptions of the sleepy walrus; a diary dedicated to sneezing; new poet laureate Tracy K. Smith; and more.

In today’s roundup: more problems where art meets commerce; a portraitist whose subjects don’t exist; and more.

In today’s roundup: investigating prog’s appeal to white guys; chainsmoking with Houllebecq; and more.

“Inside-Out,” an exhibition of woven paintings by Samantha Bittman, is at Morgan Lehman Gallery through June 17.

In today’s roundup: using paper to make near-impossible objects; shunning the literary prize racket; revisiting Thomas Hardy; and more.

In today’s roundup: alternate colors for the Guggenheim, how Irish writers learned from BBC radio, Stan Brakhage’s films, and more.

In today’s roundup: Finn Murphy remembers the back-breaking work he did as a mover.

In today’s arts and culture news: a meditation on all things lactic; a video game about everything; and more.

Friedrich Hölderlin, who spent half his life in a tower, died 174 years ago. Rainer Maria Rilke memorialized him in poem published in our Winter 1981 issue.

In today’s roundup: Martin Scorsese defends filmmaking as high art.

Karlson, who lives and works in Berlin, populates her drawings with demonic cartoons, lurid, sinuous lines, and distended patterns.

In today’s roundup: remembering a man who made TV weird; finding fake books in fake homes; what happens when literary writers try sci-fi.

In today’s roundup: a brief history of daffy mascots, the discovery of a new Edith Wharton play, the true meaning of “dystopia,” and more.

In today’s roundup: a painter explores the less decadent corners of Berlin and a Portuguese novelist gets his due.

An expansive exhibition of the photographer’s portraits from Minnesota, Montana, and North Dakota is at Howard Greenberg Gallery through July 7.

In today’s roundup: how food apps shape our desire, the changing tenor of sex in American literature, lessons from Baywatch, and more.

In today’s roundup: selling a painting that was once property of the Nazis, and more.

In today’s roundup: mourning Denis Johnson, understanding the appeal of pessimistic literature, and more.

In today’s roundup: an AI tries to name paint colors, with disastrous results; new Sylvia Plath poems turn up; and more.

For the American Ballet Theatre’s production of “Whipped Cream,” Mark Ryden created work that reflects the dreams and nightmares of a good sugar high.

In today’s roundup: the art of disease naming, Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, and more.

A poem from our Summer 1998 issue, ideal for moments of apathy.

In today’s roundup: Trump as the artificial-intelligence president; a new Murakami book a lot like old Murakami books; and more.

Our Sleep Aids are devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain.

In the 1940s, before he found acclaim as a painter, Alex Katz, now eighty-nine, was a student at Cooper Union. He practiced drawing on the subway.

In today’s roundup: the book that tied into Twin Peaks; a controversy roils academic philosophers.

In today’s roundup: the cars of NYC get their due forty years later; an Elena Ferrante casting call draws tons of kids; and more.

In today’s roundup: the ingenious bag of tricks used by early nature photographers; Cary Grant’s LSD heyday; and more.

In today’s roundup: Chicago’s rolling homes, a Proust pilgrimage, LSD and computers, and more.

In Mexico City, the artist found an album with thirty-one sheets of handcrafted paper. He decided to make a “visual poem” with it.

In today’s roundup: a new profile of Gerhard Steidl makes us want to smell new books.

In today’s roundup: the language of prairie dogs; Samuel R. Delany at a sex party; and more.

In today’s roundup: impersonating people who don’t exist, making enemies in book clubs, seeing through Facebook’s eyes, and more.

Endre Tót is one of thirty artists in “With the Eyes of Others: Hungarian Artists of the Sixties and Seventies,” a group show at Elizabeth Dee Gallery.

In today’s roundup: why Agatha Christie is a magnet for fake news, why architects shouldn’t get rich, and why it’s okay to be a philistine.

In today’s roundup: KFC embraces fiction as a marketing stunt, a boring museum about writers opens, and more.

In today’s arts and culture news: the politics of the pit, the rise of tall red boots, reading Raymond Roussel, and more.

In today’s roundup: the ongoing adventures of witches, the lost art of the sex letter, and more.

In today’s roundup: modern furniture cameos in porn; J.D. Daniels drives to the literal center of America; Samuel Beckett takes on fascists.

In today’s roundup: people love photographing lost gloves; an artist remakes iconic pictures with Play-Doh; Irving Penn’s centennial is here.

In today’s roundup: Hollywood’s desultory treatment of a genius Indian filmmaker; Christian mags for teens; Grace Paley in the streets; and more.

In today’s roundup: picturing people in cars, Louise Erdrich on sound cannons, the origins of the phrase “late capitalism,” and more.

We were heartbroken to learn that Jean Stein, the writer and editor who got her start at The Paris Review, has died at eighty-three.

Elias Sime’s art repurposes electronic waste from Abbis Ababa.

In today’s roundup: pondering the emotionlessness of ancient fiction; fact-checking by fireplace; texting the dead; and more.

The poet and artist Vito Acconci has died at seventy-seven. Read one of his poems from our Summer 1968 issue.

In today’s roundup: the poet Morgan Parker gets a sweet tat, Leonora Carrington’s centenary rolls around, and more.

In today’s roundup: a scholar contends that Coleridge was a great prognosticator; woodblock prints capture Japan’s third gender; and more.

“Rose Gold,” an exhibition of photographs and a film by Sara Cwynar, takes its title from Apple’s most coveted iPhone color.

In today’s roundup: a sculpture of naked George Washington, the origins of Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and more.

In today’s roundup: an impending Rauschenberg retrospective brings the haters out; Emily Dickinson’s poems are harder to read than ever.

In today’s roundup: the waxing influence of pill pop, the artists who dare to defy the self-promotion machine, and more.

In today’s arts and culture news: Cormac McCarthy moonlights as a scientist, Bill O’Reilly’s thriller presaged his ouster, and more.

In today’s arts and culture roundup: where our deodorant smells come from; a sexy letter from Proust.

For decades, the state used vivid art to try to tamp down the Soviet appetite for vodka. They weren’t successful—but the posters are still fun to look at.

In today’s arts and culture news: the sad rise of #vanlife, parsing Melania’s pictures for signs of life, Albert Murray on the blues, and more.

In today’s roundup: remembering the horror show that was the lobotomy; Kara Walker’s vision for public art; and more.

A melancholy 1952 letter from Thornton Wilder describes “a barnyard of angry raised voices.”

In today’s roundup: our changing dreams of Arctic life; the trouble with celebrity profiles; and more.

In today’s roundup: a utopian scheme to communicate through music; Russian fast food comes to America.

In today’s roundup: the writer Emily Hahn’s curious past, why we won’t see James Baldwin’s letters for a while, and more.

Wei uses “a touch of melodrama here, a hint of seduction there” to bring out the layer of dream-life hovering just beneath reality.

In today’s roundup: an unexpectedly wise sports memoir, the rise of Icelandic Dracula, Chekhov’s enduring lesson, and more.

In today’s roundup: the consciousness of bees, Sophie Calle gives conceptual birth to her cat, and more.

In today’s roundup: scientists locate the smells of old books; an artisanal wigmaker’s last stand; and more.

Check out pictures from our spring gala, featuring Richard Howard, Alexia Arthurs, Vanessa Davis, Todd Solondz, Yiyun Li, Zadie Smith, and many more.

In today’s roundup: renaming a bridge in New York after an iconic jazz artist; Britain’s chocolate factories in decline; and more.

“A Self-Portrait,” an exhibition of paintings by Lamar Peterson, is at Fredericks & Freiser Gallery for just a few more days, through April 8.

In today’s roundup: the 19th century fascination with technology and telepathy; the importance of not not reading; and more.

In today’s roundup: poisonous Victorian wallpaper, thirty hours of drones and beeps, too many superheroes, and more.

In today’s roundup: Aimée Crocker’s reissued memoir still shocks; many poets are also bro-ets; and more.

In today’s roundup: remembering Yevgeny Tevtushenko and investigating Pigcasso, the painting pig.

The artist has a solo exhibition up through April 22 at Galerie Lelong.

In today’s roundup: Comic Sans is due for a comeback, baseball’s due for change, and Nan Talese is overdue for a Vanity Fair profile.

Read the late poet’s work in sixties- and seventies-era issues of The Paris Review.

In today’s roundup: an evisceration of Penn Station, a paean to the plains, a salute to indexers, and more.

In today’s roundup: Kaya Mar’s protest paintings, the debate over translators and royalties, Buffy fanfic, and more.

In today’s roundup: stealing Big Maple Leaf; eschewing rampant bibliophilia; looking at the Dana Schutz controversy.

In today’s roundup: a linguist ponders the role of fecal intensifiers; the history of the non-word “irregardless.”

In today’s roundup: the fatality rate involving livestock; Sinclair Lewis’s neglected road-trip novel; remembering Trisha Brown.

In today’s roundup: Hollywood’s love of barf bags, Whitman’s love of the sea, Trump’s love of quotation marks, and more.

Meet the ten winners and read excerpts of their fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.

An exhibition of Kiki Smith’s prints from 1990 to the present is at Mary Ryan Gallery through April 8.

In today’s roundup: Walt Whitman’s precepts for manly heath; the many merits of glass; Bob Silvers’s least favorite words.

In today’s roundup: the alt-right latches on to Pride and Prejudice; reassessing Robert Lowell’s bipolar disorder, and more.

In today’s roundup: the former editor of Commentary remembers when literary parties got ugly; eulogizing Chuck Berry the wordsmith.

Derek Walcott has died at eighty-seven. We’re sharing his poem “The Light of the World,” which appeared in our Winter 1986 issue.

In today’s roundup: a serial comma affords a legal victory, easy rhymes are the best rhymes, and more.

In today’s arts and culture news: the eternal perils of conveying irony online; insanity in modernist Dutch short stories; and more.

In today’s roundup: burying thirty thousand pizzas, perpetrating literary hoaxes, and more.

Thomas’s prints and collages make prominent use of found paper: book covers, ledger pages, looseleaf notebooks.

In today’s roundup: Alice Neel stares down death, Terence Malick listens to the top forty, and more.

Revisiting a poem by Mahmoud Darwish from our Spring 1971 issue.

In today’s roundup: a curator alleges that Austen suffered from arsenic poisoning; Zambia’s space race; and more.

In today’s roundup: an exhibition remembers the burst of artistic optimism that began the USSR; and Billy Joel may suck.

In today’s roundup: pointillist cave art from 38,000 years ago; the quest to keep Cy Twombly’s scraps of paper; and more.

In today’s roundup: how women took to the factories in World War I; the elite overemphasize smartness; and more.

Lois Dodd’s early work (1958–66) is showing at Alexandre Gallery through March 18.

In today’s roundup: an unlikely history of arts in Japanese internment camps; the philosophy of long-haired baseball players; and more.

On the evening of March 7, join our web editor, Dan Piepenbring, for a conversation with Norman Ohler, the author of “BLITZED: Drugs in the Third Reich.”

In today’s roundup: a reading series featuring nude men; Steve Bannon’s favorite racist novel; and more.

In today’s roundup: Grey Gardens is up for sale, and Emmanuel Carrère thinks writing about other people is torture (for them).

In today’s roundup: rebuilding the great library of Alexandria, bickering about Garfield’s gender identity, and more.

In today’s roundup: how Playboy shaped soldiers’ minds in Saigon; literary antecedents for Trump’s lies; loving vans; and more.

Stephen Spender’s Paris Review interview set off one of the stranger disputes in the magazine’s history—it’s about jumping out a window.

In today’s roundup: an ambitious 1960s plan for a lunar Hilton, cultural criticism under Trump, and more.

In today’s roundup: Thoreau’s masterpiece becomes a video game, Nell Zink lobbies for the Golden Notebook, and more.

In today’s roundup: one writer likes readable books; another thinks “readability” is bunk; a bunch more probably don’t care.

Our Sleep Aids are devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain.

In today’s roundup: a look at history’s “macaroni clubs”; in praise of the Mall of America; why Evelyn Waugh was a shitty dad.

In today’s roundup: Walt Whitman wrote a zany mystery novel, Christopher Marlowe is officially credited as Shakespeare’s coauthor, and more.

In today’s roundup: Robert Cumming takes pictures of illusions, George Saunders cheers on ambiguity, and more.

In today’s roundup: Jagger has no memory of writing a book in the early '80s, and now John Blake claims to have recovered the manuscript.

Hanson used Polaroids to perfect his eerie imitations of tourists and blue-collar workers. The pictures offer an even deeper trip into the uncanny valley.

In today’s roundup: the Proust footage we’ve been waiting for; when Harry Belafonte ran the Tonight Show; and more.

In today’s roundup: the smells in George Orwell’s prose, the origins of fake news, Singapore’s tiny book campaign, and more.

In today’s roundup: a sculpture of King Kong goes unappreciated, Hemingway pisses off Sherwood Anderson, stupid lyrics are good.

The artist’s latest exhibition is at Lodge Gallery through March 5.

In today’s roundup: the stories in seed catalogs, Ernest Hemingway the double agent, the rise of sensitivity readers, and more.

In today’s roundup: stripping a Regency hunk of his status; selling blood plasma as a humanities professor; and more.

Robert Kushner has new work at D.C. Moore Gallery this month, along with an essay called “Do REAL Men Paint Flowers?” (Hint: yes.)

In today’s roundup: Nan Goldin on the first photographer she loved; the transhumanist search for sexbots; singing “Ode to Joy.”

The Met brought 375,000 images into the public domain this week. One of them is this beautiful garbage can.

In today’s roundup: resurrecting the tradition of Vinegar Valentines; dumb teens are sentenced to read books; cities are not computers.

Lux, who died on Sunday at seventy, wanted his poems to have “the right combination of metaphor or image connected to the business of being alive.”

In today’s roundup: the declining renown of John Ruskin; Newt Gingrich’s creepy alt-history obsession; and more.

Humphrey, who aims “to pulverize the image,” has an exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser through February 25.

In today’s roundup: the Loewentheil Collection of African-American Photographs has been digitized; Stefan Zweig on fascism; and more.

In today’s roundup: the greatest black woman sculptor of the twentieth century; a psychologist against empathy; and more.

In our Fall 1985 issue, James Dickey eulogized Truman Capote, whose “lenslike detachment,” suggested “things wrought by the engraver’s delicate hammer.”

In today’s roundup: puppetry ascendant; publicly shaming Holocaust memorial selfie-takers; Henry Green’s idea of love; and more.

The artist J.S.G. Boggs, who died last week at sixty-two, created a trough of anxiety around our approach to the dollar bill and its perceived value.

In today’s roundup: learning to reckon with luck; revisiting the Garden of Earthly Delights; the father of sci-fi; and more.

In today’s roundup: George Eliot’s big hand; an exhibition on news media at the Getty Center; starchitects; and more.

The artist has a show up at Mary Boone Gallery through February 25.

In today’s roundup: a major work of land art is for sale; Chris Ware on Krazy Kat; why poets should talk money; and more.

In today’s roundup: Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s bibliomania, better metaphors for translation, and more.

Harry Mathews died yesterday at eighty-six. The Paris Review serialized his novel “The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium,” available in full to subscribers.

In today’s roundup: Mr. Coffee's sexism, why 1984 isn't the best book for the Trump era, Daniel Defoe's false utopia, and more…

A letter from Virginia Wool, institutionalized: “What I meant to say is that I shall soon have to jump out of a window. The ugliness of the house is almost unbelievable.”

In today’s roundup: the degraded usage of “humbled,” the aesthetics of the Trump administration, and more.

Beatrice Mandelman’s sixties-era work is showing through April 1 at Rosenberg & Co., in New York.

In today’s roundup: early photos at the Clark Art Institute, Jorie Graham on the role of poetry in hard times, and more.

In today’s roundup: the joys of profanity, a lost poem from Harold Pinter, and talking Trump with Paul Beatty.

In today’s roundup: why golfers are obsessed with Costco golf balls; redefining “the vulgar”; and more.

A poem by Peter Leight on the ruling class, “with their lumps, muffs, stomach folds, pendant chins, unfinished outer layers…”

In today’s roundup: Margaret Atwood on art under Trump, a Freudian analysis of his urine obsession, and more.

Elia Kazan’s “A Face in the Crowd” (1957), showing this weekend at Anthology, is almost too well suited to our present moment.

In today’s roundup: Hemon on literature under Trump, Marina Warner at the Gogol Centre, and "Moby Dick" misunderstood as a penis joke.

The artist has new work at Bortolami Gallery this month. Among the materials he’s used here: tooled leather, mother of pearl, and KY jelly.

In today’s roundup: a reissued Argentinean classic, Richard Prince disavows his Ivanka Trump art, and more.

Osip Mandelstam, born on January 15, 1891, was a Russian writer who was arrested under Stalin and exiled in the 1930s. He died at forty-seven.

In today’s roundup: Trump’s sexism; the past glories of tobacco copywriting; how to be a cannibal without hating yourself.

Sleep Aid is a series dedicated to curing insomnia with boring prose from the public domain.

The ninety-three-year-old photographer has a new exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery.

In today’s roundup: Christian Lorentzen on Obama-era lit, Renée Cox on Beyoncé's black-power aesthetics, and more.

In today's roundup: dancehall signs, a poet fighting standardized tests about her work, Casanova gets hustled, and more.

The artist’s work is on display at Ameringer McEnery Yohe Gallery through February 11.

In today’s roundup: the Japanese way to mourn a miscarriage, why writers so seldom talk about getting paid, and more.

Cletus Johnson’s “Winter” is like seasonal propaganda, presenting a platonic version of the most frigid time of year.

Zola wasn't big on London: the shirts were too short and the women didn't enjoy breastfeeding enough.

In which Zora Neale Hurston vents about people with inferiority complexes: “They carry it like a raw sore on the end of the index finger.”

In today’s roundup: tomboys, Knut Hamsen, Rachel Cusk, and more.

Both radiate the same lambent heat—you can imagine him putting on thick mitts to slide them out of the oven of his mind.

In today’s roundup: Cate Blanchett performs manifestoes, Anthony Burgess hates critics, and Mariah Carey’s gaffe is 2016’s ultimate send-off.

At Ryan Lee Gallery, the painter draws inspiration from his childhood pastime: playing with toy trucks and racecars on his grandmother’s Persian rugs.

Take out all that business about New York collapsing, and the twenty-first century that Joel projected is basically just a hangover from the twentieth—that was his true prophecy.

In today’s roundup: the anticlimax of Disney's planned community, The Paris Review's fifties-era CIA connections, and more.

In today's roundup: mourning John Berger, celebrating vomiting cats, dancing to Darling Nikki, and more.

Today’s roundup: a brilliant new German film, an Instagram star who falls all the time, and apocalyptic nativity scenes.

You’d think it was produced in a secret ritual with the blood of rosy-cheeked virgins from Swiss spa towns.

In today’s roundup: evil megacorporations, Thoreau v. Trump, the Internet's approach to death, and more.

Pop culture is teeming with images of the incapacitated, incarcerated Santa Claus. Why?

In today’s roundup: morbid Victorian Christmas cards, napping on the job, Westworld as literature, and more.

In today’s roundup: driving the original minivan, investigating the Danish word for comfort, and spending Christmas with Thomas Hardy.

The French painter Hervé Heuzé has an exhibition at Galerie Richard in New York.

In today’s roundup: too many Jerry Maguires, the late letters of Samuel Beckett, suffragettes’ pockets, and more.

Sleep Aid is a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Try it!

When Yeats and Pound threw a party for the aging Wilfrid Blunt, they offered a token of their affection. He wasn't impressed.

In today’s roundup: the Australian word of the year, mourning Shirley Hazzard, and staring at trolls.

In today’s roundup: a Renaissance painter becomes a feminist icon; putting Tylenol under the microscope yields gorgeous photos.

Krushenick, who died in 1999, defied categorization: “They don’t know where to place me. Like I’m out in left field all by myself. And that’s just where I want to stay.”

How Audre Lorde’s phrase has been co-opted by advertisers; a Russian novel’s effect on global politics; starchitects gone mad.

This and more in today’s roundup of arts and culture news.

In a feature from our Summer 1988 issue, William Faulkner, Joan Didion, John Cheever, and dozens of other writers talk about inspiration.

He's here, he's hurt, he's in deep need of medical attention: but what is his history? This and more in today's arts and culture roundup.

