Paris Review

  • A Family Tradition

    “Maybe it’s the glow from the new miniature lamppost from the Caroler collection my brother ordered that literally cast my mother’s dolls in a new light or the realization that they’ve been with our family for so long, but I’m…

  • Rejection Woes

    Over at The Millions, several esteemed editors discuss their journals’ rejection policies. Magazines represented include The Paris Review, Hobart, The Rattling Wall, The Harvard Review, and others. It is wonderfully humbling as a writer to be reminded how difficult the…

  • David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: MFA in the Palm of Your Hand

    Released just the other day, the new Paris Review app is slender, simple and, for the cost of absolutely nothing, is already worth as much, nay more, than any MFA education now on the market. Why? Because the free app…

  • “I Was There”

    William Dereseiwicz’s luminous response to Kurt Vonnegut’s oeuvre recently printed by the Library of America, is a critique as much as it is hero-worship. Dereseiwicz confronts Vonnegut’s novels from his earliest to his last, focusing on Vonnegut’s zenith in moral seriousness and…

  • Carlos Fuentes, 1928-2012

    Carlos Fuentes has died at 83. Here’s an extensive 1981 conversation between the Paris Review and the author. “I think all writers live off of obsessions. Some of these come from history, others are purely individual, and still others belong…

  • Gunmar’s Daughter Panorama

    At the Paris Review, Rumpus artist Jason Novak has created a ten-foot tall panel illustration of Sigrid Unset’s Gunnar’s Daughter, a novel with “the great dark and bizarre appeal of Icelandic legend recycled for an Edwardian audience ready to be shocked.”

  • Poetry and Politics

    The Paris Review shares an interview with Pablo Neruda conducted in 1970 just before the poet withdrew his presidential candidacy. “I have never renounced the expression of loneliness, of anguish, or of melancholia. But I like to change tones, to…

  • Burrowing

    “Cappadocia had been cobwebbed by trade routes in those days and was constantly under attack; the underground cities served as fortification from invaders…What made me curious was that the ancient inhabitants were believed to live underground for months at a…

  • ,

    Airline Crisis Art

    Is the airline safety card more a work of the imagination than an actual instructional manual? This article guides us through the history of the often ignored “art of airline crisis.” “Is it possible that in the golden age of…

  • Remembering Jorge Luis Borges

    Today would have been the 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges, the esteemed Argentine writer who championed the science fiction genre with his depictions of unreality. This is an archived Paris Review interview he did back in July of 1966…

  • Remembering Nabokov

    Four days ago was the anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov’s death and this Paris Review blog remembers the wordsmith/butterfly catcher as the compelling professor and famous author that he became. There’s even a vague Lady Gaga comparison/reference. And did you know…

  • Magazine Review #6: Paris Review, Issue 196

    The most important—and surprising—thing about this issue of The Paris Review: Roberto Bolaño’s lost novel. This is very exciting for fans of the Chilean writer (I happen to be a somewhat obsessive one) and even more so because The Paris…