It’s free money,” I told my friend during a subway ride. “It’s as easy as watching TV in your head or playing with dolls.” ...

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages.

Antique friendly robot. Photograph by Thomas Quine, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Read the first ...

Ingmar Bergman spareness, your love of astrological signs, fluted lines, specific and sharp as stalactites in the cave of ...

Yan Lianke’s story “ Plants, Stones, Dirt, and Sky ,” translated by Jeremy Tiang, appears in the Fall 2025 issue of The Paris Review.

At the time she was writing Little Reunions, Chang had been living in Los Angeles for two decades. She was born in Shanghai in 1920, to an aristocratic family in decline; shortly after her birth, her ...

The old people are going apeshit for the mariachis. My dad and I are sitting on a bench in the plaza at the bottom of the hill, killing time before the next play. We were hoping to do a little reading ...

The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John ...

The mind is always too simply seeking meaning, trying to boil some beautiful thing down to its conceptual essence. What can stun the mind into quietness? What can briefly flummox the mind in its quest ...

I tend not to think that stuff other people think is obvious is obvious. Everyone feels like they have some sense of Frost. Everyone knows a poem or two. That kind of overexposure lends an aspect of ...

The Winter issue of The Paris Review opens with “Camouflage,” a story by Adania Shibli, the first line of which nudges us, ominously, toward a much broader picture: “We have nothing to do with what’s ...

Tom Fitzharris and Edward Gorey met one afternoon in 1974 when Fitzharris, long a fan of Gorey’s books and illustrations, bumped into him outside of the Town Hall, the performance space in Midtown ...