Ara Peterson's art evokes “the elegance of New England transcendentalism” and “the overwhelming geographies of H. P. Lovecraft.” Oh, and Steely Dan…

Gabriel Garcia Marquez sent Castro all his manuscripts, taking advantage of the dictator's keen attention to detail.

  There’s nothing wrong with Kafka. You don’t have to look at him like that. He’s just an average Joe, our Kafka, dreaming of erotic love but reacting with complete terror when presented with the act itself. For decades, Kafka scholars have…

The interviews in our new Winter issue feature three writers who have expanded the role of art in the national conversation.

A famous 2013 study suggested that literary readers were more empathetic—but new research has failed to replicate those results.

  Today, read Grace Paley’s story “The Little Girl,” from our Spring 1974 issue. Without spoiling too much, it’s the most shocking of her stories—and she told the Guardian in 2004 that it’s true. The narrator is a friend of hers she met in…

 It’s December: time to roll out the Best Books of the Year lists, and with them the many perils of list making, with its sting of exclusion and its weird subtexts. Just bear in mind that the earliest book list was intended to ban them: “Books li…

 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 0ur back issues right away; you can also …

 Whenever someone asks me how I’m doing, I say, Good! The robots haven’t eradicated me or my species yet! I’ve been going on this way my whole adult life—but now Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist who studies tech, has convinced me that my rea…

Hurvin Anderson’s exhibition “Foreign Body” is at Michael Werner Gallery in New York through January 14. Anderson is a British painter of Jamaican descent: “The first time I went to Jamaica, I was fourteen,” he told Sotheby’s a few years …

In 1962, The Paris Review published an exceptional short story by Jorge Luis Borges, then largely unknown to Anglophone readers.

 Even when an author’s life is over, his lifestyle can live on. I don’t mean through his books—I’m not some starry-eyed undergrad! No, I mean through merchandise. Hunter S. Thompson died in 2005, but his widow, Anita Thompson, is now ready to bring h…

 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 0ur back issues right away; you can also …

Don’t ever say I haven’t done anything for you. I found you this, this, this … lovely thing … this meditation on urine by Dr. Jonathan Reisman, which I will aver to be the finest piece of urine-centric writing produced in 2016: “I practiced…

This week, Taschen is publishing a new, photographic edition of Tom Wolfe’s 1968 classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, for which he embedded with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters for their transcontinental (and very psychotropically enhanced) bu…

Do not adjust your sets: theparisreview.org has been fully redesigned and beautified. If you fear change, you’ll be horrified to learn that this new site is more than just a cosmetic improvement: it also marks the debut of our complete digital arch…

In January 1919, a freak molasses accident claimed the lives of twenty-one people in Boston: a steel holding tank burst open, flooding the streets (and the nation’s nightmares) with 2.3 million gallons of treacle. Scientists have never really figur…

There’s a great Tom Waits song called “What’s He Building in There?” that I’ve thought about a lot as we ponder the Trump transition: “He’s hiding from us,” Waits growls. “I’ll tell you one thing, he’s not building a playhouse f…

William Trevor, an Irish writer who saw the short-story form as a chance to perfect “the art of the glimpse,” has died at eighty-eight. “His plots often unfolded in Irish or English villages whose inhabitants, most of them hanging on to the bot…

“No Work Today,” an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculptures by the Dutch artist Parra, is on display at Joshua Liner Gallery through December 17. Parra is, to my knowledge, the only professional artist who has also been a professional s…

You know times are hard when you find yourself looking forward to reading the nominees for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Maybe their heinousness will be the ultimate distraction from Trump—in the same way that you can divert your attention from a h…

I always like to talk about The Paris Review’s shadowy CIA past. True, it all happened well before I was born, let alone before I was employed here, but I feel it lends my personal story an air of roguish midcentury intrigue. But I should knock it …

Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginne…

In the black art of recent years, Thomas Chatterton Williams sees parables of wokeness: a worldview that sees historical black suffering stretching backward and forward through the generations, marked by fatalism and deeply skeptical of any notion of…

I’m tired of writing about dead people, but people keep dying. Now it’s the musician Leon Russell, who died on Sunday at seventy-four. He’s the archetypally long-haired Southern dude who had his hand in a million hit songs without the public ev…

The Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year is post-truth, and if I have to tell you why this is good and smart and funny, well then you can crawl right back into your hidey-hole, young man. Being a dictionary, they’ve provided a definition fo…

When I moved to New York I wished that its legendary dance scene, the one from the seventies and eighties that people never shut up about, was still alive—that I could pop in at Paradise Garage or The Gallery or The Loft, maybe wearing tan polyeste…

What can writers and intellectuals do to stem the rise of fascism in America? Well, we should look to history, of course, where theorists stand time and again with quivers of poison-tipped arrows, their bows pointed at the eyes of tyranny. Take the F…

“Classic Attitude,” an exhibition of Helen Lundeberg’s sixties-era abstract paintings, is at Cristin Tierney Gallery through December 17. Lundeberg, who died in 1999, was a pivotal figure in the West Coast abstract circle. “By classicism I mean, no…

When Toni Morrison looks at Trump’s victory, she sees echoes of Faulkner: “So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the d…

Leonard Cohen has died at eighty-two. Less than a month ago, David Remnick profiled him for The New Yorker, and Cohen knew his time was near: “I don’t think I’ll be able to finish those songs. Maybe, who knows? And maybe I’ll get a second win…

In times of hardship, where can we turn to find even one morsel of pleasure, one solitary crumb of joie de vivre? Well: there are sandwiches. Except, no, today even sandwiches are compromised. The chopped cheese sandwich, for instance—ground beef, …

This site is dedicated to literature, arts, and culture. Electoral politics are usually beyond our remit. On a morning like this, when America has chosen a bigot and a xenophobe as its next president, my job feels pointless. But I don’t want to add…

It’s a good night for Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, at the center of which is one Augustus Melmotte, a financier who runs for Parliament. 1.The countenance and appearance of the man were on the whole unpleasant, and, I may say, untrustworthy. He l…

This year’s Nobel and Booker winners have destabilized the literary prize scene—it was only a matter of time until the aftershocks spread to other awards. Op-Ed writers have helped it along: there’s never been a better time to stroke your chin …

Katharina Wulff’s exhibition “It Was Just This Moment” is at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York through December 23. Her latest large-scale paintings depict her community in Marrakech, portraying crowded gyms and a hotel lobby. “The free an…

Instagrammers: think before you geotag. Are you really just “announcing your location” to your “e-pals” for “fun”? No. You’re bragging. Worse, you’re setting into motion a creaky, elaborate machine that despoils everything in its path…

After the trials of Margaret—a brilliant movie written in 2003, filmed in ’05, released in compromised form in 2011, and rereleased in less compromised form in 2012—Kenneth Lonergan is back with a new film, Manchester by the Sea. Rebecca Mead spoke w…

When I wrote a few days ago about baby boomers who want to spend eternity in concrete caskets at the bottom of the ocean, I thought it was a shoo-in for the biggest funeral innovation of the week. Not so. You could also have your ashes scattered at t…

Jesse Mockrin’s exhibition “Pleasures of Dance” opens tonight at New York’s Nathalie Karg Gallery; her work is on display through December 18. Mockrin’s paintings borrow liberally, and often directly, from the late Baroque period; her work …

Anne Carson prizes brevity, which means, in the abstract, that she should be perfectly suited to these distracted times of ours. And maybe she is, even if she seems permanently ill at ease. In a new interview to support her collection Float, her answ…

“I do nothing professionally, I do everything for fun,” Prince’s character Christopher Tracy says in the serially overlooked Under the Cherry Moon. It’s a line that seems to unlock some of his mystique—his spontaneity, or, as Zadie Smith writes, …

Marcos Bontempo’s exhibition “Light and Dark” is at Ricco Maresca Gallery in New York through November 26. Bontempo lives and works in Andalusia; he paints on the floor using ink and salt on paper, which he prefers to canvas. “The shapes exp…

If you opened a bookstore with a section devoted to climate-change fiction, you’d have a pretty shitty shelf on your hands. (You’d also run the risk of attracting those who believe that climate change itself is the ultimate fiction.) Amitav Ghosh…

Last week, Bob Dylan’s silence on the Nobel felt like a roguish prank; this week, it’s a matter of existential import. As Adam Kirsch writes, Dylan has effectively out-Sartred Sartre, who outright refused the prize more than fifty years ago. By i…

Today in hometown heroism: Philip Roth, having recovered from yet another year without a Nobel, is donating his book collection to the Newark Public Library. Young readers will be able to flip through them and look for the dirty bits—just as he onc…

With his novel The Sellout, Paul Beatty has become the first American ever to win the Man Booker Prize. “I don’t want to get all dramatic, like writing saved my life ... but writing has given me a life,” he said at a press conference, where he …

It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: a chapter from Glue, Gelatine, Animal Charcoal, Pho…

Big data doesn’t care what you learned in college. Big data laughs at you and your myopic conception of “the author.” Big data takes an active pleasure in making you go, like, That’s fucking crazy! So big data has determined that Shakespeare probably…

Trenton Doyle Hancock’s exhibition “Pandemic Pentameter” is at James Cohan Gallery in New York through November 27. Hancock grew up in East Texas, in a deeply Christian family. “I’ve developed a perspective over the way that I grew up, the …

The history of books bound in human skin is tied, as so many terrifying things are, to the history of medicine. As Megan Rosenbloom writes, doctors in eighteenth-century France had a nasty habit of serving as arms of the state: “Doctors sometimes r…

I’ve been keeping a close eye on the collectible handguns of emotionally unstable French poets, and I have a good idea: if you’ve got sixty thousand euros lying around, consider bidding on the pistol that Paul Verlaine used in his attempt to murd…

From afar, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature seems like a real laugh riot, at least to those of us whose main ambition in life is to gain the adulation of the Swedes. But a new volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters suggests that taking home the No…

Thom Jones, a high school janitor whose short stories vaunted him into the literary spotlight in the early nineties, has died at seventy-one: “ Jones worked on the Betty Crocker Noodles Almondine line at a General Mills plant. He was fired as an ad…

Claire Sherman’s exhibition, “West Ridge,” is at DC Moore Gallery in New York through November 5. Sherman’s latest paintings focus on what she calls “unraveling environments,” depicting archetypes of forests and islands in varying states …

[Beep.] Is it rolling, Bob? Ha, get it, that’s from Nashville Skyline … which all of us here at the Academy just adore, by the way—your voice sounds so beautiful without all those cigarettes chewing it up. But anyway, I’m calling because … well,…

When one thinks of rugged outdoorspersons, one’s mind does not usually summon Simone de Beauvoir. But it turns out Beauvoir was an avid hiker, and her writing about the activity stands in powerful contrast to the “wilderness memoirs” of more re…

If you’ve exhausted the Internet’s rich store of Bob Dylan think pieces, you might turn your attention to another Nobel laureate: Dario Fo, the Italian playwright, who died this week at ninety. The Vatican once declared his play Mistero Buffo, a kind…

I know you have plenty to worry about, but Sam Kriss is here to warn you about the fabulously rich tech bros who really, honestly, actually believe that we may be living in a simulated reality generated by some hyperadvanced species of the future: …

Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, prompting a massive spike in acoustic guitar and harmonica sales at Sam Ash Music stores around the world as writers rush to recast themselves as musicians, tearing their elbow patches off and discardi…

In a November 1920 letter to her husband, John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield describes a dream in which she met Oscar Wilde. Read more of her correspondence in The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield.In a café, Gertler met me. “Katheri…

This holiday season, the gourmand in your life will accept one gift and one gift only: Salvador Dalí’s cookbook, with its recipes for frog pasties and thousand-year-old eggs. Any kitchen without it is disappointingly ordinary and should be destroy…

Anatole France won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921; the award committee, maybe taking a cue from his surname, lauded his “true Gallic temperament.” And there is no denying it: France was French. His celebrated temperament is maybe most v…

It’s back! The architectural movement you’ve been craving—with the ethics you can’t live without! It’s social democracy in building form! It’s an expression of the human desire to achieve! It’s Brutalism! Nikil Saval writes, “Despite …

“In the Pines,” an exhibition of paintings, ceramics, and works on paper by Rebecca Morgan, is at Asya Geisberg Gallery through October 29. Morgan grew up in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania; her work plays with stereotypes and caricatures …

There are plenty of people in this world who deserve to find an envelope full of human feces in the mail. Philosophers, in my experience, are not among these people; the life of the mind does not often cry out for comeuppance. But someone thinks othe…

Today in clowns: you may have heard about the rash of nefarious clown sightings we’ve faced here in the contiguous United States. It’s hard to keep one’s cool with clowns on the national prowl. But Stephen King, who knows from psychotic clowns,…

Since the late seventies, Lewis Klahr has garnered praise for his collage films, whose use of midcentury imagery inspires what the historian Tom Gunning has called “an interplay of grasping and losing, remembering and forgetting.” A new exhibit…

The airport is more than a place—it’s a state of mind. If you’re still wracked with anxiety and frustration whenever you head to JFK, be advised that the whole world is essentially an airport at this point, and it’s up to you to make peace wi…

If you’re having trouble focusing, and meditation hasn’t helped, and Adderall hasn’t helped, and whispering “focus, focus, focusssss…” to yourself hasn’t helped, you might try standing in the nude before a group of strangers. It worked …

Anne Sexton, who died forty-two years ago today, did her best to respond to the legions of fans who wrote to her. The letter below, from August 1965, finds her dispensing unvarnished advice to an aspiring poet from Amherst. Read more of her correspon…

Speaking to The Paris Review in 2011, Nicholson Baker remembered one of the small joys of his childhood. “The pencil sharpener was probably the best thing about school,” he said. “A little chrome invention under your control. It had a ­thunder…

I’ve spent thirty painstaking years building my personal brand from the ground up: a signature blend of synthetic microfibers and dried-out pipe tobacco, shot through with the bashfulness of the Coppertone girl. But I forgot the sounds. Whether you…

The Austrian painter Maria Lassnig moved to New York in 1968, leaving behind a thriving career to explore what she called “the land of strong women.” She lived in the city virtually unknown for twelve years, keeping a low profile and producing a…

It’s possible you survived the whole weekend without hearing about the unmasking of Elena Ferrante, whose “true identity” (like those exist!) was revealed yesterday by some Italian guy behaving Italianly in The New York Review of Books. If you missed…

Today in extravagant acts of self-protection: Julian Barnes wasn’t a fan of his first novel, 1980’s Metroland. So he wasn’t surprised when it got a savage notice in an organ called The Daily Sniveler by one “Mack the Knife”—a nom de guerre for …

It’s Banned Books Week, and everyone is rallying around the classics: your Gatsbys, your Catcher in the Ryes, your Mockingbirds and Lady Chatterleys. No one is giving any love to Snorri the Seal—to my eye one of the handsomest books ever to face ce…

Herman Melville ended his life as a failure, with no inkling of the posthumous glories to come. It sounds so miserable when you put it that way, doesn’t it? And in many ways it was. But his final years had small pleasures of their own. Mark Beaureg…

In Canada today, Home Depot announced that it was pulling a Halloween decoration called “Scary Peeper Creeper” from its shelves. Shoppers were deeply perturbed by the Peeper’s pockmarked, rubbery visage, and for good reason—he’s designed to…

Mike Davis was an artist, and the irate company-wide memorandum was his canvas. Few in the history of humankind have recognized the savage beauty of this lowliest of media. But Davis—the erstwhile head of Tiger Oil Company, and now dead at eighty-f…

Suellen Rocca’s “Bare Shouldered Beauty: Works from 1965 to 1969” is showing at Matthew Marks Gallery through October 22. In the late sixties, Rocca was part of the Hairy Who, a group of six imagist artists from Chicago; their exhibitions gaine…

Every artist needs an alley—some narrow, weedy, urine-soaked passage to call home. In the Paris of the fifties and sixties, an alley called the Impasse Ronsin was the alley to be: Brancusi, Max Ernst, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Martial Raysse, Niki d…

Let’s start the day by insulting some dead writers, one of the finer pastimes at our disposal. The famed editor Robert Gottlieb’s new memoir, Avid Reader, is chockablock with gossip about deceased luminaries, Alexandra Alter writes: “A highlight re…

As the Quran has it, Prophet Muhammad took a night trip to heaven aboard a trusty winged pony-horse-mule-ish creature called Buraq. It’s an episode that’s inspired Islamic art ever since, because few artists can resist a theologically sound reaso…

Today in cartographical howlers: a new exhibition in Boston, “Hy-Brasil: Mapping a Mythical Island,” chronicles the exciting centuries when no one really knew where anything was and mapmakers had carte blanche to draw whole islands anywhere they …

I used to take such pride in my literacy. “Look at me!” I would shout, running down the street in my I’M LITERATE T-shirt. “I can read!” But now the pep is out of my step, because apparently even pigeons can learn to read: “Through gradua…

It’s rough out there for artists and writers right now, I know. There are days when you just want to throw in the towel, say fuck it, fake your own death, give insurance fraud a go, and live out of a Winnebago somewhere in remote Ontario. That’s …

Dan Walsh’s exhibition “Prints and Multiples” is at Pace Prints, in New York, through October 22. “I always regarded the space in a painting as the soul of a painting,” he told the Daily in 2011. “I’m working to find a space I can interact with …

In a new essay about censorship and her childhood muteness, Hilary Mantel reminds writers of the seriousness that comes with saying anything whatsoever: “If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all; the only tip you c…

Don Buchla invented some of the first electronic instruments—not synthesizers, he insisted, but electronic instruments. To him, the word synthesizer implied some attempt at emulation, as if these new machines could do nothing more than imitate preexi…

Ottessa Moshfegh wrote her novel Eileen with a plan: to get fucking rich. As a fiction writer, she thought, there’s only one way to do that—give the people the formulaic drivel that they want. In a profile for the Guardian, Moshfegh explains that …

Before YouTube, people were convinced that all poets were boring, lifeless people who made little ink marks on pages—very sparingly, at that. Fortunately, there’s online video, and there’s never been a better time to witness poets at their medi…

The Paris Review’s offices are in Chelsea, where we attract hundreds of thousands of tourists every day. (What, you thought all those people were here for the High Line?) But now there’s a new attraction in town: stairs. Lots and lots of stairs, …

It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: a chapter from Experiments on the Spoilage of Tomat…

Every morning I wake up and I turn to the computer and I ask it, Did they turn a Thomas Bernhard novel into an opera today? The answer has historically been no, which brings me down. But today the answer is yes: David Lang’s opera adaptation of The L…

If you’re in New York, you’ve surely noticed them, those well-heeled people bolting down the sidewalk looking pissed off and holding enormous cups of coffee. That frisson of exclusion … that perfume of condescension: it’s Fashion Week! And wh…

Amy Bennett’s exhibition “Time Speeds Up” is showing in New York at Ameringer McEnery Yohe through October 8. Bennett, who works in Beacon, New York, paints her landscapes after dioramas she’s painstakingly constructed at a 1/500 scale. She …

The National Magazine Awards have announced that they’re suspending their fiction category next year. You can probably guess why: “Only fourteen magazines submitted entries in the category in 2016—a fraction of the number of participants in oth…

Today in ridiculous situations brought to you by global capital: the artist Rebecca Moss has been stranded at sea, stuck on a container ship owned by a now-bankrupt shipping line; ports around the world have denied the ship because it can no longer p…

If I know you, reader, you were about to throw your hands up, abandon your career, move to a small town, and eke out a living as a substitute teacher. But wait! Nicholson Baker spent the first half of 2014 as a sub in Maine, and he wrote everything d…

Caitlin Keogh’s exhibition “Loose Ankles” opens September 8 at Bortolami Gallery. Keogh lives in Brooklyn.

