Ten days after calling off her engagement, CJ Hauser travels to the Gulf Coast to live among scientists and whooping cranes.

When I was growing up, I could not have imagined that K-pop would be popular in North American or European media. I understood the history and existence of racism and linguistic nationalism.

When I was growing up, I could not have imagined that K-pop would be popular in North American or European media. I understood the history and existence of racism and linguistic nationalism.

  Susan Sontag lives in a sparsely furnished five-room apartment on the top floor of a building in Chelsea on the west side of Manhattan. Books—as many as fifteen thousand—and papers are everywhere....

At Hurston’s tombstone, in a run-down burial ground, the plot was flush with cash, dominos, a rhinestone statement necklace, a pack of cigarettes, and a bottle of sparkly red nail polish.

In the early 1960s, when Ursula K. Le Guin began to publish, science fiction was dominated by so-called hard sci-fi: speculative fiction grounded in physics, chemistry, and, to a lesser extent,...

  There is no direct flight from New York City to Clinton, Ontario, the Canadian town of three thousand where Alice Munro lives most of the year. We left LaGuardia early on a June morning, rented a...

  This interview was conducted over several days in the living room of a Manhattan apartment by the East River. For the last meeting Sam Shepard arrived at the end of a late-afternoon snowstorm, his...

Milan Kundera, ca. 1980. Photograph by Elisa Cabot This interview is a product of several encounters with Milan Kundera in Paris in the fall of 1983. Our meetings took place in his attic apartment...

Courtesy of Philip Roth   I met Philip Roth after I had published a short book about his work for the Methuen Contemporary Writers Series. He read the book and wrote me a generous letter. After our...

  Susan Sontag lives in a sparsely furnished five-room apartment on the top floor of a building in Chelsea on the west side of Manhattan. Books—as many as fifteen thousand—and papers are everywhere....

In the early 1960s, when Ursula K. Le Guin began to publish, science fiction was dominated by so-called hard sci-fi: speculative fiction grounded in physics, chemistry, and, to a lesser extent,...

David Orr on the popular misconceptions surrounding the iconic poem.

COURTESY OF FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX   Robert Gottlieb is a man of eclectic tastes, and it is difficult to make generalizations about the authors he has worked with or the hundreds of books he has...

James Baldwin in Hyde Park, London. Photograph by Allan Warren, The Paris Review No. 129.   This interview was conducted in the two places dearest to James Baldwin’s struggle as a writer. We met...

In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week,...

Neil Gaiman remembers the time Ursula K. Le Guin threw a bombshell at the 2014 National Book Awards.

In 1985, after seventeen New York publishers had rejected City of Glass, the lead novella in The New York Trilogy, it was published by Sun and Moon Press in San Francisco. The other two novellas, G...

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river? Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air—an armful of white blossoms, a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it...

  Legend has it that on his deathbed the actor Edmund Gwenn answered director John Ford’s “What is dying like?” with a reflective, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” By any measure—quantity, quality,...

Ten days after calling off her engagement, CJ Hauser travels to the Gulf Coast to live among scientists and whooping cranes.

James Baldwin in Hyde Park, London. Photograph by Allan Warren, The Paris Review No. 129.   This interview was conducted in the two places dearest to James Baldwin’s struggle as a writer. We met...

Ten days after calling off her engagement, CJ Hauser travels to the Gulf Coast to live among scientists and whooping cranes.

Fran Lebowitz, ca. 2011. Photograph by Christopher Macsurak   Fran Lebowitz’s trademark is the sneer; she disapproves of virtually everything except sleep, cigarette smoking, and good furniture. Her...

  Simone de Beauvoir had introduced me to Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre, whom I had interviewed. But she hesitated about being interviewed herself: “Why should we talk about me? Don’t you think...

Twenty-five years ago, Sven Birkerts published “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.” Have his fears and projections come to pass?

James Baldwin in Hyde Park, London. Photograph by Allan Warren, The Paris Review No. 129.   This interview was conducted in the two places dearest to James Baldwin’s struggle as a writer. We met...

Reading is at once a lonely and an intensely sociable act. The writer becomes your ideal companion—interesting, worldly, compassionate, energetic—but only if you stick with him or her for a while,...

In 1985, after seventeen New York publishers had rejected City of Glass, the lead novella in The New York Trilogy, it was published by Sun and Moon Press in San Francisco. The other two novellas, G...

“Ghosts abounded—but were they real?”

For National Library Week, Stuart Kells basks in the magic, the strangeness, and the musty glory of libraries.

We are very sorry to hear of the loss of our admired and beloved contributor John Ashbery.

  A. S. Byatt lives and writes in her handsome west London house and, in the summer months, in her house in the south of France. Both are filled with art, predominantly by her contemporaries,...

  Marguerite Young published her first collection of verse, Prismatic Ground, in 1939. In 1945 came the double appearance of Moderate Fable, her last volume of verse, and Angel in the Forest, a...

Hannah Ewens embeds with the bravest contingent alive: fangirls.

The board of The Paris Review Foundation is pleased to announce the appointment of Emily Stokes as the next editor of ‘The Paris Review.’

  The board of The Paris Review Foundation is pleased to announce the appointment of Emily Nemens as editor of The Paris Review. She will be the fifth editor in the sixty-five-year history of The...

