The Paris Review

The spark for Hélène Bessette’s third book came while she was on holiday with her two sons on the northern coast of France. One night, they heard a gunshot in the hotel where they were staying; Bessette later read in the newspaper that a boy had shot and killed his father. She continued to follow the case, and at some point began to reconstruct her findings on the page. A reader will quickly realize, however, that Bessette is not interested in anything like a straightforward true crime story; wh

Photograph by Stephanie Wambugu. Once we had ventured far enough into America to no longer be anywhere near the mood-lit wine bars and overrun coffee shops of North Brooklyn, where I live, secession began to strike me as not only possible but inevitable, as if it were only a matter of time before we all realize this Union is a house too tenuous, inharmonious, and ill-defined to remain standing, and act accordingly. From state to state, there is such variation in accents, languages spoken, climat

Contact sheet: Peter Hujar self portraits on heel, 1974, gelatin silver print, 8.5 x 11″, 2013.108:8.2110. Peter Hujar Collection, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, 2013.   Only a decade ago, just mentioning the photographer Peter Hujar required explanation. “He took that famous picture of Susan Sontag, recumbent with tired eyes.” Or: “He made gorgeous black-and-white photos of writers, artists, dancers, beautiful men, em

At a glance, Rachel Aviv’s new book looks like a conventional kind of essay collection: six pieces drawn from more than a decade of writing for The New Yorker, framed by a new preface. You Won’t Get Free of It gathers some of Aviv’s most celebrated portraits, including those of Hannah Upp, who disappeared three times in nine years during episodes of dissociative fugue, and Andrea Robin Skinner, whose childhood abuse was suppressed within her family even as her mother—the writer Alice Munro—refra

Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, Non-Violence, 1980, bronze, 79 x 44 x 50″ (donated by Luxembourg, 1989). All photographs courtesy of the author. On January 30, 2026, the New York Times published an article with the headline “U.N. Says It’s in Danger of Financial Collapse Because of Unpaid Dues.” The United States owes the lion’s share of those dues—95 percent, totaling about $2.2 billion. Eight days prior, the charter for a new organization called the Board of Peace had been signed in a ceremony

From Alex Da Corte’s Rubber Pencil Devil. The cover of our new Summer issue features a detail from The End, a painting by the Venezuelan American artist Alex Da Corte. Da Corte works across film, sculpture, installation, and performance; using costumes and prosthetics, he has assumed the guises of Eminem, Mister Rogers, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Pink Panther, and Marcel Duchamp, among countless others. At the beginning of June, I went to Philadelphia to speak with Da Corte in his studio,

Ronnie O’Sullivan at the German Masters, 2012. Photograph by DerHexer, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. When I arrived in Sheffield, England, last year and walked to the Crucible Theatre, it was not immediately clear that I was approaching the mecca of a sport watched by millions. Sheffield feels more like a large village, whose greatest claim to historical fame is industrializing so-called crucible steel, which revolutionized the cutlery trade. Today it has a reputation

Photograph by Erik Drost, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. At times of especially blessed sports spectatorship, which the Knicks’ past few weeks have undoubtedly been, I often return to David Foster Wallace’s 2007 essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.” Ostensibly a pan of the tennis player’s 1992 memoir, Beyond Center Court, the piece is really about the perceived chasm between a great athlete’s genius and their apparent inability to talk about it after the fact. Whether player

Glowing tree mold photographed after the October 1968 eruption of Kilauea volcano in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. In 2015 I was dating three fellows at once. A mudder, a lawyer, and a prince. The mudder was Greek and on weekdays he did something with computers in a sealed room where dust meant ruination, and on weekends he’d train to race in this extreme obstacle course where you had to crawl under barbed

Graphic designers and proofreaders—and the businesses and governments they work for—usually succeed at eliminating errors in the text of signs, shirts, and ads. In Taiwan, the normal standards seem relaxed for the English-language portions. I’m not sure why Taiwan has so much English—maybe due to optimism regarding tourism and business. Whatever the reason, it has resulted in widespread error-ridden, idiosyncratic, and unintentionally poetic English in public typography. I took these photos duri