The secret’s out: I’m writing this in my underwear, from my bedroom. I reveal this hideous truth to make a point about the nature of the workplace today—that it is everywhere, and that today’s “knowledge worker” can perform his functions …

Have you heard about this election? It feels fun now, but give it time. There will come a moment when you long to escape the never-ending concussion that is electoral politics, and our new Fall issue is here for you. It’s full of the best new…

If you’re in Paris, you have only a few more days to catch Michel Houellebecq’s exhibition at Palais de Tokyo. Hot insider tip: bring a pack of cigarettes—you can smoke them on the premises. True, much of his art is devoted to his beloved pet c…

This month, Swiss Institute becomes Swiss In Situ, moving temporarily to a massive space at 102 Franklin Street in Tribeca. Their first exhibition, up through September 2, features a collection of artist-made zines from the independent Swiss publis…

Today in farts: there’s a new movie called Swiss Army Man, and it’s full of ‘em. Don’t write it off as stupid. Don’t pretend you’re not seduced by the fusillade of flatulence. There is life in those farts, Annie Julia Wyman writes: “The idea for Swis…

Early in the fourteenth century, an Egyptian bureaucrat embarked on the kind of project that many of us attempt on nights off: an enormous encyclopedia designed to contain all knowledge in the Muslim world. The book, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts…

Jean Rhys was born in Dominica, an island among the British West Indies. Though she spent most of her life in England, her time in the Caribbean left her with a distinctive, lilting accent. It sounds beautiful to me, but in 1909 it got her kicked ou…

Today in occasions for self-satisfaction: a new study suggests that readers of literary fiction have an improved understanding of other people’s emotions, which doesn’t explain why that guy reading Shalimar the Clown on the train was such a jerk to m…

Is Kanye’s McDonald’s poem a parable of class struggle?When I wrote in May about the seriocomic implications of a Burger King Spa opening in Helsinki, I thought I’d pegged the most extraordinary fast-food story of the year. Reader, I blew it. In th…

Writers generally hate to get on in years, because they’re soulless cowards who fear death. (I say this with authority, even at age thirty.) One good thing about getting older, though, is that you can sell your papers—you know, all that junk that…

Lou Pearlman, the slippery impresario behind the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, O-Town, LFO, Aaron Carter, and about a half dozen other agreeably vacuous late nineties pop acts, has died in prison. Yes, the Lou Pearlman. The guy practically invented boy ba…

Say what you will about Ernest Hemingway, the guy knew how to market himself. He’s remained in print for many decades after his death, which is no mean feat—but more impressively still, he’s found a second life in the comics, where his boastful…

This is the last week to see the photography of Roger Steffens and the Family Acid at Benrubi Gallery, in New York. Taken mainly in the sixties and seventies, Steffens’s self-consciously psychedelic pictures “imagine a different America, one of s…

Today in nomenclature: having lived for years in total ignorance of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), I was at last moved to pay attention, because the names of our cheeses—the entire foundation of our nation’s fragile rela…

I’ve never understood the appeal of mixed martial arts—too often it features, as Matthew Shen Goodman puts it, “an unending barrage of increasingly indistinguishable bald men and cornrowed women with terrible tattoos throwing the same one-two i…

Guess what, people? Your garden-variety, Norman Mailer­–style, chest-thumping, self-aggrandizing narcissist is obsolete. This is the twenty-first century, and we have newer, more sophisticated, and more popular models for self-love. Kristin Dombek wr…

If you live in New York, you have to make your peace with Keith Haring—his public works are all over town. But the city’s murals rarely, if ever, showcase Haring’s once-in-a-generation gift for drawing cocks. To see that, you must turn to Manhattan P…

 A photo posted by aspentimes (@aspentimes) on Aug 10, 2016 at 11:51am PDTTry to stay calm, everyone, but I have some very exciting news: it’s about Hemingway’s antlers. Back in 1964, Hunter S. Thompson stole a set of elk antlers right off the gu…

Friends, the great march of progress continues apace. The word bawbag—“a Scots word meaning scrotum, in Scots vernacular a term of endearment but in English could be taken as an insult”—has been added to the Macmillan Open Dictionary. Now the officia…

Some asshole on Ninth Avenue grabbed Mary Karr’s crotch and that was a really, really, really dumb thing for him to do: “I came to and shouted from the doorway, ‘Not today! Not this bitch! You picked the wrong woman to fuck with today!’ … A…

Ask any Joe on the street and he’ll tell you the best thing about Melrose Place was Heather Locklear. He’d be wrong, though. The best thing about Melrose Place was that it served as a secret gallery space for a collective called the GALA Committee, l…

Peyton Freiman’s exhibition “Long Gone and Missing” opens Wednesday, August 10, at Shin Gallery, in New York. Freiman, based in Brooklyn, uses his work to explore “feelings of disillusionment with institutional systems,” with a special fond…

Premise one: all your free time can be monetized. Premise two: in the future or maybe even tomorrow, really ordinary sounds from our day-to-day lives will be interesting to someone. Conclusion: you should buy yourself a microphone rig and become a …

Hey, you! Egghead! Ponce! Academic intellectual hippie freak! Get a real job! You don’t know shit about real people! You wouldn’t know a working man if he put a gun in your mouth! “People who specialize in the life of ideas tend to be extremely…

You might, if you’re lucky, retire someday, and it’s never too early to start thinking about what you’ll do with all that free time. You may think you’ve got it all figured out—I’ll just build a wacky Disneyland spin-off in my backyard, y…

A lot of things keep me up at night. Lately it’s all the forgotten potential of Cheez Whiz and Reddi-Wip—the beauty we lost when mankind turned away from aerosolized foods. As Nadia Berenstein writes, “Push-button cuisine is one of the great, u…

The artist Michael Kidner died in 2009. In New York, a new exhibition at Flowers Gallery celebrates his works on paper from the 1960s and 2000s, which found him experimenting with moire patterns, pentagons based on Penrose tiling, and the geometrica…

In the early sixties, the London Review of Books’ Mary-Kay Wilmers was working as a secretary at Faber, where one of her superiors was T. S. Eliot. His managerial style left something to be desired, she writes: “I had some bad moments with him. I…

Don’t learn this the hard way: it’s likely impossible to wrest a good screenplay from the pages of a Philip Roth novel. Many (okay, like, eight) have tried, the latest being James Schamus, with Indignation. All have struggled and gnashed their teeth.…

Because your summer is a never-ending slog and all your beach reads have disappointed you, we thought you’d want to peruse these two interviews from our Spring issue. Once available only to subscribers, they’re now available to everyone, everywh…

Today in age-old arguments about the creative life: “In some annexes of the writing community it’s been playfully termed the ‘pantsing vs. plotting/outlining/planning’ debate. Pantsers fly by the seats of their pants: they write and see where…

Chester Himes and John Alfred Williams met in 1961 and soon began a long and occasionally tempestuous correspondence about their personal lives and the difficulty of finding a fair reception as African American writers in the publishing world. By the…

The hatchet job isn’t what it used to be. To read Tobias Smollett’s book reviews from the eighteenth century is to discover, as J. H. Pearl writes, ever-higher concentrations of venom: “Smollett, who helmed The Critical Review from 1756 to 1763, neve…

James Alan McPherson, the first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, has died at seventy-two. An obituary in the New York Times quotes his memoir, Going Up to Atlanta, in which he writes about reading comics at the library in Savannah,…

Congratulations to The Paris Review’s contributors David Means, Ottessa Moshfegh, and David Szalay, all of whom have been long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize. (Paul Beatty, interviewed last year on the Daily, is nominated, too.)To all the ri…

I’m tired all the time, which is why I’m so popular. Reviewing Anna Katharina Schaffner’s new Exhaustion: A History, Hannah Rosefield unpacks the durable notion of exhaustion as a status symbol: “Many critics, even as they call for a cure, frame ex…

“Life Goes On,” an exhibition by the Japanese artist Shinya Kato, opened last week at +81 Gallery, in New York. Kato uses a painting knife to apply layers of color to nineteenth-century cabinet cards. His show is up through August 21. 

 

Wherever there are Freudian dynamics afoot—whenever latent sexual tension and homosocial tendencies take the national stage—there you’ll find our country’s fan-fiction writers doing their best work. You can only imagine, then, the hay they’…

Christian Lorentzen is at the Republican National Convention, scoping out the merch downtown, where the spirit of small-time entrepreneurialism is something like that of the parking lot outside a Phish show: “In the afternoon I walked through downt…

Still haven’t planned your summer getaway? It’s never too late for a trip to balmy Orlando, where, at a theme park called the Holy Land Experience, “Jesus is crucified most afternoons around five P.M. … Miracles are the stock-in-trade of this…

If you’re a best-selling author, here is a great way to piss off the FBI: announce that you’re writing a book about the FBI. In 1964, writing in an issue of Playbill, James Baldwin mentioned some future projects he had in mind, including one on “th…

In his new exhibition at White Cube, “Self Portraits,” the painter Raqib Shaw insinuates himself into classics by the Old Masters. You’ll find him in the canvases below—carefully modeled after work by Antonello da Messina and Hendrick van St…

Today in deeply disturbing ontological questions: in the not-too-distant future, we can reasonably expect to upload simulations of ourselves to computers to enjoy eternal digital afterlives. So, uh … as Michael Graziano asks: “Did you cheat death…

The Four Seasons, that venerable glass cube for hungry rich people, is closing. You could mourn the unseemly ritual of the three-martini power lunch, the potent varieties of affectation and entitlement on display among the clientele, or the astronomi…

Rukmini Callimachi reports on ISIS for the New York Times—a demoralizing, tormenting, dangerous beat. She constructs her pieces like poems: “My formation as a writer was as a poet. I tried very early on to be a poet and I published about a dozen …

In 2003, as the U.S. mustered its forces for a long, messy invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein sat in solitude. He had an important task: he was putting the finishing touches on a piece of fiction. Not a novel, mind you—he’d already written three of…

For the third consecutive summer, The Paris Review is delighted to offer a joint subscription deal with the London Review of Books: you’ll get a year of both magazines for the low price of $70 U.S. That’s the best in imaginative writing and the bes…

On February 3, 1974, Philip K. Dick was minding his own business—just recovering from dental surgery as you or I might, maybe with a pint of rum raisin Häagen-Dazs and some trashy daytime television—when a divine spirit had the nerve to interru…

The police murders of so many black men have been caught on video, putatively for the sake of justice. But these videos perpetuate themselves with the same moral ambiguity that comes with war photography or any document of suffering. As Ezekiel Kweku…

I hear you’re moving to Buffalo to pursue a more affordable, creative, authentic life in the smoldering remains of the Rust Belt. That’s neat. But what are you buying into, really? In cities like Pittsburgh and Troy, David A. Banks argues, “a …

A survey of the Scottish artist Peter Howson’s prints, spanning decades of his work, opened today at Flowers Gallery in London. “I had nothing at all in 1984, nothing,” Howson said in a 2013 interview:I didn’t have a penny. I was homeless for a yea…

Today in poetry as panhandling: Rowan McCabe pitches himself as “the world’s first door-to-door poet.” (An insult to the many lyrically inclined encyclopedia salesmen who once roamed this earth.) McCabe is based in the UK and will likely never …

Let it never be said that we’re unreliable. For the third consecutive summer, The Paris Review is delighted to offer a joint subscription deal with the London Review of Books: you’ll get a year of both magazines for the low price of $70 U.S. That…

Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian director who made Taste of Cherry, Certified Copy, and a host of other poetic films, has died at seventy-six. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, one of Kiarostami’s contemporaries, told the Guardian, “Kiarostami gave the Iranian cinem…

The poet Geoffrey Hill has died at eighty-four, “suddenly, and without pain or dread,” according to his wife. “The word accessible is fine in its place,” he told the Guardian in 2002. “That is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people i…

If you’ve been listening to pop music your whole life, you might think that love is a many-splendored thing, subject to the vicissitudes and vagaries of the human condition. You would be wrong. Love has exactly seven stages—no more, no less. Sten…

“Intimisms,” a new group exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, looks at the legacy of the Intimists, a group of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists—Jean-Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard among them—remembered for the rich cl…

D. W. Griffith’s film Intolerance is a hundred years old. Its lavish sets—replete with plaster elephants, ornate ten-story walls, and all manner of Babylonian spectacle—testify to a creepy brand of movie magic that has long since leaped from the…

Most of us struggle to interest our friends in our vacation photos, even in real time. (My Instagram of Six Flags only got two likes.) But in the midthirties, George L. K. Morris and Suzy Frelinghuysen, the so-called Park Avenue Cubists, traveled t…

At ninety-seven, Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still telling stories, hanging out with Sterling Lord, and drinking Merlot, as one does: “The partnership between Mr. Ferlinghetti and Mr. Lord, two towering legends in the publishing world, traces back to …

When I think of the Beats, I think of drugs, of brooding nights in dens of iniquity, of casual misogyny. But it’s time to revamp their public image: they were also, as Timothy Egan writes, eloquent proponents of our national parks. “They were kno…

Jay Miriam’s first solo show in New York, “Catch the Heavenly Bodies,” opens tonight at Half Gallery. “I think there’s something strange going on right now,” Miriam, who paints from memory, told Adult Magazine last year: “People aren’t okay with …

I don’t keep a diary. I prefer the raw material of anxiety, guilt, and neurosis—my “special sauce”—to remain entirely unprocessed in my brain. But for those who diarize with reckless abandon, there emerges a question of audience, as Elisa S…

Start your week off right: take a long, hard look at the world’s ugliest color, Pantone 448C, aka “opaque couché.” Redolent of baby shit and capable of summoning all kinds of grime in the mind’s eye, 448C is powerfully ugly: “The agency G…

Today in really, really, really, really depressing things that Silicon Valley people say with casual authority: Nicola Mendelsohn, a Facebook exec, gave a presentation in London where she claimed “that stats showed the written word becoming all but…

We were sorry to learn that the poet Bill Berkson has died at seventy-six. Berkson’s poems appeared in two issues of The Paris Review, from Winter 1968 and Fall 1970; he was also an accomplished art critic, contributing regularly to Artforum and Art …

It’s something we all dream of—that our favorite deceased writers will someday roam the earth again as robots. In Japan, that dream is becoming a reality, as the author Soseki Natsume, who died a century ago, prepares to enjoy a second coming: …

Greg Drasler’s exhibition “Road Trip” opens tonight at Betty Cuningham Gallery.  

Borges, who died thirty years ago this month, led a life as tangled in riddles as his fiction is. One burning question: How did he pay the bills? “Borges was blessed with the most privileged, ideal life for a burgeoning literary genius. Educated in…

We’re sorry to learn that Gregory Rabassa, the translator best known for bringing Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude into English, has died at age ninety-four. Rabassa, whose translations include Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Mario Va…

When I’m on the job, I use periods in my writing all the time. They’re part of the buttoned-up, G-rated approachability that makes me such an asset to office culture. But when I’m off duty, you better believe the periods are the first thing to …

In the grim aftermath of the tragedy in Orlando, Richard Kim pays tribute to gay bars as institutions: “My first gay bar was Crowbar. Like all great gay bars, Crowbar was a dump: dark, low-ceilinged, shitty sound system. It was off Tompkins Square …

Today in simulacra, simulation, and other heavy Baudrillard-type shit: Why are so many tech bros convinced that reality is an illusion created by our futuristic descendants? “Many people have imagined this scenario over the years, of course, usuall…

In the seventies, Barbara Williamson founded the Sandstone Foundation for Community Systems Research, “a nudist community that promoted personal freedom through open marriage and group-sex parties.” She became known as “the most liberated woman…

Daniel Spoerri has been making “trap pictures” since the late fifties. His procedure is simple: he goes to a flea market or a dump, riffles through heaps of trash or near-trash, recovers whatever discarded objects strike his fancy, and hangs them…

Let us mourn the tech culture of the late twentieth century, which bore only a superficial resemblance to the libertarian, Objectivist, misogynist creep fest that is Silicon Valley today. Flipping through old issues of Wired, Anna Wiener admires an e…

Our editor Lorin Stein talks to Frederick Seidel about his poems, his persona, and the kind of seedy back-alley porn shops you just can’t find in London anymore: “I think it’s too bad, but unsurprising, that this myth of the beautifully outfitt…

In the clip above, our founding editor George Plimpton recalls hearing Muhammad Ali give a lecture to thousands of Harvard graduates, and the poem that emerged from it:He gave this wonderful speech … It was moving, it was funny at the same time, a…

We’re closer than ever to electing a woman president—a political outcome that seemed fantastical even in 1992, when Donna Karan made an almost farcically outlandish ad campaign called “In Women We Trust” depicting a woman in high office: “…

Furthering a grand tradition I like to call “strong opinions about parts of speech,” Colin Dickey has mounted a defense of the adverb, which had come under fire as early as last week. Anyone who finds adverbs imprecise doesn’t know how to use t…

Are you enjoying yourself at the moment? Please stop. It’s Thomas Hardy’s birthday, and he will wipe the smile right off your smug, contented, life-affirming face. You’re dealing with a man who knew how to deploy the word Niflheim, defined by the OE…

Ginsberg and Whitman have birthdays only three days apart, and it gets even weirder: they’re both American poets. The illustrator Nathan Gelgud has celebrated both of them by drawing “A Supermarket in California”: “I think of an English profess…

Ken Price, who died in 2012, is remembered as a sculptor, but he was also a talented illustrator—his ideal day, he once said, would be spent drawing while listening to jazz. More than forty of his drawings are on display through June 25 at Matthew…

My father always said, Son, if you’re gonna play golf, you should only do it under the influence of a psychoactive Schedule I substance. I rebelled against him, so I’ve yet to try it—but of course someone has, and of course that someone is Hunt…

… to bring you some important news about the Paris Review Daily.As you may have seen, last week marked the end of Sadie Stein’s tenure as our daily correspondent. For two and a half years, with charm and insight, Sadie has brought us her stories: a…

Hot take: There’s a new miniseries adaptation of Trollope’s Doctor Thorne, and it’s not good. Just follow Laura Miller’s lead and read the book instead: “Seemingly everything that happens today has already been covered in one of [Trollope’s] …

As an editor at Faber & Faber, T. S. Eliot had the chance to publish Animal Farm. He declined. And he had sound porcine reasons for doing so, according to a newly digitized letter he wrote Orwell in 1944: “The positive point of view, which I take t…

I read that a Burger King franchise in Helsinki has opened an in-store sauna, serving Cokes and fries to visitors as they sweat it out, and my first thought was: I want to go there. I don’t mean “go” in the sense of an ironic pilgrimage, the wa…

Raymond Carver’s fiction is good, sure, but you haven’t really lived till you’ve seen the guy’s family photos. His brother, James, has shared a few with a remembrance of Raymond: “I remember the years we shared living together in Sacramento…

After he published the Tractatus, Wittgenstein traded philosophy for gardening, and developed a fixation on home design that may have led him back into philosophy’s embrace: “To details like the door-handles, in particular, Wittgenstein accorded …

It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: a chapter from Ants and Some Other Insects: An Inqu…

Today in fancy Russian plagiarism scandals: upward of a thousand prosperous Russian bureaucrat types, all with doctoral degrees, stand accused of having bought their dissertations on the black market. Leon Neyfakh reports: “The alleged fraud was e…

On the streets of English, adverbs are the knockoff Rolex salesmen lurking in the shadows, always ready to sell you something shiny and fake. Christian Lorentzen urges you to stay away: “The adverbs easiest to hate are the so-called sentence adverb…

Today in things to do with your extra $600,000: buy a rambling 1950 letter from Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac. It’s sixteen thousand words … it’s on paper … any more questions? “The missive, known as the Joan Anderson letter, after a woman w…

Three Little Ghosts, from 1922, was one of Hitchcock’s earliest films—but it survives only in a Soviet edition, with Russian intertitles. It fell to Anna Aslanyan to translate those titles back into English, whereupon she noticed that some editor…

Ben Vida’s recent exhibition at Lisa Cooley Gallery, “[Smile on.] … [Pause.] … [Smile off.],” included a series of what the author calls Speech Acts, inspired by concrete poetry. Intended to be recited in a duo vocal performance, the speec…

Remember the sixties? Me either—I was negative eighteen in ’68. Jesse Jarnow also wasn’t born yet, but his book on the psychedelic counterculture, Heads, benefits from that distance, Hua Hsu writes: “He is vigilant in his attempt to understand the …

Most people see the Pantheon and think, What a neat-looking old thing. Others look at it and can only wonder how and when they’ll get to the top. “Although it may come as no surprise that the Pantheon’s roof is off-limits in our highly litigiou…

I find novels starring people—or any animate creatures, really—to be unthinkably dull. For this reason I do most of my reading in the mid to late eighteenth century, when novels with inanimate objects at their centers enjoyed a brief but memorabl…

The forecast is calling for more rain this weekend. Why not stay in and curl up with a cup of organic fair-trade tea and a nice, laminated U.S. Geological Survey topographical map? Tom Vanderbilt does it from time to time: “For the past number of y…

Today in mirrors: they’re everywhere. As Alexandra Kleeman points out, they’ve proliferated to such a degree that our self-image is inescapable. There’s never been a better time for ridiculously narcissistic people to walk the earth, and never …