Ten days after calling off her engagement, CJ Hauser travels to the Gulf Coast to live among scientists and whooping cranes.

James Baldwin in Hyde Park, London. Photograph by Allan Warren, The Paris Review No. 129.   This interview was conducted in the two places dearest to James Baldwin’s struggle as a writer. We met...

  Gabriel García Márquez was interviewed in his studio/office located just behind his house in San Angel Inn, an old and lovely section, full of the spectacularly colorful flowers of Mexico City. The...

  Helen Hennessy Vendler was born in Boston in 1933. She studied chemistry at Emmanuel College, a Roman Catholic school for women in Boston, and went to the University of Louvain after graduation on...

  Simone de Beauvoir had introduced me to Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre, whom I had interviewed. But she hesitated about being interviewed herself: “Why should we talk about me? Don’t you think...

Stephen King began this interview in the summer of 2001, two years after he was struck by a minivan while walking near his home in Center Lovell, Maine. He was lucky to have survived the accident, in...

On joy, cultural empathy, and the K-drama ‘Crash Landing on You.’

Reading is at once a lonely and an intensely sociable act. The writer becomes your ideal companion—interesting, worldly, compassionate, energetic—but only if you stick with him or her for a while,...

  Gabriel García Márquez was interviewed in his studio/office located just behind his house in San Angel Inn, an old and lovely section, full of the spectacularly colorful flowers of Mexico City. The...

A short story must be, by definition, short. That’s the trouble with short stories. That’s why they’re so difficult to write.

Toni Morrison, ca. 2008. Photograph by Angela Radulescu   Toni Morrison detests being called a “poetic writer.” She seems to think that the attention that has been paid to the lyricism of her work...

  The man who wrote The Remains of the Day in the pitch-perfect voice of an English butler is himself very polite. After greeting me at the door of his home in London’s Golders Green, he immediately...

A comic strip from ‘Department of Mind-Blowing Theories.’

“When I watch Phil playing these parts in films that now capture a distant past, in roles that have become familiar to us, I can see so much of who he was.”

Crying won’t make you feel better. We only think that it will, or, perhaps more important, think that at some point in the past it did.

The first time I called Umberto Eco, he was sitting at his desk in his seventeenth-century manor in the hills outside Urbino, near the Adriatic coast of Italy. He sang the virtues of his bellissima...

James Baldwin in Hyde Park, London. Photograph by Allan Warren, The Paris Review No. 129.   This interview was conducted in the two places dearest to James Baldwin’s struggle as a writer. We met...

The first time I called Umberto Eco, he was sitting at his desk in his seventeenth-century manor in the hills outside Urbino, near the Adriatic coast of Italy. He sang the virtues of his bellissima...

Fran Lebowitz and Danez Smith reflect on the impact Toni Morrison had on their lives.

Toni Morrison, ca. 2008. Photograph by Angela Radulescu   Toni Morrison detests being called a “poetic writer.” She seems to think that the attention that has been paid to the lyricism of her work...

As a stripper, I was an independent contractor, free to work as many or as few nights as I wanted. My days were all mine and at some point during that period, I began to use my daytime hours to write...

The intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible work of Audre Lorde is as relevant in this century as it was in her own.

In which Anthony Bourdain tells a joke.

Welty, circa 1962, Wikimedia Commons   I met Eudora Welty in her room at the Algonquin Hotel an hour or so after her train had arrived in Penn Station. She had given me the wrong room number, so I...

There is a very rich tradition of stories like ‘Lady Bird.’ You just have to know that you want it. And then you have to know where to find it.

An exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art features work by fourteen key members of the influential photography collective the Kamoinge Workshop.

The best mathematics, like the best literature, will continue to cause intense emotional satisfaction to thousands of people after thousands of years.

This fall’s freshmen will be the first college students whose answer to the question, Where were you on 9/11? will be: I wasn’t born yet.

Hilma af Klint's strange spiritual works predate those of any other abstract painter by several years. Long unknown, she is now the subject of a retrospective at the Guggenheim.

  Gabriel García Márquez was interviewed in his studio/office located just behind his house in San Angel Inn, an old and lovely section, full of the spectacularly colorful flowers of Mexico City. The...

In the early 1960s, when Ursula K. Le Guin began to publish, science fiction was dominated by so-called hard sci-fi: speculative fiction grounded in physics, chemistry, and, to a lesser extent,...

Fran Lebowitz, ca. 2011. Photograph by Christopher Macsurak   Fran Lebowitz’s trademark is the sneer; she disapproves of virtually everything except sleep, cigarette smoking, and good furniture. Her...

  Susan Sontag lives in a sparsely furnished five-room apartment on the top floor of a building in Chelsea on the west side of Manhattan. Books—as many as fifteen thousand—and papers are everywhere....

Photo by Sophie Bassouls / Sygma via Getty Images, Courtesy The Ray Bradbury Literary Works, LLC. Ray Bradbury has a vacation house in Palm Springs, California, in the desert at the base of the Santa...

Though her books have only been in circulation for eight years, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that N. K. Jemisin could one day be one of the greatest living science fiction writers. She may already...

The French Revolution and the invention of the guillotine allowed Charles-Henri Sanson, whose family had been executioners for generations, to become a hero—but the glory was brief.