Screenshot of Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return. I first got sober at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019. Two days into the festival, I woke up with my ever-present hangover in a hilltop apartment lent to me by a Parisian friend. After deciding to spend my modest savings on what should have been a cinephile’s fantasy vacation, my initial endorphin cloud cleared to reveal my true motivations: an attempt to escape depression, temporarily forget my unemployment, and ward off paralysis about what

Nijinski Dancing by Lincoln Kirstein. All photographs courtesy of Hannah Piette. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Four poems by Hannah Piette appear in our new Summer issue, no. 256. Here, she dissects “Nijinsky Dancing.”   How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I was tasked in a drawing class to draw a figure in space. I knew at once where to find

As we were working on our new Summer issue, my partner and I began fostering a rescue dog, a seven-month-old pit bull named Woody. Left to his own devices on a sidewalk, Woody has the manner of someone searching for a lost earring. Often, having found the thing he was apparently looking for, he refuses to budge. It was only after we had spent a couple of weeks dragging him down our street that a friend advised that, without being given time to sniff at things, he was exhausting his body but not

Photograph by G. Edward Johnson, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. In an apt omen of things to come, the first prefight press conference for UFC Freedom 250 opened with an AI-generated promotional video and ended with an unplanned altercation. It was early May; the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s “D.C. Takeover”—the culmination of Donald Trump’s promise to bring the UFC to the White House—was still more than a month away. But UFC President Dana White convened the event’s stars fo

Cassadaga front office. Photograph by Greta Rainbow. Friday, March 27, 2026 When I waded into the Florida humidity, Mom and Mimi were waiting for me at curbside pickup, three hours after the worst airport security I’d ever experienced. The TSA line at JFK had snaked around the sidewalk. I’d cut shamelessly.  I hugged my mother first, then her mother. I’d last seen Mimi at Uncle Dan’s funeral almost two years before, and I hadn’t been down to Florida in ten. I used to spend every spring break in

Seth Lemmons, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Early on in Opera Fever, her newest collection of poetry, Chelsey Minnis asks: “Is this a poem or the back of a shovel?”—something that can literally take off the back of your head. This January, I read a dozen or so noir novels from the thirties and forties. People were smothered with towels, bludgeoned in bathtubs, beaten to death with glass decanters, and killed by stray bullets at dance marathons. Some weeks, I watched a noir fil

Borderline by Timothy Ely, front (left) and back (right) cover. Photographs by Max Ross. Late in the week I got an email from one of my book dealers. He was at a fair in New York and thought he’d found a buyer for Timothy Ely’s Borderline, a unique artist’s book I’d placed with him on consignment. It was welcome news; we’d been trying to sell Borderline for two years. Before traveling to New York, he’d asked if we might lower the price, from ten thousand dollars to seven thousand and five hundre

Robinet Testard, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Translator’s Note: This piece uses the medieval-period translation technique of inserting metacommentary directly into the text when a detail is dubious or has no verifiably accurate translation. The technique is used here to highlight, play with, and contribute to Dávila’s own footnotes regarding unreliable facts within the autofictional narrative. This version adds another layer to the communally constructed story, first published in Spani

Edvard Munch, The Sick Child (1855–1886), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The Sick Child by Edvard Munch is undoubtedly a highlight of Norwegian painting, still compelling and touching, still unsurpassed. The odd thing is that the painting seemingly came out of nothing: Munch was twenty-one years old when he painted it, he had hardly any education, hardly any experience as a painter, and he painted it on the very outskirts of provincial Europe, in a Kristiania where, only a few decades bef

Photograph by Lazaregagnidze, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. I began growing kumquat trees after my German hairdresser—who fixes BMWs and fills his salon with large, flapping plants—pulled a pale fruit off one of his containers’ branches and told me to keep it in my pocket for three days to ripen. I wrapped the kumquat, the size of my thumb pad, into a Kleenex to be transported in my winter coat. It was a new year. I drove back to a house built in the 1700s—owned by a