Miao Xiaochun’s new exhibition, “Echo,” is at Galerie Paris-Beijing from May 12 through June 18. A Chinese digital artist, Xiaochun specializes in what he’s called “algorithmic painting,” recasting work from a religious European traditi…

Because life is a waking nightmare in which the grandees of the universe spread their sagging buttocks over our prone bodies, Budweiser has changed its name to America. Ricardo Marques, a Budweiser veep hastening the arrival of the end times, gave an…

So you’ve bought an English country house—great! And you have a time machine, allowing you to choose when you’ll reside at said country house—great! May I recommend the interwar period? It was a truly exceptional time to own an English country ho…

Today in the expenditure of effort: one reason serialization has become so popular, Juliet Lapidos, is that it curtails the reader’s (or viewer’s) setup time, encouraging a kind of economy in entertainment: “The most demanding part of any narra…

With Zero K out, Don DeLillo is doing that most un-DeLillo of things: giving interviews. He told Mark O’Connell, “The novel still exists. And to my mind it still can be called a flourishing form. There are so many good younger writers. It’s cle…

Guess which living luminary has a new essay out? Hint one: it involves California, the seventies, and a certain inimitable brand of world weariness. Hint two: the author is an anagram of “Dad Join Ion.” “I see now that the life I was raised to …

In July 2009, the French mathematician Michèle Audin began to attend the monthly meetings of Oulipo, everyone’s favorite experimental collective. And they involved just as much wine, whining, and rare meat as you’d hope: “Once everyone has ent…

Marisol, the mononymic pop-art sculptor known for her carved wood figures and legendarily long silences, has died at eighty-five. “Marisol was a star of the New York art scene in the 1960s, breaking through with a 1962 solo show at the Stable Gall…

Rumor has it that our founding editor George Plimpton was once called upon to give a commencement speech at Bennington College. Instead of bringing an armful of platitudes about inspiration and the future, he brought an armful of fireworks—maybe mo…

In 1858, Walt Whitman made an impassioned contribution to a series called Manly Health and Training, a kind of precursor to the self-help movement. In the piece, newly rediscovered, he implores the young men of his day to pursue lives of fervid activ…

Bill Clinton is widely credited with having turned the cigar into an erotic emblem, but Charlotte Brontë got there first, in Villette: “Her heroine, a plain-faced and seemingly colorless 23-year-old school teacher named Lucy Snowe finds herself fal…

Jenny Diski has died at sixty-eight. Blake Morrison told the Guardian: “What I liked was her abrasiveness—she was tough, not least on herself. Whatever subject she took on—rape, depression, the sixties, Antarctica—she had something new and su…

Deaccessioning: it’s one of the cruel realities of our time. But how do libraries determine which books turn to pulp and which remain to yellow on shelves? According to Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner, who’ve created a blog called Awful Library Books…

To celebrate the reissue of George Plimpton’s sports oeuvre (Paper Lion, Out of My League, et cetera), you’ll probably want to see these pictures of him doing one of the things he did so well: getting in over his head with very athletic men.Crumb h…

Eric Green has a new exhibition at Ameringer McEnery Yohe through May 21. Green’s two series, Time Diptych and Mirrored Room, use graphite grisaille layered with colored pencil and varnish to depict the almost imperceptible passage of time in variou…

Today in censored statues: in Italy, the fashionable thing to do with one’s nude statues is not to display them but to conceal them with some plywood or maybe a heavy drop-cloth or whatever else you’ve got lying around. The Capitoline Venus, which re…

Today is Charlotte Brontë’s two-hundredth birthday, and no two-hundredth birthday is complete without a new biography. Claire Harman has furnished one for the occasion, the first new biography in twenty years: Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart. “The …

Longtime readers of the Review will recall our 1997 interview with Barney Rosset, the irrepressible publisher of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review. In the fifties and sixties, Rosset brought scores of ostensibly obscene books to the U.S., often to…

For years, I’ve implored the management here at the Review to install a gold toilet—it would raise morale and the magazine’s profile. I’m sad to report that the Guggenheim has beaten us to the flush. And their gold john is designed by Maurizio …

I speak only English, so I write in English, too. And though for years this seemed to me the natural state of affairs, it might just be that I’m economically and politically undiscerning. As Tim Parks writes, “Ever since Jhumpa Lahiri published In Ot…

This Wednesday, April 20, join us at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, where Cathy Park Hong will interview Nathaniel Mackey. Their talk will appear in a future issue of The Paris Review, but you can hear it here first. Over the years, the Poetry Cente…

Our advisory editor Hilton Als has an “emotional retrospective”—“One Man Show: Holly, Candy, Bobbie, and the Rest”—at the Artist’s Institute. Seph Rodney paid a visit: “The retrospective consists mainly of portraits, photographs found…

It’s time. I must bring to your attention the least essential controversy of 114 years ago: nude bookplates.Yes, everyone loves a good ex libris, and time was when no serious reader would be without one—but you couldn’t just go slapping any old…

Our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, on David Foster Wallace’s tennis writing: “David Foster Wallace wrote about tennis because life gave it to him … He wrote about it in fiction, essays, journalism, and reviews; it may be his most cons…

When The Paris Review last interviewed Mark Leyner, in 2013, he announced his next book. “Gone with the Mind is my autobiography in the form of a first-person-shooter game,” he said. “You’ll have to blast your way back into my mother’s womb…

Need a morning pick-me-up? Say it with me: “I am full of impulses to shove animal matter into my poorly designed facial rot hole … I must endlessly defecate. I need to fuck. I need to be fucked. It’s fantastic and terrifying. Fascinating. Point…

Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a begin…

Every April for years, intrepid editors have searched in vain for a way to fuse National Poetry Month to Mathematics Awareness Month, killing two birds with one stone. It turns out a pair of Italian mathematicians solved the problem centuries ago: …

Today in things you didn’t know you wanted: scenes from Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, reconstructed with Legos. Throw in some gravlax on an IKEA plate and you’d have a veritable orgy of Scandinavian exports.Ever wondered what a corporate booksto…

The German photographer Thomas Ruff’s “press++,” showing now at David Zwirner Gallery, comprises space-age images culled from the archival clippings of various American newspapers. Ruff scanned both sides of the original documents and layered…

Though his criticism can be acid, and though it sometimes deploys words like gassy, Michael Hofmann isn’t “a lit-crit Johnny Fartpants,” experts say: “As he sits in an incongruously rowdy Hamburg bar, all shy eyes and nervous hands, one is re…

At 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, The Paris Review has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and The Paris Review have made recordin…

Our Spring Revel was this Tuesday, and we have the pictures to prove it. Hundreds convened at Cipriani 42nd Street to honor Lydia Davis with the Hadada Award. She received it from her high school classmate Errol Morris—“We played in the high schoo…

Did you know? Heterosexual men tend to enjoy sexual intercourse—so much so, in fact, that even when they’re not having intercourse, they sometimes wish they were. Undone, a new novel by John Colapinto, explores this fecund quadrant of the male psyche…

At 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, The Paris Review has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and The Paris Review have made recordin…

Today in noble sidelines: in the same way that you or I might go to the gym or take a few shots of Cuervo Gold, Russian diplomats like to write poetry as a means of “blowing off steam.” And they do this intently—there’s a 541-page anthology o…

At 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, The Paris Review has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and The Paris Review have made record…

Last night, we hosted our Spring Revel, and our guests came away with a special, unexpected treat: a Lydia Davis story on a bottle of mouthwash. “It hasn’t exactly been my dream to see my work printed on a bottle of mouthwash,” she told T Magazine. …

At 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, The Paris Review has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and The Paris Review have made recordin…

Should we be surprised that so many writers have doubled as spies? It seems a shame to put all their observational prowess to waste when there’s a great way to monetize it—and writing is most assuredly not that way. Plus, the connection speaks to…

Man, being a beat poet must’ve been pretty far out if you were a man—I mean, the drugs, the politics, the … roads, and the being on those roads. But what if you weren’t a guy? Lynnette Lounsbury writes, “I loved the beat generation and the …

Remembering Zaha Hadid, the “starchitect” who died yesterday at sixty-five: “It always amazed me that Hadid had somehow attracted a singular reputation for being difficult to deal with. Compared with other prominent architects, no one was more …

Imre Kertész, a Holocaust survivor whose novels won him the Nobel Prize, died this morning at eighty-six. “I was able use my own life to study how somebody can survive this particularly cruel brand of totalitarianism,” he told The Paris Review in 201…

Barbara Takenaga’s exhibition “Waiting in the Sky” opens tomorrow at DC Moore Gallery. “They still seem to naturally gravitate,” she said in 2013 of her paintings, “or maybe anti-gravitate, to some kind of explosive/implosive situation. …

All hail Zardulu! She appears in ceremonial robes around Gotham, begging mortals to serve as “tools” in her “grand architectural designs.” And these designs … they may seem, from the outside, like they’re just viral videos. But they’re …

New York’s alright if you like saxophones, but it’s no place for existentialists: “When a boat carrying Albert Camus sailed into New York Harbor in March 1946, he was hailed as a moral emissary from war-ravaged Europe and the glamorous embodime…

If you’re like me, the walls of your home are obscured by hundreds, nay thousands, of thick, musty, outdated reference texts: The 1903 Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. Things to Know About Boll Weevils. Urinalysis and You. A day ago, I would’ve told yo…

Jim Harrison has died at seventy-eight. “You don’t write—an artist doesn’t create, or very rarely creates—good art in support of different causes,” he told The Paris Review in 1988. “And critics have an enormous difficulty separating the attitudes …

John Jeremiah Sullivan on Shuffle Along, one of the first all-black musicals on Broadway: “The blacks-­in-blackface tradition, which lasted more than a century in this country, strikes most people, on first hearing of its existence, as deeply biza…

What does Chris Bachelder’s new novel The Throwback Special have in common with Leonard Michaels’s 1981 book The Men’s Club? Both, as Miranda Popkey writes, are excavations of a certain kind of American white-dude frustration, and both have a chorus …

We’re delighted to announce the ten winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards:Brian Blanchfield, nonfictionJ. D. Daniels, nonfictionLaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, poetryMadeleine George, dramaMitchell S. Jackson, fictionAlice Sola Kim, fictionCatherine Lacey, fic…

The cafard and mirthlessness that have long governed French philosophers have now extended to French writers of all kinds—a new survey says they’ve never been unhappier. Their proposed solution? Surrender. “French writers have never felt more b…

It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: “History of Sumach Tanning in England, Degradation…

At a moment when Syria, in the Western imagination, is synonymous with violence and war, an anonymous Syrian film collective called Abounaddara “provides a strikingly different picture of Syrians and their country,” as our poetry editor, Robyn Cr…

Our basketball columnist, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, has stepped over to The New Yorker to bid farewell to Kobe Bryant. And he’s a defender of Bryant’s poem-cum-retirement-announcement: “ ‘Dear Basketball’ was mocked by some, but it has more g…

Our congratulations to Paul Beatty, whose novel The Sellout won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction yesterday. The New York Times calls The Sellout “a scorching satire that wrenches humor out of painful subjects like slavery, police …

Today in long-lost manuscripts commissioned by prominent escape artists: an expansive essay by Lovecraft called “The Cancer of Superstition” (sounds nuanced, doesn’t it?) was found among the memorabilia from a defunct magic shop. Apparently Har…

The Malian photographer Malick Sidibé’s latest exhibition opens tonight at Jack Shainman Gallery. Sidibé, who’s seventy-nine or eighty, lives in Bamako, where he’s worked as a photographer since the fifties; he’s known for his vivacious bla…

Since I began working at the Review, I’ve asked repeatedly for one simple thing that would propel this magazine to new heights: limited-edition designer-made cashmere Paris Review socks. They’re now a reality, and guests at our Spring Revel will wa…

Ta-Nehisi Coates has offered a glimpse of what we can expect from his new series of Black Panther comics, and it involves, as all good stories do, a superhuman terrorist group called the People. “In my work for The Atlantic I have, for some time, bee…

Late last year, I saw John Ashbery give a reading at Pioneer House, in Brooklyn. At one point, he read a prose poem by James Tate, who died last summer. It was, Ashbery said, Tate’s final poem—so incontrovertibly final, in fact, that it had been …

Anita Brookner, the author of Hotel du Lac, has died at eighty-seven. Brookner, who was born in London, gave an Art of Fiction interview in our Fall 1987 issue. “The truth I’m trying to convey is not a startling one, it is simply a peeling away o…

The Paris Review hasn’t been headquartered in Paris since 1973—a cause of immeasurable confusion over the years. But this week, for once, our name makes sense: our editor, Lorin Stein, is in the City of Light. Though he’s not, to my knowledge, revi…

Because people are incorrigibly nosy, and because no one seems to find it enjoyable to let an author write her books in peace, an Italian professor has sallied forth with yet another dubious claim as to the true identity of Elena Ferrante. And the pr…

Today in zits: if you like to spend your free time watching grotesque pimple-popping sessions on YouTube, you’re not alone. (I may or may not have dedicated an hour to zit vids in the very recent past.) Sandra Lee, a dermatologist, has turned her s…

Trawling through eBay recently, I came across a folder of sample funeral cards from the early twentieth century. As near as I can tell, salesmen would roam from funeral home to funeral home peddling these to undertakers, who would in turn press them …

Brad Bigelow thinks of his blog, Neglected Books, as “one little step against entropy.” His reviews of forgotten or obscure books have led, in many cases, to publishers reissuing them, sometimes even in translation: “One of Bigelow’s favorite…

Today in the gender binary: using data collected from e-book readers, a start-up called Jellybooks (inspires confidence, no?) has decreed that “men decide much faster than women if they like a story or not.” The company’s founder, Andrew Rhomb…

Today in dripping-wet Regency heartthrobs: this is not a drill, people. Mr. Darcy’s soaked white shirt is bound for these shores. You know the one: it doesn’t exist in the pages of Pride and Prejudice, but Colin Firth made it famous in the 1995 BBC a…

Emilie Clark’s exhibition of new watercolors, “Meditations on Hunting,” is at Morgan Lehman Gallery through March 26. 

Coney Island today is a fine place to force-feed yourself hotdogs and get a weird rash, but in centuries past it was a bona fide dreamland—so much so that a new exhibition of early Coney Island art is called “Visions of an American Dreamland.…

Today in exotic forms of posthumous success: In 1917, seven years after his death, Mark Twain wrote a novel called Jap Herron by communicating through a medium using a Ouija board. This led to some legal troubles (to say nothing of the metaphysical q…

In the long car ride we call life, Andrew O’Hagan has eschewed the driver’s seat for the passenger seat, and he’s loving every minute of it: “In my natural state, I possess the habit of saying no to everything, but all the requesting party ha…

Tickets and tables are available now for our Spring Revel, to be held Tuesday, April 5, at Cipriani 42nd Street—please join us for the Review’s annual gala and our biggest night of the year!This year, we’re honoring Lydia Davis with the Hadada, …

Today in comedies of errors: William Empson began work on The Face of the Buddha in 1932, but the book is only now being published. What took so long? Well, for starters, Empson gave the manuscript to a dangerous guy: “The man of letters John Daven…

I hear you’re trying to knock over a library. May I suggest you get a hold of the blueprints? Thing about libraries is—librarians, cover your ears—many of them tend to reside in historical or at least oft-remodeled buildings with easily exploit…

Another year, another volume of My Struggle, another news cycle rich in Knausgaard. Here he reflects on the shame of writing about himself: “Building a fiction room requires either great strength or great ignorance … To me all writing is blind an…

That image above comes from the trailer for Maggie’s Plan, which features Ethan Hawke reading our Winter 2014 issue (if I had to guess, he’s somewhere deep in the Michael Haneke interview) as Greta Gerwig looks on with envy. Is the rest of the film…

In the halcyon days of September 2015, when the weather was mild and Trump’s candidacy was moderately less terrifying, we published interviews with Eileen Myles and Jane Smiley. Our print subscribers have long since read, digested, and discussed them…

Writers should always have a backup plan. A good one is to consider a career in the Central Intelligence Agency, which is what Jennifer duBois did around the time she was applying to M.F.A. programs. You ask: But couldn’t she do both? “When it co…

The Harry Ransom Center’s Guy Davenport collection opens to the public this month. The papers cover sixty years of his career as a writer, scholar, and painter; they include journals, artwork, and manuscript pages. But much of the collection is g…

Foupe, adventine, dentize, kime, morse—these and other non-word words have made their way into English-language dictionaries over the centuries, blurring the line between errata and neologisms. Philologists call them ghost words, and they’re main…

A decade before Virginia Woolf and her calls for a room of one’s own, there was Lola Ridge, a poet whose 1919 presentation “Women and Creative Will” was a watershed moment for feminism: “ ‘They say there never has been, there is not, and th…

Zadie Smith is thinking about The Polar Express 4–D Experience and Anomalisa and, of course, Schopenhauer: “One way of dealing with the boredom of our own needs might be to complicate them unnecessarily, so as always to have something new to desire…

Kafka isn’t often remembered for his sunny worldview. Surprising, then, to read his effusions about the hustle and bustle of the Paris metro, which you’d think would’ve depressed the hell out of him: “The noise of the Metro was terrible when …

A small Dutch town with the incredible name of ’s-Hertogenbosch is planning a truly legendary celebration of Hieronymus Bosch: “The whole city (already famous in the Netherlands for its wild Shrovetide carnival) is planning to go slightly bonker…

It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: “Administration of Timberlands in Canada,…

If you’ve been holding off on reading Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels because there’s, like, four of them, and that’s just kind of a lot of books, and you secretly don’t even really enjoy reading that often anyway, you’re in luck: they…

The Japanese artist Izumi Kato has his first solo exhibition in the U.S. at Galerie Perrotin, in New York, through February 27. Eschewing brushwork, Kato, forty-six, paints directly with his hands, rubbing the colors deep into the canvas; he wears l…

Breaking news: Bram Stoker’s great-grand-nephew has rejected a scholar’s recent claim that Dracula hailed not from Transylvania but from Exeter. “People will be surprised and sometimes shocked by my findings, as most of what they now hold true …

In France, a twenty-five-year plan to streamline the language for schoolchildren may spell the end of the circumflex, that most mysterious of diacritical marks: “The circumflex came into use in France much later, in the sixteenth century, and the A…

Just when you think the book is making a comeback—just when you think reading might actually be cool again, with indie bookstores finding their footing and e-book sales plateauing—you hear that McDonald’s is putting books in their Happy Meals, an…

So you published one of the most lauded, beloved, fiercely debated novels of 2015—what now? A new thrill can be hard to come by. Hanya Yanagihara has elected to follow her success by swimming across Martha’s Vineyard. Just because. “Swimming,…

Mernet Larsen’s exhibition “Things People Do” is at James Cohan Gallery through February 21. Larsen, seventy-five, works in what she has called “old-fashioned narrative paintings ... statements of longing.” “What I use are these perspectival ploys…

Sarah Manguso holds up the many sources of writers’ envy—“of money, of accolades, of publication in this or that place … of profligacy and of well-managed scarcity … of accomplishment and of potential”—to remind us of how easy it is to …

In which Elif Batuman, visiting Turkey, puts on a head scarf and begins to rethink some things: “What if I really did it? What if I wore a scarf not as a disguise but somehow for real? I was thirty-four, and I’d been having a lot of doubts about th…

Philip Larkin’s poems and letters present him as misanthropic, hard-hearted, and above all miserable—but he moonlighted as a photographer, and his work in the medium shows a dramatically different side of him. “In their sociability, tenderness,…

When the book and even the e-book have exhausted their charms, turn instead to the blook, an ersatz kind of book that offers many of the same bookish qualities without all that fatiguing text. Mindell Dubansky, the preservation librarian at the Metro…

It feels like only yesterday that I was lugging my hardcover of 2666 around town, regularly having my mind blown on subway cars, buses, park benches, et cetera. Imagine how much easier it would’ve been to have that experience in one prolonged five-…

Many reasonable people have concluded that the only way to stay sane in New York City is to be drunk all the time. It was just a matter of time until the advantages of this lifestyle reached the theater community and seeped into its most pious sect, …

A lot of things are a century old this year: Boeing, Roald Dahl, the Professional Golfers’ Association. Another is Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s short story “The Nose,” published in January 1916 in a student magazine called Shinshichō. “The Nose,” which …

