The Paris Review

There’s a Russian phrase that translates as something like “kitchen talk” and refers to the kind of conversation that, in the postwar Soviet Union, could happen only around the kitchen table. Previously, apartments had been almost always communal, with stovetops shared by multiple households. Suddenly, in poky single-family khrushchevka, a new social culture arose. In a steamy kitchen, you could share risky anecdotes, engage in political debates, and read from samizdat, especially if the tap was

Dorothea Lasky, via Wikimedia Commons; licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (left). Mother, Wave Books (right). Across ten collections of poetry and prose, Dorothea Lasky has shown herself to be a writer of formidable range. One of her books is based on The Shining; another, about Sappho, is forthcoming. Memory, her most recent collection of nonfiction, includes essays about fashion, Satanism, David Hockney, roses, anger, and Bernadette Mayer. But this omnivorousness belies a unified sensibility, one dra

All photographs courtesy of Hannah Berger. The Meadow Event Park in Doswell, Virginia, lies on a few hundred acres of flat land abutted by farms and an amusement park called Kings Dominion. It’s the kind of place where animals and vegetables get sorted out. When I told a shearing friend I was heading there, he told me he’d just been there, too, for “sheep stuff.” The crest of an orange roller coaster peeked through the trees as I parked beside several RVs, all of them accompanied by some form of

Courtesy of the Estate of Richard Yates. Richard Yates has a reputation for bleakness. But while the works for which he is best known—the novels Revolutionary Road (1961) and The Easter Parade (1976), as well as the story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962)—do feature a cast of unhappy souls, they are also often funny. So are his letters, which have never before been published.  Yates’s papers, maintained by his three daughters, include decades of correspondence; this selection of

Ghadeer Bustani, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. In 1677, a medical student named Johann Ham approached the Dutch scientist and future “Father of Microbiology” Antonie van Leeuwenhoek with unsettling news: there were tiny creatures living in his semen. Or not in his semen, not necessarily. Some incorrigible friend—someone who certainly wasn’t Ham—had dislodged his wad in the company of an “unclean woman” and then transferred custody of his deposit by means unattested into Ham’s hands. Curio

Every month, our desks at the Review pile up with dozens of soon-to-be published books, only some of which involve writers we have heard of, or subjects we know anything about. More often, we wind up with a mix somewhere between that of a cabinet of curiosities and a Little Free Library stocked by an indecisive grad student; this summer, for example, alongside many debut novels and NYRB reissues, we found an Italian chapbook of cat-themed poems from the eighties and a semiepistolary critique of

In the Lake District, 1994. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews for our readers from our archive. This week, we’ve unlocked our interview with Hermione Lee, selected from the archive by Daisy Hildyard, whose story “Two Lives” appears in our recent Summer issue. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces to your inbox every Sunday morning. Everybody dabbles in biography. If you have ever spoken at a funeral, rewritten your CV, or gossiped, you’ve had t

Photograph by Kathleen McNamara. In the time between his first submission to the Review, in February of last year, and the publication of his short story “Lil Spooky” in our new Summer issue, the writer Chad Fore and I exchanged almost a hundred emails. I also read several of his stories, which tend to be somewhat autobiographical, at least in the sense that they often take place in one of Fore’s two neighboring hometowns—Piru and Fillmore, in Southern California—and are rich with the kind

Photo by Claire Carusillo. June 12, 2026 Our shop is in an old service station in a charming alpine town nestled within Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. Here’s the oomph of it: Avery, the only person who works here besides Galen and me, sells coffee in a waiting room we’ve converted into a bar. In the first garage bay, Galen sells skateboards and enormous pairs of shorts. In the second garage bay, I sell books and art supplies and an assortment of Korean-formulated sunscreens. Some people have been cal

Courtesy of The Jonestown Institute at San Diego State University, via Wikimedia Commons. From the outset there seemed to be little mystery as to the facts of the case at Jonestown. The victims included over nine hundred men, women, and children of People’s Temple, the majority of them Black Americans from the San Francisco Bay Area (which matters). The scene of the crime was an agricultural commune in the South American nation of Guyana (not a coincidence). The murder weapon (the word “suicide”