Flush your antidepressants, fire your therapist, and deaccession your self-help library: Cervantes is the only mood elevator you need. “Eduardo Guerrero, head of Mexico’s prisons system, told Radio Imagen that when El Chapo was recaptured earlier…

“Peter Hujar: Lost Downtown” opens this Thursday at Paul Kasmin Gallery. The exhibition chronicles Hujar’s time on the Lower East Side between 1972 and 1985, when he photographed his friends and acquaintances, including Susan Sontag, John Water…

Today in translating bugs: The Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn’s Insect Literature (1921), newly reissued, reminds that certain literary tropes are far from universal: “Yoko Tawada recently remarked that one of the difficulties she faced when translati…

AIGA’s Eye on Design blog has a thoughtful, thorough history of The Paris Review’s art and design, with stories from our former editor Maxine Groffsky and our art editor, Charlotte Strick. “The masthead has shape shifted from serif to sans and ba…

There’s an abysmal simile making the rounds online right now, drawn from a certain splashy literary debut: “Breasts like bronzed mangoes.” Yes, it comes courtesy of a male writer, of course; and yes, Google suggests it’s the only use of the p…

We’ve known for a while that fairy tales are old, but only now have we discovered that they’re in fact really, really, really old—an important distinction. Stories like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Rumpelstiltskin” originated thousands o…

Janet Fish’s “Glass & Plastic: The Early Years, 1968–78” is at DC Moore Gallery through February 13, featuring an impressive array of her trademark still lifes and her work with light. “The reason for painting glass was to totally focus on lig…

Congratulations to Review contributors Garth Greenwell and Ottessa Moshfegh. The former received a rave review of his debut, What Belongs to You, in the New York Times: “Greenwell writes long sentences, pinned at the joints by semicolons, that push…

Norman Rush on “the savage fictions” of Horacio Castellanos Moya and the archetype of the “superfluous man”: “The literary woods are of course as full of superfluous men as they are of unreliable narrators and, these days, really rebarbativ…

Any Joe with a Twitter account will tell you that today is Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year. It’s a claim that rests mostly on a bunch of pseudoscience and a dubious 2005 ad campaign for a travel agency. Even so, a whole cottage ind…

Orson Welles and Hemingway had a vexed friendship, if friendship is even the word—their first encounter came to blows, after all. In interviews, Welles tended to speak respectfully, if not kindly, of the writer. But now, a 1973 screenplay by Welles, …

Ben Lerner remembers C. D. Wright: “She was part of a line of mavericks and contrarians who struggled to keep the language particular in times of ever-encroaching standardization. I think of the messy genius of James Agee and Mary Austin as two pos…

The poet C. D. Wright died unexpectedly this week at the age of sixty-seven, in Providence, Rhode Island. “It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free,” Wright once said, “and declare them so”; poetry was …

Where 7Up is the uncola, poetry is the “un-Trump,” Eileen Myles says: “Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy. It’s like the un-Trump: The poet is the charismatic loser. You’re the fool in Shakespeare; you’re the loose …

A few months ago, we published Thomas Mallon’s introduction to John O’Hara’s Pal Joey, which turns seventy-five this year. “I sense that O’Hara’s moment for a really breakout revival,” Mallon writes, “may at last be upon us”: Joey’s …

Sometimes I lose sleep worrying about the colors of the world, fearing that some of them will disappear forever as manufacturing processes change and our planet’s pigment chemists quietly swap, say, one shade of aubergine for another, slightly infe…

Hiroki Tsukuda’s “Enter the O,” the artist’s first exhibition in the U.S., opens this Thursday, January 14, at Petzel Gallery, in New York. Tsukuda, who lives in Tokyo, draws his inspiration from science fiction and video games; his works in …

Good help is hard to find. The late nineteenth century was a fecund period for the Oxford English Dictionary, which began to add and sift through words at unprecedented speed—in large part because Dr. William Chester Minor, a murderer locked up in …

First things first: David Bowie is dead, and the world is a worse place for it. Here, from 2013, is a list of his hundred favorite books, including DeLillo’s White Noise, Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and, yes, The Paris Review’s collected…

Over the course of the “Little Ice Age” that befell Europe some centuries back, the River Thames froze twenty-three times—such an unlikely occurrence that people had no choice but to party on the ice. These “frost fairs” often lasted for da…

These Russian book jackets from the thirties are among the many riches on offer in the New York Public Library’s newly enhanced digital collections. Below are some favorites; you can see the whole collection here. 

The Swedish Academy keeps its lists of potential Nobel winners confidential for fifty years—meaning that, at last, we can see who coulda been a contender for the 1965 prize in literature. That year it went to the Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov, of A…

The nineteenth-century obsession with premature burial.I was eleven when the family cat died—we found her on the cold concrete floor of the garage—but once we’d buried her in the backyard and erected a modest wooden cross, it occurred to me tha…

To celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Folger Library is sending Shakespeare’s First Folio to all fifty states. Good news for his fans, yes, but maybe for enterprising book thieves, too? “The Folger has eighty-t…

The following are things we’re sending to the moon: text messages between a husband and wife, thirty-three artists’ blood, microscopic sculptures, river water, DNA from a genetically modified goat. They’re all part of Lowry Burgess’s MoonArk,…

For the painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet, the most profound art was “art brut”—created from chaos and madness by the mentally ill. A new exhibition at the American Folk Art museum explores his ethos. Our managing editor, Nicole Rudick, explai…

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!Notes on shopping and giving.I used to get coffee at Pret a Manger almost every morning. It’s a noisy and bustling shop …

The Danish writer Dorthe Nors decided to leave Copenhagen for Jutland, and she’s having a wild time: “Just about the time that I seriously began to consider moving from Copenhagen, the first wolf was sighted in Jutland. Big commotion! Wolves had …

Edgar Allan Poe had only one best seller in his lifetime. It wasn’t The Raven and Other Poems. Nor was it The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, his only novel. It was The Conchologist’s First Book: Or, a System of Testaceous Malacology, …

In November 1994, George Plimpton interviewed Garrison Keillor at 92Y as part of a collaboration with The Paris Review. You can listen to a recording of their interview here—and now the PBS series Blank on Blank has animated part of it. “I think …

What happens when the author of Frank Sinatra Has a Cold has a cold? Pretty much nothing. He asks for a lozenge, drinks some water, drinks some Coke, drinks a martini, talks shop. “Even when you write about a celebrity you don’t learn anything ne…

Punctuation was once the stuff of radical experimentation; today it tends to be the site of tired grammatical debates, the kind that feel antiquated a mere decade or so after they first got people riled up. David Crystal’s book Making a Point hopes t…

Our new Winter issue, hot off the presses, features poems from A New English Grammar by Jeff Dolven. One of them, “*The Haystack’s Painting,” has occasioned a roiling linguistic-grammatical debate at Language Log. “I would have no problem wit…

Eve Sedgwick, the groundbreaking queer theorist, died in 2009. Since then, her husband, Hal, has maintained her apartment—they lived in separate ones—as an archive, amassing all her work, her belongings, and even her cat. Jane Hsu spoke with him…

For the cultural critic, astrology is low-hanging fruit: a gimmicky, pervasive pseudoscience that preys on our superstitions, our solipsism, our need to make sense of the unknown. It’s easy to ask people, How can you buy into that shit? But the edi…

Sam Sacks opens his review of our anthology The Unprofessionals with a litany of all that’s been co-opted by careerism in literature: “Consider the extraliterary responsibilities expected of authors who have had their novels accepted for publicat…

Our new Winter issue, out now, features an interview with Gordon Lish, the editor whose drastic emendation of Raymond Carver’s work remains contentious even now, decades after the fact. In an excerpt of the interview in the Guardian, Lish talks about…

The drugs in the real world are okay. But fictional drugs—those are some drugs. A tour of drugs in fiction suggests, among other things, that we’ve been disappointingly unimaginative in choosing names for actual drugs: Where can we find the likes o…

If you’ve seen Fantasia, you are, whether you know it or not, familiar with the work of Kay Nielsen, a Danish artist whose illustrations collide light and dark in sublime, often disquieting quantities, with patterns of feverish detail abutting vast s…

Our new Winter issue features an interview with Jane and Michael Stern, “the original culinary road warriors.” A new profile in Eater captures what Norman Rush would call their “idioverse,” i.e., a “private patois made up of shared referenc…

Compared to writers at the beginning of their careers, successful authors have an enormous freedom to experiment with form and style: their reputations are sound. And yet so few of our most prominent authors risk anything in their books. Writers like…

It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: “Cattle Barons and Pioneer Drovers of Illi…

We’ve received word that the poet Christopher Middleton has passed away at eighty-nine. Guy Davenport called him “an incomparable stylist, a wry ironist, a philosopher of words. The only category in which he fits justly,” he added, “is that o…

When Germans like to dramatize their politics, imbuing the theater with metaphors to suit the times, they always turn to one play: Hamlet. Over the centuries, the Dane has survived a dizzying number of interpretations and representations on German st…

Notes on shopping and giving.
I used to get coffee at Pret a Manger almost every morning. It’s a noisy and bustling shop in Union Square, the sort of high-impact environment that teaches people how to shout at one another without sounding unfriendly…

Primo Levi died in 1987, after he tumbled over a railing in his apartment building in Turin. The consensus held that this was a suicide, but the publication of The Complete Works of Primo Levi has, at least in some quarters, renewed the debate. Tim P…

In an effort to combat censorship, the British filmmaker Charlie Lyne (such a British filmmaker name, no?) has launched a campaign to produce the single most banal film in the history of the medium: Paint Drying. “The film is a single, unbroken sho…

Peter Muller-Munk, who died in 1967, designed a really nice chromium-plated water pitcher. He also made the most sensuous blender I’ve ever seen. Then there’s his Lady Schick electric shavers, his enameled cookware—and his gas pumps! What can b…

Today in audiobooks: recordings of erotic novels are selling like love muffins. And why not? What better way to spice up a long drive or a boring Saturday night than with a good story and some professionally stylized heavy breathing? But according to…

In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast has landed the number-one spot on the French best-seller list—spurred in part by an interview with a woman known only as Danielle, who said the memoir helps the French “hold high…

We’ll be celebrating The Unprofessionals, our first anthology of new writing in more than fifty years, tonight, November 19, at BookCourt, where Emma Cline, Kristin Dombek, and Cathy Park Hong will read from their selections in the book. The event is…

With the National Book Awards over and done with, we can turn our attention to a more pressing matter: the annual Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award. As a close follower of this prize, I can assure you that this year’s nominees have writt…

Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a begin…

Our new anthology, The Unprofessionals, is out now. What does it mean to be unprofessional, you ask? In many cases, it’s as easy as spitting in someone’s food or showing up to work in bondage gear. But if you’re a writer, escaping the rising ti…

Today it’s finally here: our first anthology of new writing in more than fifty years. The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review features thirty-one stories, poems, and essays by a new generation of writer. The Atlantic calls it …

Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginne…

Are you the proprietor or manager of a commuter-rail system, an office, a truck stop, or a faculty lounge? Have you found that your employees and/or customers are dissatisfied with your current vending-machine offerings? Would you like to be on the c…

Houellebecq’s Submission features many an excursus on Joris-Karl Huysmans, the nineteenth-century French writer of whom Houllebecq himself has said, “I think he could’ve been a real friend to me.” What was Huysmans’s MO? His novel À rebours, which te…

Flogging! Embezzling! The public humiliation of a churchman named John Winterbottom! These and more await you in an unpublished story by Charlotte Brontë, discovered in the “much-treasured” pages of the family copy of Robert Southey’s The Remains of …

New York: tonight at McNally Jackson, Rowan Ricardo Phillips will read his latest basketball column—so new, in fact, that I haven’t even seen it yet. (If you haven’t heard, Rowan is our new, and also first-ever, basketball columnist.) He appear…

In 1650, William Pynchon—Thomas’s earliest colonial ancestor—published The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, a small quarto volume about, you know, God and stuff, which caused a hell-storm of controversy in Puritan New England: “To leading offic…

The Bodleian Library has recovered a lost poem by Shelley—the ambitiously named “Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things,” written when he was just eighteen. It’s 172 lines of pure political invective, and its themes, as one professor …

With that chill in the air, summer seems so long ago, doesn’t it? We’re trying to relive some of that Estival Enchantment™ by publishing the interviews from our Summer issue in full, online. Just think: what our print subscribers read on vacati…

Everyone loves a good international children’s-lit imbroglio, all the more so when K-pop stars enter the fray. Please note, then, that Korean pop legend IU stands accused of sexualizing the story of My Sweet Orange Tree, a Brazilian novel more than f…

Our Spring issue featured “Sample Trees,” a portfolio by Thomas Demand and Ben Lerner. Demand constructed and photographed paper flowers based on a detail from a news photo of Katherine Russell, the widow of the Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarna…

Today in language and sensory perception: the verdict is in and English is a laughably inadequate language when it comes to describing scents. We must close the smell deficit, giving the olfactory its due in a mad rush of neologism. “In English, th…

If we’re going to gauge an artist’s success by the number of Twitter and Instagram followers she has, an aspirant artist can and should game the system: don’t wait for the followers, just go out and buy a bunch of fake ones. Constant Dullaart…

The Great and Noble Defenders of High Culture (one of them rhymes with Kansan) would have you believe that books and social media are locked in a mortal battle, and that every time you tweet, an angel-novelist loses his wings. But this is a false dic…

Mark your calendars: on Tuesday, April 5, 2016, at Cipriani 42nd Street, The Paris Review will honor Lydia Davis with the Hadada Award at our annual gala, the Spring Revel.The Hadada is our lifetime-achievement award, presented each year to a distin…

The French artist Sophie Calle’s Suite Vénitienne, first published in 1983, is back in print. If you or I made a book about stalking and photographing a complete stranger, we would be cast out of our communities; when Sophie Calle makes one, it’s a…

In 1929, William Seabrook published The Magic Island, an account of his travels in Haiti, and so introduced American readers to zombies, which soon came to dominate the cinema: “The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken …

Suspense, mystery, confusion, a certain contemplative je ne sais quoi … you can use ellipses for just about anything these days. Try ending your e-mails with them for a much-needed injection of professional ambiguity. And remember their roots: “P…

A letter from Lord Byron to Thomas Moore, dated October 31, 1815. Yesterday, I dined out with a largeish party, where were Sheridan and Colman, Harry Harris of C[ovent] G[arden] and his brother, Sir Gilbert Heathcote, Ds. Kinnaird, and others, …

In search of some cosmic horror, something to give you seasonally appropriate nightmares, something outside the realm of the usual Lovecraft stuff? Try William Hope Hodgson, who in the early twentieth century “envisioned the end of the Earth in the…

Evil, in fairy tales, often comes in the form of an old woman: the fearsome, embittered crone is a staple of the genre. What will it take for our legends to start treating old biddies with respect—and why did they get a bad rap to begin with? The a…

Jonathan Franzen investigates the necessary and sufficient features of that classic, oft-maligned form, The New Yorker story: “What made a story New Yorker was its carefully wrought, many-comma’d prose; its long passages of physical description, th…

A lost poem by Dylan Thomas, published originally in a magazine called Lilliput in 1942, has been recovered from a torn-out page; this weekend, in an act of poetic resuscitation, the actor Celyn Jones will read it aloud in public. We know the poem is…

Hawthorne’s scariest story.“Even his bright gildings,” Herman Melville once wrote of Nathaniel Hawthorne, “play upon the edges of thunder-clouds.” This was in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” an 1850 appreciation in which Melville reputed t…

Ask your standard-issue grammarian about further versus farther and he’ll trot out the conventional wisdom: farther should be used to refer to literal distances and further to metaphorical ones. But what if everything we’ve been taught is a lie? Cale…

The artist Ragnar Kjartansson lives in fear (and bemused disgust) of what he’s dubbed “Western culture claustrophobia.” “It’s everywhere!” he’s said: “The same desire for this Western properness is everywhere—it’s like a big block…

Kathryn Schulz’s Thoreau-bashing New Yorker piece last week was only the latest in a long tradition of broadsides against Walden—people love to hate Thoreau. James Russell Lowell, Garrison Keillor, Jill Lepore, and Bill Bryson have all taken swipes…

The eeriest and most gravid of today’s new emoji is this guy: the so-called Man in Business Suit Levitating. In Apple’s rendition, he cuts an imposing figure, like a rich kid who’s just aced his LSATs—a simpering, dubiously pompadoured fella …

Fact: there are men still walking the earth who have shared a meal at Denny’s with Orson Welles. “One day in 1974, Orson Welles, John Huston, and the comedian Rich Little were sitting in a Denny’s near Carefree, Arizona, about to order a meal … A…

From a letter by Arthur Rimbaud to his family, dated November 17, 1878, and sent from Gênes. After a disastrous affair with Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud, born on this day in 1854, left France to travel the world, eventually setting up shop in Ethiopia, …

Proust’s madeleine is one of modernism’s essential images—a cookie whose unique taste, whose absolute singularity, could conjure for the author a whole lost world. So it’s downright disturbing, then, to learn that the cookie was damn near som…

 These images are from the Dobkin Family Collection of Feminist History’s exhibition, on display through Saturday, October 24, at Glenn Horowitz Booksellers’ Rare Gallery, in New York. The show takes its title from a powerful passage in Woolf’s A Roo…

Weimar Berlin is “typically presented as a nonstop freak show of grotesque transvestites and mutilated war vets, lumpen Brechtian beggars and top-hatted industrialists, Charleston-crazed floozies, effete gigolos, and brazen rent boys”: imagery at…

Susan Howe on Wallace Stevens and just plain old liking the guy’s poems: “The poetry of Wallace Stevens makes me happy. This is the simple truth. Pleasure springs from the sense of fluid sound patterns phonetic utterance excites in us. Beauty, ha…

The Million Man March, twenty years later.October 16 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Million Man March. The photographer Roderick Terry, then age thirty, was there as more than a million black men crowded Washington, D.C.’s National Mall, …

Today in persistence, doubt, the slow burn, and eventual triumph: Marlon James, who won the Booker earlier this week for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, saw seventy-eight different houses reject his first novel. (Can you beat that record…

Today in profligacy: for a cool $16,500, you could own Edith Wharton’s one-of-a-kind sterling-silver baby rattle, which she gave to the only child of Leon and Germaine Belugou on her christening in 1920. It’s got a whistle at one end with EDITH…

Richard Howard first appeared in The Paris Review in our thirteenth issue—from the summer of 1956. Since then, several of his poems and translations have found their way to these pages, and in 2004, J. D. McClatchy interviewed him for our Art of Po…

In which Alex Mar gives neo-paganism a try and spends a weekend at a witches’ gathering, only to understand, through her skepticism, the communal appeal: “most humans, once they get in deep enough, will dig in their heels and commit to the value …

“I have never been part of the London literary scene,” Christopher Logue said in his 1993 Art of Poetry interview:My time has been passed with painters, antique dealers, musicians, booksellers, journalists, actors, and film people. I find it natu…

Michael Clune’s Gamelife is an excellent new memoir about computer games. We could tell you all about it, but there are better means of description: as Clune writes, “computer games taught me how to imagine something so it lasts, so it feels real.”…

In which Vivian Gornick lives in New York, and walks, walks, walks, and keeps walking, imagining herself under “citywide house arrest”: “Nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like joining the endless stream of people moving steadily, as b…

 New York! Tomorrow—Saturday, October 10— at three P.M., our editor Lorin Stein will moderate a discussion with our Southern editor John Jeremiah Sullivan, Elif Batuman, and Jessica Moss. The matter at hand: How do writers interact with the mirror of…

Michael Lewis’s profile of (and fan note to) Tom Wolfe also reveals the startling comprehensiveness of the latter’s archives: “Wolfe saved what he touched—report cards, tailors’ bills, to-do lists, reader letters, lecture notes, book blurbs…

It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: Cold Storage, Heating, and Ventilating on Board Shi…

All eyes are on Svetlana Alexievich for her Nobel win, which Philip Gourevitch rightly calls “a long-overdue recognition of reportage as a form of literature equal to fiction, poetry, and playwriting.” The Review published a piece by Alexievich bac…

The Belarussian writer Svetlana Alexievich has won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. Read her piece “Voices from Chernobyl” from our Winter 2004 issue. “Alexievich,” The New York Times writes, “is best known for giving voice to women and men …

From the psychiatrist R. D. Laing’s transcripts of his sessions with Edith E., a young woman he took on as a patient in 1954 and later wrote about in The Divided Self. Laing, who was born on this day in 1927 and died in 1989, is remembered for his pr…

If the prospect of another literary awards season has you rolling your eyes and grumbling about the tastelessness of the establishment, try spicing things up the old-fashioned way: gambling. You’ll find that a well-placed bet, or even a poor one, c…

“The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time,” Eileen Myles tells Ben Lerner in our new Fall issue:There’s a whole kind of inside thing bursting out, and I’m always dying to hear it. I do hear it in my head, but I never …

The filmmaker Chantal Akerman, whose 1975 movie, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is arguably “the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema,” has died at sixty-five. “Jeanne Dielman is a real-time study of a …

This morning we made an exciting discovery: beneath a plaster bust of George Plimpton and a dog-eared copy of our short-lived magazine for children, we found a box of limited-edition dead-stock Paris Review T-shirts. Being nothing if not business-min…

If you were conducting a kind of Hemingway Grand Tour, traveling the world in search of all things Papa, I’d tell you to get a better hobby—but if you insisted, I would tell you to make sure you visit northern Michigan, the site of Hemingway’s …

If you’ve got an extra $250k–$350k lying around, you could own a part of obscenity history—a print of Robert Mapplethorpe’s electrifying photograph Man in Polyester Suit is up for auction. That’s the one, you’ll recall, that features “a tightly…

If you’re in New York this Saturday, October 3, stop by the Designers & Books Fair to see our art editor, Charlotte Strick, discuss the process of redesigning The Paris Review. She’s part of a panel on magazine redesigns at the Fashion Institute of…

“I love the nuance and depth of feeling in the poems of T. S. Eliot,” you’ve probably said to yourself, sighing: “If only the man had written more erotica!” Reader, he did, and soon it will be yours to behold. A new edition of Eliot’s p…

“Aunt Alma,” a poem by W. S. Merwin from our Spring 1958 issue. Merwin is eighty-eight today. This is the one that will outlive us all
With her head in the same duster and her small
Mouth maybe puckering in a bit more
Each decade, but it always did gath…

Fact: the American newspapers and gazettes of the nineteenth century had names that absolutely trounced their present-day counterparts where liveliness and creativity are concerned (with the exception of the Modesto Bee, which remains a truly great p…

Congratulations to the MacArthur Foundation’s Class of 2015, four of whom you can find in the pages of The Paris Review and here on the Daily. There’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote in praise of Jennifer Grotz’s poem “Poppies” for us a few years a…

Carmen Balcells, who died earlier this month, was “a literary superagent with a license to kill, like James Bond.” (NB: she never murdered anyone. Some also referred to her, equally outlandishly, as “Big Mama.”) She changed Spanish-language p…

Six paintings from Matthew Brannon’s “Skirting the Issue,” an exhibition at Casey Kaplan Gallery through October 24. In this series, Brannon uses traditional printmaking methods—letterpress, silkscreening—to depict the domestic and cultural…

Today in reading and statecraft: What’s your nation’s official book? Think. There must be one. “Each country chooses, prefers to be represented by a book,” Borges said, “although that book isn’t usually characteristic of the country. For ex…

Our new issue features Ben Lerner interviewing Eileen Myles. If you’re of the try-before-you-buy mind-set, you can read a new, long excerpt: “There’s a whole female industry engaged in materially supporting the illusion that the artist doesn’…

Remember this summer’s #ReadEverywhere contest, the one we went on and on about? It was a great success. We asked readers to submit pictures of themselves reading The Paris Review or the London Review of Books around the world, and you did, by the hu…

We’re in the midst of serializing Chris Bachelder’s novel The Throwback Special—a book about middle-aged men who meet annually to reenact the 1985 NFL game in which Joe Theismann fractured his leg on live TV—whose whole gestalt I’ve tried in va…

Today in the thrill-a-minute world of annotation: well before Genius began its quest to annotate the world (or at least the internet), scholarly annotations of modern books for popular audiences delighted the readers of the 1960s. “The science fict…

The British illustrator Charles Keeping (1924–88) is remembered largely for his work with children’s books. But his morbid style—his first book commission was Why Die of Heart Disease?—often felt better suited to adult fare, and his long career als…

If you’re like me, you spend most of your free time imagining what Hamlet might look like: the pallid cheeks, the heavy eyelids, the ruminating brow, the svelte silhouette, the dejected posture … But what if he was fat? What if the hero of the gr…

C. K. Williams, the poet known for his “long, unraveled lines,” died yesterday at seventy-eight. Williams realized, he told the New York Times, “that by writing longer lines and longer poems I could actually write the way I thought and the way I fe…

There are any number of prestigious opportunities available to freelance writers—footwear catalogs, restroom signage, pamphlets about flossing—but it takes a truly outstanding writer to land the best gig of them all: fortune-cookie writer, at sev…

This Sunday from ten till six, you’ll find us manning booth 307 at the Brooklyn Book Festival, where we’ll have our new Fall issue, T-shirts, tote bags, pencils, and vintage back issues. Come shoot the breeze.Our managing editor Nicole Rudick wil…

In 1965, an elderly Buster Keaton starred in film, a little experiment in cinema by one Samuel Beckett—an unlikely collaboration, but an inspired one. The movie was almost entirely silent, and shot largely in the first person; Beckett regarded it a…

From letters William Carlos Williams sent to his mother as a student at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. During his time there, Williams, born on this day in 1883,  joined Mask and Wig, the nation’s oldest all-male collegiate mus…

Our culture’s obsession with design has led to a lot of useless flash, especially on the Internet, where things glide, slide, swoop, pulse, and occasionally dance across the screen. The artist Peter Quinn parodies user interfaces and their ornament…

Hey, kid—wanna get into print? Take some advice from a guy who’s been around the block: during the submissions process, it’s always better to lie and/or cheat. (The jury’s still out on stealing.) “I was a junior editor at an established mag…

From a series of poems by David Ray in our Fall 1977 issue. My BitternessI gave up some of my bitterness. Let me tell you why. Because you can prove the world is a good place, but you can’t prove it a bad place, that’s the truth, unless you’re …

The Internet is awash in devastating, graphic personal essays—young writers are encouraged, maybe more than ever, to monetize and sensationalize their grisliest experiences. So … now what? “The Internet’s confessional impulse has been fully c…

We were saddened to learn that Bill Becker, a longtime friend of The Paris Review, died this weekend at eighty-eight. As today’s obituary in the New York Times explains, Bill was “a theater critic and financier who acquired Janus Films with a partn…

In which Justin Taylor dissects a paragraph of Sam Lipsyte’s story “This Appointment Occurs in the Past,” in the name of pedagogy: “The only higher-order claims I wish to make today are, attention to language at the molecular level is valuabl…

New York in the late seventies was not exactly a utopia: crime was soaring, graffiti was ubiquitous, mace was a must-have accessory. But a certain set of novels and films has made the era something to yearn for: “This was the last moment when a nov…

A letter from Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) to her companions Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson, sent March 1, 1933. H. D., born on this day in 1886, had journeyed to Vienna to commence her psychoanalysis with Freud himself, though he was old and frail by then…

“The role of a novel is to entertain readers, and fear is one of the most entertaining things there is … I don’t particularly feel like apologizing. It’s impossible to increase the proportion already given to Islam in the news. We’re alread…

Sherman Alexie chose a poem by Yi-Fen Chou, a Chinese American, for this year’s Best American Poetry anthology. But Yi-Fen Chou was a pseudonym, it turned out, for Michael Derrick Hudson, a white guy. Now that he’s elected to include the poem any…

When the French playwright Alfred Jarry—born on this day in 1873—was fifteen, he enjoyed lampooning his physics teacher, a plump, inept man who so amused his students that he became the subject of Jarry’s first attempt at drama, Les Polonais, staged …

Iván Navarro was born in Chile, in 1972, the year before Pinochet came to power. He grew up with the fear of being disappeared, and so it’s fitting, in a way, that he’s chosen light as his medium. From his studio in Brooklyn, Navarro makes sculp…

Today in strange testing procedures involving nonsense words: Oxford applicants in classics and oriental studies, among other fields, are asked to translate phrases from invented languages with names such as Dobla and Kalaamfaadi—and the sample tex…

I can’t say that I’m much of a fan of Charles Bukowski’s, but I’ve been marveling at our shared love of cats, via a forthcoming collection of short pieces—verse and bits of prose—about or involving his feline friends. It’s endearing to …

Joy Williams has a new collection out, and a reporter has found her in rare form: “Williams does not have an email address. She uses a flip phone and often writes in motels and friends’ houses on old Smith-Coronas; she brings one with her and keeps…

Whenever anyone frowns upon the Daily for publishing work they find obscene, frivolous, or otherwise undeserving of the prestigious Paris Review name, I want to direct their attention to our seventies issues. Readers who think we’ve published sixty…

Elena Ferrante would like to remind you, now that her novel The Story of the Lost Child is out, that she is not a man, and that if you think she might be a man, you’re part of the problem: “Have you heard anyone say recently about any book writte…

Part of a letter from Joseph Roth to Blanche Gidon, his French translator, sent October 11, 1932. Roth, born on this day in 1894, used his letters to vent his spleen, often about money and politics; in this note he rails against French publishing. (“…

So you’re writing a sex scene—congratulations! The journey ahead will be arduous, and likely totally unsexy, but there are some rules of thumb for these things. Your first major decision is what to call the penis. “Do go for the etymological di…

Whatever you’re reading these days, it’s probably not as popular as Amish romance novels, which owe their meteoric rise, perhaps, to an old-fashioned yen for the patriarchy: “There’s no mistaking the potent commercial lure of the ‘bonnet bo…

What a golden age this is for trolls. Never has it been easier, with the proper combination of disdain, ignorance, and calculated condescension, to work hundreds of thousands of strangers into an indignant lather. If you don’t mind the occasional d…

We understand the urge to procrastinate. Two months ago, when we first announced our joint subscription deal—the one where you get a year of The Paris Review and the London Review of Books for just $70 U.S.—most of the summer was ahead of us. Sixt…

Today in reevaluations of problematic twentieth-century philosophers: Heidegger’s predilection for tragedy and poetry informed his yearning for a grand narrative, a story that could encompass all of history. That yearning, in turn, is part of what …

There are questions of such vast, cosmic import that most of us never think to ask them. I’ve wondered why there’s something rather than nothing; I have pondered the nature of objectivity; I’ve questioned the existence of free will. But I’ve …

Today in Houellebecq: the author has inveighed against Le Monde, the French newspaper of record, for publishing a series of unauthorized pieces about him. Calling journalists “parasites” and “cockroaches,” Houellebecq dismissed the articles f…

Jean Pagliuso takes pictures of chickens. It’s a risky subject—to hear about it, you’d worry you were dealing with the same kitschy, quasi-ironic veneration of farm and fowl that animates many an Etsy shop—but there’s nothing decorative or …

Literary fame has been a thorny thing more or less forever—according to Suetonius, Virgil sometimes ducked into buildings to flee his fans and the adulating masses. But what accounts for this celebrity, and what stokes its flames once a writer has …

A letter from Guillaume Apollinaire to Madeleine Pagès, dated October 11, 1915. Apollinaire had met Pagès, who taught literature, on a train in January of that year; by August they were engaged and Apollinaire was stationed in the trenches of Champ…

Our joint subscription deal is in its final days: you only have five days left to get The Paris Review and the London Review of Books for just $70 U.S. (If you’re already a Paris Review subscriber, we’ll extend your subscription to The Paris Review …

Claudia Rankine on Serena Williams, black excellence, and the strange status conferred by corporate largesse: “The London School of Marketing (L.S.M.) released its list of the most marketable sports stars, which included only two women in its Top 2…

“Wait in the Chair,” a poem by Cynthia Macdonald, appeared in our Spring 2004 issue. Macdonald, who died earlier this month at eighty-seven, taught for many years at the University of Houston; she was also a psychoanalyst. Richard Howard wrote th…

The poet Cynthia Macdonald has died at eighty-seven. Hayden Carruth praised her “light sardonic touch”; her poems sometimes drew on her career as a psychoanalyst, in which her specialty was, appropriately enough, writer’s block. “All people w…

Compared to other aspects of the book arts—typography, binding, tooling—the dust jacket is a pretty recent innovation. Depending on whom you ask, it was born either in 1833, to adorn an English novel called Heath’s Keepsake, or it was an earlier, Fre…

Newly declassified documents have revealed that the British government spied on Doris Lessing for some twenty years and that they’d thoroughly imbibed the rhetoric of J. Edgar Hoover: “Her communist sympathies have been fanned almost to the point…

Illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, made to accompany Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. Beardsley, born on August 21, 1872, favored the grotesque and the erotic in his drawings and had a large influence on the developing the Art Nouveau style, thoug…

First published in London in 1684, Aristotle’s Masterpiece is “one of the best-selling books ever produced in English on sex and making babies.” Aristotle, at the time, had assumed a role in the popular culture as an ancient sex expert; “his”…

Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginne…

“Several times the proper business of bed has been interrupted by mosquitoes,” Virginia Woolf wrote to a friend on her honeymoon with Leonard, which does not appear to have been an unqualified success: “They bloody the wall by morning—they al…

“Coke,” a poem by Scott Cohen from our Summer 1971 issue. Cohen’s collection Actual Size was published the same year.The difference in the speed of the thought process of a man who has just snorted coke and a man who hasn’t is a very strange number…

In which James Wood discusses “smarty-pants tone,” his revised opinion on David Foster Wallace, and erasing the distinction between pleasure and analysis: “At exactly the moment that I wanted really to write, and started writing poems and then …

Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginne…

Anyone who maintains that writers play a pivotal role in advancing and transforming our language is dead wrong—the real engines for linguistic change are teenage girls, who have served as “disruptors” since the fifteenth century, if not earlier…

Titus Andronicus is a hideous play. Harold Bloom called it “a poetic atrocity”; Samuel Johnson refused to believe that Shakespeare was its author, writing that “the barbarity of the spectacles, and the general massacre, which are here exhibited…

In New York, most of the iconic bookstores make certain distasteful concessions to consumers. Their books are in alphabetical order, for example, on neat, clearly marked shelves. Not so in John Scioli’s Community Bookstore, which has been a fixture…

A letter from Samuel Beckett to Cissie Sinclair, his aunt, dated August 14, 1937. At the time, Beckett was trying, fitfully and without much success, to become an art dealer; he’d gone so far as to travel through Germany for six months for the expr…

Plenty of adjectives are fit for Norman Mailer—insecure, misogynistic, overrated—but the one people seem to settle on, as a kind of euphemism, is pugnacious. Yes, here was a man whose ears always pricked up for the call of combat, a man who’d ask y…

There are two routes to literary immortality:Slave for years—if not decades—over a work of fiction so searingly sui generis, so well and truly fused with an authentic zeitgeist, so deeply attuned to life’s vicissitudes and the mysteries of the …

Since David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, Infinite Jest has undergone a dramatic change in its cultural significance: once merely the mark of a curious reader, it’s become a totem for bros, who see in its massive size and brainy reputat…

“Last Days of Prospero,” a poem by Donald Justice from our Winter - Spring 1964 issue. Justice, born on August 12, 1925, is remembered for his formal mastery; he had a special fondness for sestinas. He died in 2004. Michael Hofmann has said that …

Our joint subscription deal is in its final weeks: through the end of August, get The Paris Review and the London Review of Books for just $70 U.S. (If you’re already a Paris Review subscriber, we’ll extend your subscription to The Paris Review for …

For three years, Barton Swaim worked as a speechwriter for Mark Sanford, the maligned former governor of South Carolina. His book, The Speechwriter, suggests that Sanford’s grammar was as wanting as his ethics: “Nearly every page of this book is …

Among the selections recently added to Cambridge’s Digital Library is Shi zhu zhai shu hua pu, or Manual of Calligraphy and Painting, a seventeenth-century Chinese book by the Ten Bamboo Studio, based in Nanjing. First published in 1633, it’s belie…

Shakespeare scholars are reeling from a discovery so major, so irrefutably epochal, that it sets the entire field on its head: four clay pipes found in his Stratford-upon-Avon garden contain cannabis residue. Historians may never know for certain if …

Before he found success with All in the Family and its spin-offs, Norman Lear wrote and directed Cold Turkey, a cynical 1971 antismoking comedy that is, to date, his only credit as a film director. It’s showing August 13, 15, and 17 at New York’s…

“It wasn’t easy to interest glossy magazines in poverty in the 1980s and 90s,” Barbara Ehrenreich writes: “I once spent two hours over an expensive lunch—paid for, of course, by a major publication—trying to pitch to a clearly indifferent…

“Ethics,” a prose poem by Adam LeFevre from our Winter 1975 issue. LeFevre, now sixty-four, is also a playwright and an established character actor.Where I went to college in the purple valley of northwest Massachusetts, there was a fellow in my clas…

Mark von Schlegell talks about the paperback revolution and its undoing in the nineties: “I was temping at Ballantine Books in New York … My boss got copies of all the first mass-market editions of Philip K. Dick … She gave them to me free. The…

The Hungarian artist Lajos Vajda died in 1941, when he was only thirty-three—having long suffered from tuberculosis, he’d fallen ill during a compulsory stint in the Labour Service, the government’s antisemitic substitute for military conscript…

In 1969, Life ran a photo essay called “What it takes to be a lady author anymore,” with predictably outmoded advice: “swim a little,” for starters, “exercise in a bikini,” and be “photographed in bed.” The magazine photographed Jeann…

Four paintings from Grace Weaver’s “Teenage Dream,” showing for two more days at Thierry Goldberg Gallery. Weaver takes the title of her show from Katy Perry’s (not undeservedly) ubiquitous 2010 single. She imagines her paintings as pop songs…

Anxiety has always been a fixture of the human experience—who doesn’t enjoy a good bout of angst and fear now and again? But the word worry is, in its current sense, a fairly new addition to the English language: “Although it was used in the sixtee…

We’ve now entered the final month of our joint subscription deal: get The Paris Review and the London Review of Books for just $70 U.S. Already a Paris Review subscriber? Not a problem: we’ll extend your subscription to The Paris Review for another …

Some writers take years to finish their novels. These people are fools: writing a novel takes only seventy-five minutes, if you crowdsource it effectively. This Saturday, the sci-fi author Chris Farnell will prove it at a “Geekfest” panel in Heat…

A letter from Hayden Carruth to Jane Kenyon, dated April 29, 1994. When Kenyon was dying of leukemia, Carruth wrote her almost daily, though he knew she was unable to respond. His correspondence is collected in Letters to Jane. Carruth, born on Augus…

Data analysts have descended on the corpus of Agatha Christie—to celebrate the 125th anniversary of her birth, they’ve crunched some numbers and honed a formula “that they claim will enable the reader to identify the killer before the likes of …

George Bradley’s poem “August in the Apple Orchard” appeared in our Summer 1980 issue. Bradley’s most recent collection is 2011’s A Few of Her Secrets. It seems someone else was interested in order, too— The squat trees edging away down the slo…

Today in obsolete fruits: a seventeenth-century still life by Giovanni Stanchi reveals the extent to which selective breeding has altered the watermelon—nay, life!—as we know it. Look at Stanchi’s painting and you’ll see a smaller, rounder, w…

From “Ellen Auerbach: Classic Works and Collaborations,” an exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery through August 14. Auerbach, who died in 2004, worked in Berlin in the time of the Weimar Republic; she’s remembered for her work with ringl + pit, an…

Yesterday we posted Rick Moody’s introduction to Genoa: A Telling of Wonders, a searching 1965 novel by Paul Metcalf in which he grapples with the influence of his great-grandfather, who so happened to be Herman Melville.Metcalf makes liberal use of …

Today in pictures of the Brontë sisters that are probably actually not pictures of the Brontë sisters: have a look at this one from the mid-nineteenth century, recently purchased by a collector named Seamus Molloy on eBay for fifteen quid. It could…

It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: The Square Root of Two, an e-book sequel to Pi publ…

Don Marquis, an early twentieth-century humorist, had an almost Disney-like knack for creating benign characters who thrived in the popular imagination. The most famous of these was Archy, a poet-cockroach who practiced his craft after-hours on an ol…

“You get a tremendous boot out of what the Angels call ‘screwing it on,’ taking a big bike and just running it flat out as fast as it will go. I used to take it out at night on the Coast Highway, just drunk out of my mind, ride it for twenty an…