Courtesy of Max Callimanopulos. The first one thousand fans through the gates of the Aqueduct Racetrack on the last Sunday of June received a commemorative vial of track dirt. I arrived too late to claim mine, but I spotted several as I walked out to the grandstand. A few old men clutched them tightly while watching the races. Others used them as paperweights to keep their stacks of betting slips from blowing away. “Magic charm,” said a man in a Vietnam War Veteran hat, flashing his little jar a

Courtesy of Ottessa Moshfegh. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews for our readers from our archive. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces to your inbox every Sunday morning. The first thing you learn about the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Bettering Myself,” published in issue no. 204 of the Review, is that she pukes in the nuns’ bathroom in the mornings. Miss Mooney is a jaded teacher at a Ukrainian Catholic school, prone to showin

Still from UNBROKEN: The Untold Story of Shen Yun. © 2026 Sincere Films, courtesy of Paulio Shakespeare and NTD.  There’s this old joke from the Cold War. An American is on a flight next to someone from the USSR; they strike up a friendly conversation. The American says: “I’m really impressed by your country’s propaganda. It’s so persuasive, so sophisticated.” The Soviet is sheepish. “Thank you, but it’s nothing compared to yours,” he says. The American blanches. “What do you mean? We don’t have

Bill Buford with Granta, between 1979 and 1985. Photograph by Bernard Gotfryd, courtesy of the Library of Congress. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. In 1984, Bill Buford, an American literary editor in his late twenties, began devoting his spare time to following “football hooligans”—a distinctive tribe of fans known for committing acts of violence and vandalism on match days. English soccer in those days was associated with brutality on the “terraces” (the standing area at stadiums) and in

Photograph courtesy of Molly Cooper. In the mideighties, at my mother’s insistence, my father started seeing a psychoanalyst named Dr. Stein, who had an office on East Ninety-Sixth Street. I was around nine or ten, and could reliably be found camped out on the carpet in front of our family television, recording or rewatching scenes from my favorite shows, or poring over the latest issues of Teen Beat and Bop, a pair of nail scissors handy to clip out celebrity photos for my bedroom walls. I don’

Anatomical drawing of a human figure with dissected torso, 1927. Exposition d’art Medico-Historique, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Like many doctors I know, I found myself being peppered with questions from friends and patients—some genuinely curious, others more finger-wagging—after The New York Times Magazine published a long piece in the spring about the “discovery of a third circulatory system.” Recent experiments had shown that foreign materials such as tattoo ink or chem

“An ambitious adaptation of the Odyssey, enacted by us children.” Photograph courtesy of Emily Wilson. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews for our readers from our archive. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces to your inbox every Sunday morning. In 2017, to accompany her translation of the Odyssey, which was excerpted in issue no. 221 of the Review, Emily Wilson wrote a piece for our website in which she recalls performing in a children’s produc

Fire (circa 1805), William Blake, The Morgan Library via Wikimedia Commons. The philosopher’s stone, desired by alchemists for its mythic ability to transmute lead into gold, was once in Philadelphia. Johannes Kelpius—mystic, monastic, and magician—supposedly came into possession of said stone shortly before his death in 1708. But rather than letting it be acquired by less reputable occultists, he dispatched a confidant to throw it from Germantown’s banks deep into the water of the Wissahickon C

Hannah Tishkoff, Beginning of a Poem, 2026, colored pencil on found wood, 9 x 9.5 x 1 in, from issue no. 256. Courtesy of Hannah Tishkoff and OCHI, photograph by Deen Babakhyi. In the airport the bald man with the salt-and-pepper mustache is saying to three women, Unless you’re a comedian—listen to me—unless you’re a comedian, it’s not smart to have a favorite expression. In the mirror I see a bug crawl down my face, eliciting curses. But it’s just a dark wound in the mirror, an immobile injury

Maaysra, Lebanon. The site of an Israeli air strike that destroyed a house and killed fifteen people in the small village of Maaysra, north of Beirut. Hezbollah installed a poster blaming the United States for the deaths. Photograph by Jacob Russell. In Lebanon the rains usually start around the end of October. There is little transition from summer. One day the weather is fine. The next great squalls come off the sea accompanied by thunder that shakes the walls. So we were cutting it close,