Happy eighty-eighth to John Ashbery. Many of his poems from the Review are available online, but I wanted to share a meditative passage on film from “The System,” a long prose poem published as fiction in our Spring 1972 issue.In 1971, Ashbery re…

A letter from Malcolm Lowry to Conrad Aiken, sent in the winter of 1929. Lowry, who was born on this day in 1909, was so enamored of Aiken’s novel Blue Voyage that he attempted, with this bumptious letter, to strike up a correspondence; throughout, a…

Fact: a minor independent publishing house known as the Central Intelligence Agency published the first Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago in 1958. It was printed in an edition of 1,160 as part of an effort to undermine the USSR. Boris Paster…

In 1967, while he was a poet-in-residence at the California Institute of Technology, Richard Brautigan wrote “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” a gamboling techno-utopian vision that reads, nearly fifty years later, as farcically, ha…

This summer we’re offering a joint subscription to The Paris Review and the London Review of Books for just $70 U.S. Already a Paris Review subscriber? Not a problem: we’ll extend your subscription to The Paris Review for another year, and your LRB …

The USPS, in its infinite wisdom, has finally put Flannery O’Connor on a postage stamp, but it’s kind of an ugly one. (Peacock feathers have never more resembled dune grasses.) Our art editor, Charlotte Strick, took a stab at a redesign: “I tho…

In its delicacy and volatility, the art of writing is rivaled only by the art of not writing: “There are years, days, hours, minutes, weeks, moments, and other measures of time spent in the production of ‘not writing.’ Not writing is working, a…

“Mannerism,” a poem by Rene Ricard from our Summer 1970 issue. Ricard was born on this day in 1946; he died last year. An obituary in the New York Times calls him “a notorious aesthete who roamed Manhattan’s contemporary art scene with a capaciou…

Explaining the Internet’s Joan Didion obsession is a tricky thing: “In the crossover of feminism, fashion, and literary interests, there is a whole swathe of the internet where Didion is a staple reference. Her borscht recipe can be found on the …

Head to St. Augustine, Florida, north of the Mission Nombre de Dios and south of the Vilano Bridge, and you’ll find it, as advertised—the Fountain of Youth. It’s open to the public from nine to six daily. Children’s admission is cheaper than …

Ice cream: delicious summertime treat or agent of moral turpitude? In fin de siècle Scotland, ice cream parlors “with mirrored walls and leather seats” became “the scourge of the prudish bourgeoisie, who saw them as papist dens of vice”: “…

As part of its new Project REVEAL (not an empty acronym: it stands for Read and View English and American Literature), the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin has digitized the papers of writers from the nineteenth and early twen…

This summer we’re offering a joint subscription to The Paris Review and the London Review of Books for just $70 U.S. Already a Paris Review subscriber? Not a problem: we’ll extend your subscription to The Paris Review for another year, and your LRB …

If you like asking big questions about, say, the presence of sentient life-forms elsewhere in the universe, then look to science fiction, which at its best functions philosophically: “What, then, does it really mean to be alone or not alone? If you…

A letter from Mark Twain to John T. Moore, July 1859. Moore, also known as Tom, was an “old river man” and a longtime friend of Twain’s. More than twenty years later, in 1883, this note appeared in The Arkansas Traveler and was afterward reproduced b…

In its early days, America decided to differentiate itself from its oppressors across the pond by giving the language a bit of a face-lift: we borrowed words from other tongues, reclaimed British words that had fallen into disuse, and—this is the r…

Nicole’s staff pick from earlier today reminded me: I’ve been meaning to draw attention to the riches of archive.org’s Magazine Rack, a clearinghouse for defunct, forgotten, and abstruse periodicals from decades past. Anyone interested in media…

Earlier this year, Donald Antrim gave a commencement speech at Woodberry Forest School. His subject was “the unprotected life” and coping with its devastations. For years after a long suicidal depression, he said, “I did not write. It was enoug…

Have you seen F. W. Murnau’s skull? From the neck up, the Nosferatu director has gone missing from his grave, which sits about twelve miles out of Berlin. No reward has been set, and no word given on whether his lovely throat remains intact.I do my b…

Iris Murdoch, who would be ninety-six today, thrilled to paintings of every stripe, but she was compelled by one work in particular: Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, from the late sixteenth century. She mentions it in her 1990 Art of Fiction intervie…

Philosophers are always telling us what to do and why to do it—telling us, in essence, how to rescue ourselves from childhood, how to grow up. For Vivian Gornick, their advice is lacking in what a college counselor might call real-world experience:…

If you haven’t heard, this summer we’re offering a joint subscription to The Paris Review and the London Review of Books for just $70 U.S. Everyone is excited about this deal—people, pets, pigeons.From now through August 31, post a photo of yourse…

From 1859 to 1870, Dickens edited All the Year Round, a literary magazine that declined to identify its contributors. But a newly discovered twenty-volume set teeming with Dickens’s annotations threatens to blow everyone’s cover: in pencil, Dicke…

From John Clare’s letter to Eliza Emmerson, March 1830. Clare, born on this day in 1793, came from poverty and is sometimes dubbed “the peasant poet”; he’s known for his expansive poems on rural life and for his eventual turn toward insanity.…

In postwar America, magazines like Esquire and Playboy helped to shape our concept of the bachelor: an unfettered man, a man in complete control of his life, a man who helped to preserve conventional masculinity even as he fretted over his appearance…

Proverbs are perfect examples of poetry’s seductiveness—and, in many cases, of its emptiness. “The brain craves ideas that can be understood and remembered without effort … But what happens when memorable advice is bad? ‘To thine own self b…

At 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, The Paris Review has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and The Paris Review have made recordin…

Our Summer issue features illustrations by Jason Novak for the first installment of Chris Bachelder’s new novel, The Throwback Special. Now you can see them here—including a particularly enchanting representation of an oviraptor ...With his suicide…

 At 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, The Paris Review has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and The Paris Review have made recordi…

“One cannot read a book,” Nabokov famously said, “one can only reread it.” That’s pleasant and all—certainly it flatters our sense of elitism, suggesting that “aesthetic appreciation requires exhaustive knowledge only of the best”—b…

Ken Kalfus is on his way to the bookstore, and he’s not having a swell time—because how can you, anymore? “Bookstores have become places of regret and shame. We once enjoyed shopping in them or simply looking in their windows, back in the days …

In Moscow, a new exhibition remembers Soviet Photo, the USSR’s premier photography magazine. Among its many treasures: gymnasts, factories, eggs … and a picture of Khrushchev and Castro drinking ebulliently from horns.Whither the aphorism? It’s…

In the sixth chapter of “Big, Bent Ears,” Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss’s “Serial in Documentary Uncertainty,” the pair turn their gaze to Lexington, Virginia, where Cy Twombly was born in 1928; he grew up four blocks from Stonewall Jackson…

Looking for good summer reading? Our editor, Lorin Stein, went on NPR’s On Point to discuss the season’s best books. Between 1935 and the early forties, the WPA issued some two million silkscreened posters. Whatever their subjects and intentions…

Like Richard Sharpe Shaver, a midcentury sci-fi writer who believed that an ancient civilization had embossed its complex history into “rock books,” Ken Grimes is convinced that humankind has defined communication too narrowly. A self-styled “v…

In South Korea, there’s a book so sagacious—so steeped in commonsense know-how and philosophical intrigue—that it’s whispered about at every level of society. It’s the Talmud, whose unlikely role in South Korean culture reads like something…

The narrator of “Yancey,” Ann Beattie’s story in our new Summer issue, is an aging poet; she tells of her encounter with an IRS agent who shows up to audit her. Toward the end, she recites a poem to him—James Wright’s famous “Lying in a H…

Our Summer issue features an interview with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, “the quiet rebels of Russian translation”—now Literary Hub has the longest excerpt of it you’ll see online. Among its many revelations, you’ll learn of Peve…

 It’s mid-June. Summer is in full swing. All the young people in your life have graduated; they’re preparing to embark on new journeys, to begin new lives, and by now they’ve received lavish, thoughtful presents from everyone in the family. Bu…

As an undergraduate at Harvard, T. S. Eliot risked flunking out—but fear not, for his febrile poetic mind was already hard at work: “He invented the characters of ‘Columbo’ and ‘Bolo,’ who for years to come starred in a series of scatol…

Today in Sisyphean undertakings for the greater good: Michael Mandiberg, an interdisciplinary artist, is “transforming the English-language Wikipedia into an old-fashioned print reference set running to 7,600 volumes … [He] describes the project …

Our Spring 2009 issue featured eleven collages by John Ashbery, who’s been working in the medium since he was an undergrad at Harvard—roughly the same time he began to write poetry. “One thing he obviously values in collage is its implied anyon…

“I see The Paris Review as much as an ‘object’ as I do a venerable and essential literary quarterly. The look and feel is both so important to the readers’ experience … The logo we now use was scanned from a midcentury back issue, and it has …

The history of our quest for eternal youth is a history of fools’ errands. It’s also, if your glass is half full, a buoyant tribute to the human imagination—or at least to the spirit of determination. We want so badly to stay young. We’ve sou…

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s 1949 Cré na Cille is a landmark work of Irish modernism, available now in a new translation called The Dirty Dust. It’s a must-read for connoisseurs of decomposition: “All the characters are dead and speaking from inside their…

Long before Kim Kardashian’s Selfish—before the selfie was technologically feasible, let alone a generation’s preferred form of self-expression—Pamela Singh was taking pictures of herself. Her innovative, curiously intimate efforts at self-port…

A letter from Ezra Pound to James Joyce, March 1918. Pound, then an editor for the New York magazine The Little Review, had arranged to serialize Joyce’s Ulysses; he feared its more scatological parts would result in confiscation from the government.…

Ben Lerner stares into the mire of futility and falsehood that is poetry: “What if we dislike or despise or hate poems because they are—every single one of them—failures? … The fatal problem with poetry: poems. This helps explain why poets th…

It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific prose available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: “Infringement,” the fourth chapter of Things to Kno…

We’re delighted to announce that Thomas David will be our third Writer-in-Residence—and our first biographer—at the Standard, East Village, in downtown Manhattan. He will be in residence for three weeks this July. We wish him a happy and producti…

John Berger is eighty-eight, and still seeing—which isn’t to commend him for having retained his eyesight, but to say he’s still an acute observer. “I live enormously through my eyes. The visible is simply a very important part of my experien…

Everyone holds up Anna Karenina as a milestone for realism—“We are not to take Anna Karénine as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life,” Matthew Arnold wrote—but Janet Malcolm raises an eyebrow at all that. “The book’s ‘astonis…

From “Renée Vivien,” an essay by Natalie Clifford Barney anthologized in A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney. Vivien, a poet who was born on this day in 1877, began an intense affair with Barney in 1899; in 1901, they broke up, …

Alice, of Wonderland fame, has osmosed right on into the culture and found a life of her own; we no longer need to read Lewis Carroll’s books to feel that we know her. But we should read Carroll—there’s a certain amount of drift between his Won…

An excerpt from Susan Howe’s “Defenestration of Prague,” originally published in our Winter 1982 issue. Howe, who was born in Boston, is eighty-eight today. “People often tell me my work is ‘difficult,’” she told the Review in 2012. “I have the sin…

Vincent Musetto, a New York Post editor who wrote “the most anatomically evocative headline in the history of American journalism”—HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR—has died at seventy-four. “But however lauded it became, it was not Mr. Musetto…

I like to root for the underdog, so I’m always comforted to find Satanism in the news. There are, after all, some two billion Christians in the world, and only about a hundred thousand Satanists; if the eternal war between good and evil is a number…

With machine translation growing ever more sophisticated, we may as well revive the old is-translation-an-art-or-a-science question—and ask if machine translation imperils human translation. “What mostly annoys human translators isn’t the arrog…

The French Canadian artist Guy Laramée, whom we’ve featured before on the Daily, has a new series of book sculptures, “Onde Elles Moran”—“Where They Live.” Laramée spent nine months on the series, which features Brazilian birds painted on …

At last, the time has come for robots to harness the single most powerful force known to humanity: metaphor. An attempt to teach emotional nuance to artificial intelligences, The Poetry for Robots project invites people—even decidedly unpoetic peop…

Two centuries ago, book critics were a reliably truculent bunch, their knives always sharpened, their authority indisputable—what happened to journals like Blackwood’s, which had what Karl Miller later called “squabash, bam, and balaam”? “Parod…

The fifth chapter of “Big, Bent Ears,” Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss’s “Serial in Documentary Uncertainty,” features the work of Richard Rothman, a photographer whose work demonstrates “depth, dedication, and skill in evoking the enigmati…

Barney Rosset, the “the downtown pugnacious outré rebel” (read: publisher of provocative texts), spent his final years immersed in an artistic experiment—transforming one of the walls of his East Village apartment into an elaborate mural. Now …

Before we commence with the dog and pony show for our brand spanking new Summer issue, you should know that the three interviews from our Spring issue are now available in full online.These include the first-ever in-person interview with Elena Ferran…

Jason Segel, who took on the role of David Foster Wallace in the new movie The End of the Tour, discusses how he studied for the role: he watched the Charlie Rose interview, read the collected nonfiction, and, yes, reckoned with Infinite Jest. And ye…

The Paris Review has a booth at Chicago’s Printers Row Lit Fest this Saturday and Sunday. Come find us in the Book Fort (not, to my knowledge, an actual fortress built of books) in Tent D, on South Dearborn between West Congress and West Harrison. …

A letter from Philip Larkin to Barbara Pym, July 18, 1971. The pair enjoyed a long, warm correspondence beginning in 1961; they met, at last, in 1975, at the Randolph in Oxford. “I shall probably be wearing a beige tweed suit or a Welsh tweed cape …

“My idea of hell on earth,” Philip Larkin wrote once, “is a literary party.” He had in mind the Oxford parties of his era, which, much like the Oxford parties of this era, comprised “a lot of sherry drill with important people.” But what …

Our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, writes with Bernard Haykel on jihadi poetry: “Analysts have generally ignored these texts, as if poetry were a colorful but ultimately distracting by-product of jihad. But … it is impossible to understand jihadi…

“My First Time” is a new video series in which we invite authors to discuss the trials of writing and publishing that first novel, that first play, that first book of poems. Consider it a chance to see how successful writers got their start, in t…

Face it, America: ours is a culture that hates clowns. Coulrophobia is real, and it is systemic. But how do its victims feel? “I want respect, and I don’t want respect,” Boswick, a clown from San Francisco, has said. “I want respect for who I…

David Graham’s “Where We Live: Photographs of the American Home” is at Laurence Miller Gallery through June 26. Graham’s photographs span more than thirty years; he aims to “document the American home as both sanctuary and playful expressio…

“My First Time” is a new video series in which we invite authors to discuss the trials of writing and publishing that first novel, that first play, that first book of poems. Consider it a chance to see how successful writers got their start, in t…

Jonathan Franzen gave his first interview about his new novel Purity yesterday, and even the Associated Press showed up: “Those who left early missed a highlight of the event, a self-described ‘rising sophomore at the University of Connecticut’…

From “On the Literary Life,” a series of excerpts from John Cheever’s journals published in our Fall 1993 fortieth-anniversary issue. Cheever, born on this day in 1912, had amassed twenty-eight notebooks by the time he died, in 1982; he wrote t…

“My First Time” is a new video series in which we invite authors to discuss the trials of writing and publishing their first books. Consider it a chance to see how successful writers got their start, in their own words—it’s a portrait of the …

You probably haven’t been worrying about John Ashbery, but if you have, don’t—he’s still got it. His new collection, Breezeway, expands the range and influence of what might be called his trash magic; reading his poems “is sometimes unnerving, as t…

Welcome to “My First Time,” a new video series where writers discuss the trials of writing and publishing that first novel, that first play, that first book of poems. This is a chance to see how successful authors got their start, in their own wo…

Milan Kundera has a new novel out, his first in a decade—but does anyone care? Kundera’s books epitomize a certain outmoded, chauvinist worldview: “I can’t help feeling that if anything will undermine Kundera’s long-term reputation … it w…

  From “The Designs for Motion,” a portfolio and interview with the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely from our Spring-Summer 1965 issue. “Today we can no longer believe in permanent laws, defined religions, durable architecture or eternal kingdoms,” Ti…

Today in “Let’s Pretend There’s a Trend”: Are long novels enjoying a day in the sun? There are, after all, many of them being published this year. “People seem to be seeking wholly immersive experiences,” says one publicist. “They’re binge-wa…

The Paris Review is known for its interviews. Our first issue, from Spring 1953, featured a conversation with E. M. Forster on the art of fiction, inaugurating a series that’s grown to include hundreds of poets, novelists, playwrights, translato…

Among the titles on Osama bin Laden’s bookshelf: Bloodlines of the Illuminati, Secrets of the Federal Reserve, an Adobe Acrobat manual, Noam Chomsky. Archivists at the University of Michigan have found fragments of Orson Welles’s unfinished autobi…

On the cover of a 1598 book, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, a historian claims to have found “the only demonstrably authentic portrait of Shakespeare made in his lifetime”; the editor of Country Life magazine is calling this “the lite…

Walter Russell (May 19, 1871–May 19, 1963) was the progenitor of a “new world-thought” centered on light; in books such as The Electrifying Power of Man-Woman Balance, The Book of Early Whisperings, and The Dawn of a New Day in Human Relations, he …

I also bought a teach-yourself drums book, carved two sticks, placed some books around me in a circle on the floor, the one on the left was the hi-hat, the one next to it the snare drum, and the three books above the tomtoms. —My Struggle, Book 3 …

After seventeen years, Judy Blume is publishing a new novel—for adults. “In so many of Blume’s books, her main characters’ bodies insist on their inherent, primal messiness; they crave, they ooze, break out in rashes as strange and humiliatin…

A letter from D. H. Lawrence to Bertrand Russell, February 1916. When the two men had met the previous year, they became fast friends, and had even planned to give a lecture series together—but their friendship quickly soured. “Gradually I discover…

Dag Solstad will appear at our Norwegian-American Literary Festival this week—isn’t it time you get to know him? “A literary provocateur and a national icon, an experimental writer who is also a favorite with the country’s top comedians, Dag …

Gay Talese has held on to his address book for fifty years, and he’s never erased a name. It has just the kind of history and pedigree that makes documentarians salivate—so, sure enough, it’s soon to be the subject of a documentary. “ ‘Do y…

Mika Rottenberg’s installation NoNoseKnows, showing now at the Venice Biennale, focuses on production, as much of her work does: in the video, we watch an assembly line of women making pearls. They turn hand cranks; they manipulate knitting needles; …

Today is the first-ever Dylan Day: a commemoration of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, which he debuted at 92Y (his voice “removed and godlike in tone”) on May 14, 1953. Dylan Day grants you a plausible reason to seize strangers by their lapels an…

Next week, we’re delighted to cohost the latest Norwegian-American Literary Festival, a series of readings, conversations, and musical performances coming to New York for three nights. As the events approach, we’ll be telling you more about what’…

The fourth chapter of Big, Bent Ears, Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss’s “Serial in Documentary Uncertainty,” pulls back the curtain on the art of documentary, and on one facet of that art in particular: chaos. As Weiss tells it, their attempts to…

As Thomas the Tank Engine turns seventy, it’s worth asking: What’s this talking train’s political agenda? A thoughtless pushover, fearful of going off the rails and fixed on his cohort’s industriousness, “Thomas resembles one of those prepo…

We’re delighted to announce that three of our contributors have won Pushcart Prizes this year: Zadie Smith, for “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets,” a story from issue 208; Dorothea Lasky, for her poem “Porn,” also from issue 208; and Jane Hi…

“Indigenous Architecture through Indigenous Knowledge,” a 52,438-word dissertation by a Ph.D. candidate named Patrick Stewart (not that one), “eschews almost all punctuation. There are no periods, no commas, no semicolons … ” Stewart “wanted …

This is the final week to see Charles Coypel’s extensive Don Quixote tapestries, paintings, prints, and books, on display at the Frick through May 17. Coypel, Louis XV’s painter, was commissioned by Paris’s Gobelins Manufactory to produce the s…

Chris Burden—who spent five days in a school locker, hammered a metal stud into his sternum, and had himself shot in the arm by a rifle from fifteen feet, all in the name of art—has died at sixty-nine. “Power was a central motif in Burden’s w…

A plea to the professoriat: If you really love the humanities, do them a favor and shut up about Shakespeare. “On the shrinking support for the liberal arts in American education … organizations such as ACTA and NAS mistake a parochial strugg…

In April 1889, only a few months before he died, Robert Browning became the first major literary figure to commit his voice to wax. At a dinner party held by the artist Rudolf Lehmann, Browning stood before the Edison Talking Machine—then new and e…

In defense of Kim Kardashian’s book of selfies, which is “arguably emblematic of the disruptions in image production and consumption that have taken place over the past decade on a significant, even revolutionary level”: “Though their circums…

It would be an understatement to say that Airan Kang is fixated on the book as a form—the South Korean artist’s exhibitions have bibliophilic titles, almost to a one: there’s “The Only Book,” for instance, plus “Hello Gutenberg,” “Lig…

Tim Parks on reading and the senses: “We have a vested interest in supposing that we are capable of projecting a kind of continuous movie of the events in a novel … The problem is that upon close examination the reading experience is far more com…

  At UC Berkeley, scholars have discovered a cache of stories by Mark Twain, written when he was a twenty-nine-year-old newspaperman in San Francisco. “His topics range from San Francisco police—who at one point attempted, unsuccessfully, to s…

It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific prose available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: the first chapter of Straw Hats: Their History and …

About a decade ago, Jonathan Gottschall pioneered “literary Darwinism,” a school of thought that interprets literature through the prism of evolutionary desires. By bringing biological concerns to English departments, he hoped to rescue the human…

On etiquette, art, and the increasing complications of public space: “Taking a selfie in a museum may be disruptive to others, and antithetical to the experience of art, yet given the option, most people will avoid walking through the line of sight…

From The Anti-Oedipus Papers, a set of notes and journal entries by Félix Guattari. When Guattari, born on this day in 1930, cowrote Anti-Oedipus (1972) with Gilles Deleuze, readers and scholars were baffled by their process; Guattari’s extensive d…

Our Spring issue, available now, features “Thesaurus Paintings,” a portfolio of text-based paintings and drawings from Mel Bochner. They have a focus on ordinary language, specifically the “emotional trajectory” that emerges when one riffs on…

Finnegans Wake, in all its difficulty, was only “crying out for the invention of the web, which would enable the holding of multiple domains of knowledge in the mind at one time that a proper reading requires.” A wealth of new projects online aim t…

“On the Ship,” a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy from our Spring 2005 issue. Cavafy was born on April 29, 1863; he died on his seventieth birthday. It certainly resembles him, this small
pencil likeness of him. Quickly done, on the deck of the ship;
an…

When he was in his early seventies and gravely ill, Goya began a series of private drawings, full of piss and vinegar and intended to amuse his friends—among them were pictures of naked witches, newborn babies tied to poles, and a procuress fingeri…

You may have noticed a Knausgaard theme on the Daily today, between our interview with his translator Don Bartlett and Ian MacDougall’s probing analysis of the author’s scatological side. We’re celebrating the release of My Struggle’s fourth volume…

It must be said: in this, his bicentennial year, Trollope is trending—and not just because, as we mentioned yesterday, one of his books is soon to become a TV show. “The quality of irony that we value today is omnipresent in Trollope—and that i…

Rachel Kushner, Francine Prose, Peter Carey, and at least three other prominent writers have declined to attend the PEN American Center Gala on the grounds that it honors Charlie Hebdo, known for its scathing portrayals of Muslims and “the disenfra…

M. H. Abrams, whose Norton Anthologies have united the bookshelves of English majors across time and space, is dead at 102. His seminal work, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), was that rare thing, a work of criticism that permeated the culture and chan…

An exchange between J. P. Donleavy—who’s eighty-nine today—and John Irving, from our Spring 1988 issue. Some two years previous, in his Art of Fiction interview, Irving had disparaged Donleavy at length, speaking of their meeting at the Iowa Wr…

Whitman’s Drum-Taps, his collection of Civil War poems, is 150 this month—and like the war itself, it’s still perplexing and angering people. Henry James, upon its release, called it “an insult to art … the efforts of an essentially prosaic m…

Earth: it’s a neat-looking place. Agèd. Spherical. Cerulean-ish. Problem is, there are more than seven billion people here, gumming up the planetary works with such “advances” as “buildings,” “indoor plumbing,” and “rust-proof tens…

Larry Kramer, seventy-nine, came of age at a time when being gay was still illegal; his latest opus, The American People, is kind of a novel, kind of not, very long, and very gay: “a history of hate [from] one among the hated.” “Most histories …

Give him your dog-eared, your tattered, your musty tomes yearning to breathe free, the shelf-worn refugees of your teeming library. He will smooth their pages and mend their binding. For he is Nobuo Okano, book repairman. An episode of the Japanes…

From Charlotte Brontë’s letter to her friend Ellen Nussey, April 2, 1845. Brontë and Nussey exchanged hundreds of letters; this one, written about two weeks before Brontë turned twenty-nine and two years before the publication of Jane Eyre, finds her…

Historically, U.S. novelists have made their subject “the American dream,” starry-eyed and ambiguous as it may be—but “has the American dream run out of road? Perhaps an exhaustion with national myths explains the recent advent of post-apocal…

Tomorrow evening (Tuesday, April 21), join us in Brooklyn at the BAMcafé, where our editor, Lorin Stein, will talk to Chris Ware as part of BAM’s Eat, Drink, and Be Literary series. Zadie Smith has said, “There’s no writer alive whose work …

From Les Paradis Artificiels (Artificial Paradises), Baudelaire’s 1860 book on hashish, a drug he referred to as “the playground of the seraphim” and “a little green sweetmeat.” Along with Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, an…

Readings from Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, and Czesław Miłosz are among the new recordings released by the Library of Congress, which has finally digitized some seventy-five years of magnetic-tape reels. Poetry i…

The art collective Le Gun (Steph von Reiswitz, Neal Fox, Chris Bianchi, and Robert Greene) has mounted “Tales from the Void,” a stealthy takeover of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, that Parisian mainstay. Their installation comprises hand-…

Though thousands of tweeting bibliophiles would have you believe there’s no such thing as too many books, there may be, in fact, a book surfeit: “It’s hard not to feel that we are in an era of massive overproduction. Just when we were already o…

If Thomas Pynchon writes systems novels, Steve DiBenedetto makes systems paintings—paranoid, erratic, vaguely interconnected. His latest exhibition, “Mile High Psychiatry,” up through Saturday at Derek Eller Gallery, has an air of zany premonit…

92Y has released recordings of Tomas Tranströmer reading his poem “Reply to a Letter” in 1989 and Seamus Heaney reading in 1971. “Heaney is in his early thirties on this 1971 recording,” Pura López-Colomé writes in a breathless commentary,…

The most famous version of Wordworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” or “Daffodils”—that landmark of English Romanticism, a pedagogical perennial that’s inspired thousands of stock photos of daffodil fields—turns two hundred this y…

“How do you rehabilitate your love for art works based on expired and inhuman social values—and why bother?” Elif Batuman reckons with racist literature. (Which is, after all, most literature: “These Turks took a pleasure in torturing childre…

We’ve featured Etel Adnan, who turned ninety this year, on the Daily before. A Lebanese American poet and artist, Adnan was born in Beirut; she lived in California for some fifty years before moving to Paris. She excels in many media—paintings, tap…

“It’s counterintuitive to think of the British Museum as a happening spot, but for a long time its reading room served as a premier gathering place for London’s brainy bohemians … It was also a pickup scene. Edward Aveling, a science lecturer…

A letter from Eudora Welty to Jean Stafford, September 2, 1949. Faulkner and Welty had met once before, when she presented him with the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction. William Faulkner took us sailing on his sailboat o…

Our Spring Revel was last Tuesday, and it was, as Gay Talese put it simply, “a real party,” a party for the ages. About five hundred of us gathered at Cipriani 42nd Street to honor Norman Rush with the Hadada Award, presented by James Wood, who recit…

Günter Grass, best known for his novel The Tin Drum, has died at eighty-seven. “Grass learned a lot from Rabelais and Celine and was influential in development of ‘magic realism’ and Marquez,” Orhan Pamuk said about him. “He taught us to ba…

At 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, The Paris Review has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and The Paris Review have made record…

On James Merrill, whose work “exists in part to reverse our bias against trivia”: “His work is replete with the transfigured commonplace, bits of the world reclaimed in his daily imaginative raids: an ‘Atari dragonfly’ on the Connecticut Ri…

At 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, The Paris Review has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and The Paris Review have made record…

Writers love to hate M.F.A.s; they also love to brag about them. Are the degrees worthless? Essential? Expansive? Detrimental to one’s creative impulses? “It’s no surprise that the promise of the M.F.A.—to make you, if you’re lucky, a famo…

At 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, The Paris Review has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and The Paris Review have made record…

When Richard Dawkins conceived of memes, he imagined them as units of culture, transmitted like viruses to contribute to our social evolution. But Internet memes have distorted the meaning of the term, arguably to uselessness. “Trawling the Interne…

At 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, The Paris Review has copresented an occasional series of live conversations with writers—many of which have formed the foundations of interviews in the quarterly. Recently, 92Y and The Paris Review have made record…

Richard Price talks to David Simon about crime, television, crime on television, and his father as a less-than-ideal reader: “I ran into him about three months after [my first novel] came out. It was one o’clock in the afternoon and he said, ‘C…

“April in the Berkshires,” a poem by William Matthews from our Spring 1987 issue. Matthews died in 1997. “Auden was wrong,” he said in a 1995 interview: “It’s not true that poetry makes nothing happen. It tends to work its wonders in a ve…

Charles Simic uses reading, as so many of us have, to cure insomnia: “I read only a passage or two, and at the most a page, because if I read more than that, I’m in danger of staying up half a night. All I require, to use a culinary term, is an amuse…

Poor Judas. He just can’t seem to catch a break—his is perhaps the most reviled name in history, even though he’s the only one of the apostles who has any identifiable human qualities. “At the ancient French Catholic shrine of Notre-Dame des …

The Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck’s new show, The Drawing Room, opens tonight at Marianne Boesky Gallery. Among its sculptures and watercolors—painted after nightfall, when “all of the machines in his studio were switched off, the phones stoppe…

From Ernest Hemingway’s letter to Colonel Charles T. Lanham, April 2, 1945. Hemingway described Lanham as “the finest and bravest and most intelligent military commander I have known”; he did, in fact, go on to make general. Original spelling a…

The politics of genre fiction: “the current preoccupations of the crime novel, the roman noir, the krimi lean to the left. It’s critical of the status quo, sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly. It often gives a voice to characters who are not c…

“I think I was way oversensitive as a kid, very much easily frightened,” Peter Saul said in an oral history for the Archives of American Art in 2009: I was frightened of movies, very scared. My mother was quite a fan of film noir and mystery s…

In which Tom McCarthy, Rachel Kushner, Paul Muldoon, and other writers are photographed in their offices: “Helicopters, the L.A.P.D.’s crazy hobby, thunder overhead, chasing some guy who stole a Honda Element,” Kushner writes of her home office…

For the third chapter of Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss’s “Big, Bent Ears: A Serial in Documentary Uncertainty,” we’re premiering their documentary on Nazoranai, an experimental improvisation trio. All the interviews and recordings come from l…

What accounts for Jane Austen’s unprecedented posthumous success? “Tolstoy, Dickens and Proust are all remembered, and still read, but they do not have countless fans throughout the world who reread their books each year, who eagerly await the la…

From “Soap,” by Francis Ponge, in our Summer 1968 issue. Ponge, a French poet and essayist born on this day in 1899, believed that “a mind in search of ideas should first stock up on appearances.” “Soap” is an excerpt from his Le Savon. There is so …

Luc Sante on listening to reggae in the late seventies: “General Echo, whose real name was Errol Robinson, was prominent in the rise of ‘slackness,’ the sexually explicit reggae style that began to eclipse the Rastafarian ‘cultural’ style …

This spring, Zachary Leader’s new life of Saul Bellow arrives—“transparently meant as a corrective to the authorized biography published by James Atlas in 2000, which presented Bellow as a racist and a woman-hater, among other things, and accel…

“Every now and then, when I’m tuning, I can make myself cry,” he said at one point. How can a piano tuner make himself cry? I thought to myself. What in the act of tuning would cause someone to do that? When I reviewed this footage months later…

So you’re making a work of art—congratulations! If you want it to endure physically for eons to come, thus imbuing you with a kind of immortality, you should look to the past: marble, granite, wood, rabbit-skin glue, oil paint, and other biolog…

In 2011, when Michel Houellebecq failed to show up for a book tour in the Netherlands, his three-day absence fueled ridiculous rumors: Had he disappeared? Was this an act of international terrorism? In fact, Houellebecq says, he’d just sort of forg…

Congratulations to Akhil Sharma, whose novel Family Life has won the Folio Prize. Writing the book, Sharma said, was “like chewing stones”: “I’m glad the book exists, I just wish I hadn’t been the guy who wrote it.” “The traditional co…

A letter, possibly unsent, from P. G. Wodehouse to Don Iddon, March 1954. Iddon, “a sleekly combed English reporter,” wrote a weekly column about life in Manhattan for the Daily Mail. “Many [British] readers,” Time wrote in 1951, “rely on Iddon's h…

The word glitch “may derive from Yiddish words conveying slippage”—and glitch art explores the grating moments of slippage in our technology. It is, depending on whom you ask, new, old, incisive, crass, “beatified violence, “ “the product…

Outside Kaliningrad, Immanuel Kant’s home still stands, and now it’s adorned with a loving note in his memory: “Kant is a moron.” Russian police have made it their categorical imperative to find the vandals. “With Arthur Schopenhauer dead f…

Assigning emotional values to words. Last month I wrote about Matthew Jockers’s research on the shapes of stories, which has since met with a welter of reactions within and without academe. His critics ask two questions, essentially: Is it reall…

Melville’s first book, Typee, is, like most literary memoirs, a fraud: though he certainly ventured to Polynesia, many of the events in the book are clearly created out of whole cloth—and they suggest how little we really know about the events of M…

Roz Chast does excellent work on paper—and sure enough, her latest memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, has just won a National Book Critics Circle Award—but I think her real medium is the egg. She’s been doing great things with pysa…

Ian Frazier on Steaming to the North, a new book of photographs that “provides another of the poignant rear-view-mirror visions of ourselves and our environment in which Americans specialize.” The book charts the journey of “the U.S. Revenue Cutter B…

When I saw the cover of Clifford A. Richmond’s The History and Romance of Elastic Webbing (1946) making the rounds on Tumblr, I knew at once I had to have it. I don’t know why, in retrospect. I paid seventeen dollars for a used copy. I have made a …

Chicago’s Goodman Theater is mounting a five-hour adaptation of Bolaño’s 2666. The production is underwritten by a grant from “an actor and stage manager turned Episcopal monk who pledged last year to give away much of his $153 million Powerball ja…

From “Another Disappointee” through “A Datum,” pp. 5–29 This is the first entry in our Mating Book Club. Read along. Here are a few of the things we learn about the narrator of Mating in the novel’s first twenty-five pages: She is an anthropolo…

On SimCity and the value of games that dared to make complex systems their protagonists: “SimCity is a game about urban societies, about the relationship between land value, pollution, industry, taxation, growth, and other factors … the game got us…

From William S. Walsh’s Handy-book of Literary Curiosities, a 1909 compendium of “bibelots and curios” from the world of letters. The critic Barbara M. Benedict has written that the Bottle Conjurer “promised to bring literature to life; to reve…

“Can a writer’s original inspiration survive success? Imagine you are Karl Ove Knausgaard at this point in his career … Why not enjoy success? Why not accept that you are a genius, if people insistently tell you that you are? One way or another…

The BBC has just reported that Terry Pratchett has died at sixty-six. Pratchett wrote more than seventy books, most of them part of his Discworld series: satirical, philosophical fantasy novels that earned him a wide readership, sometimes at the expe…

Frei Otto, the German architect whose tensile, tent-like constructions were marvels of structural engineering, has died at eighty-nine. He designed his bubbles, webs, and wings to use as few materials as possible; they challenged conventions of durab…

Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Tokyo noir.Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who created a dark, noirish style of Japanese manga he called gekiga, meaning “dramatic pictures,” died last week at seventy-nine. We featured a portfolio of Tatsumi’s work in our Spring 2006 is…

We’ve posted the first chapter of Big, Bent Ears, Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss’s “Serial in Documentary Uncertainty.” If you missed it, we launched the series last week; it’s a combination of video, audio, photography, and writing in vario…

The artist Tim Youd is retyping Lucky Jim, word by painstaking word, in public at the University of Leicester, on an Adler Universal typewriter—the same model Kingsley Amis used. “I’ve read everything before I retype it, so the suspense is gone…

In 1970, before he started on Crash, J. G. Ballard staged an exhibition of totaled cars at London’s New Arts Laboratory—“three crashed cars in a formal gallery ambience,” he called it in his Art of Fiction interview: The centerpiece was a …

The Warburg Institute, which dates to 1900, is one of Britain’s most peculiar libraries; in its radically open stacks, astrological guides sidle up to astronomy textbooks and science lives with magic. “In the past several years, the Warburg’s f…

New Yorkers: join us tomorrow at McNally Jackson, where our editor Lorin Stein will appear in conversation with Paul Beatty. Paul’s new novel, The Sellout, is out now; the Guardian calls it “a galvanizing satire of post-racial America,” and Sam…

On April 7, at our annual Spring Revel, we’re honoring Norman Rush with our Hadada Prize, presented each year to “a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” To celebrate, the Daily …

How does contemporary literature derive meaning in the age of big data? “The rise of corporate capitalism, and the astonishing, almost exponential rate of its recent acceleration, I would argue, present a huge challenge to the writer, forcing him o…

A letter from George du Maurier to his mother, March 1862. My dear Mamma, I have just received your letter which is disgustingly short and disappointing after I’ve been waiting day after day—as if you didn’t owe me a letter—fact is, you don’t c…

John McPhee on writing, illumination, and mustaches: “Robert Bingham, my editor at The New Yorker for sixteen years, had a fluorescent, not to mention distinguished, mustache. In some piece or other, early on, I said of a person I was writing about t…

Congratulations to the ten winners of this year’s Whiting Awards: Anthony Carelli, poetry Leopoldine Core, fiction Aracelis Girmay, poetry Lucas Hnath, drama Jenny Johnson, poetry Dan Josefson, fiction Elena Passarello, nonfiction Roger Ree…

Our ongoing quest to personify the weather.As I write this, the ominously named Winter Storm Thor is bringing his hammer down on the tristate area. Thor is pelting. Thor is dumping. Thor is lashing, coating, and causing havoc. He has an image problem…

When Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children was published in 1880, he had cut, presumably on a publisher’s order, some sixty-five thousand words—almost a quarter of the original manuscript. “Although Trollope did not delete any of his eighty ch…

Many of you know Sam Stephenson from his excellent contributions to the Daily over the years. But he also has, with Ivan Weiss, a documentary nonprofit called Rock Fish Stew—they’ve worked on projects about everything from jazz to baseball. And s…

Fiction has seen a preponderance of nameless narrators lately—in stories of the apocalypse, stories of exile, and/or stories of just about anything else. “The first few months of 2015 alone have brought us the following books with nameless protag…

After Faulkner won the Nobel Prize, he was a hot commodity abroad—he traveled to many foreign lands to bang the drum for the U. S. of A., which would’ve been fine, had he not been such a lush. The State Department circulated a memo called “Guid…

We’re gearing up for our Spring Revel here at the Review. Variously described as “the best party in town” and “prom for New York intellectuals,” it’s a tradition that stretches back … well, tens of years. In that time, archival evidence s…

What makes certain writing publishable while the rest of it, the bulk of it, is consigned to the slag heap? Kenneth Goldsmith’s UbuWeb has launched Publishing the Unpublishable,” a series of e-books dedicated to challenging the precepts of litera…

A letter from Saul Bellow to Jack Ludwig, circa February 1961. Ludwig and Bellow had met years earlier at Bard College, where they became close friends. Later, Ludwig began an affair with Bellow’s second wife, Sondra. The romance was something of…

Aquabob, clinkerbell, daggler, cancervell, ickle, tankle, shuckle, crottle, doofers, honeyfur, zawn … the English language has historically teemed with vivid, precise words to describe the landscape and natural phenomena. So what happened to all of t…

Victor Hugo wrote poetry, novels, and drama—more than enough for any mortal—but he also made some four thousand drawings over the course of his life. He was an adept draftsman, even an experimental one: he sometimes drew with his nondominant hand…