The Paris Review
@parisreview.bsky.social
Quarterly literary magazine founded in 1953.
https://www.theparisreview.org/
https://theparisreview.substack.com/
https://www.theparisreview.org/
https://theparisreview.substack.com/
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Our Winter issue is here—featuring interviews with Hélène Cixous and Alice Oswald, prose by Eve Babitz and Gwendoline Riley, poetry by Jana Prikryl and Ed Roberson, art by Joan Jonas and Mieko Meguro, a cover by Adebunmi Gbadebo, and more: ssl.drgnetwork.com/flex/TPR/254/
“There are hardly any good poets I don’t like.” —Helen Vendler
Helen Vendler, The Art of Criticism No. 3
“A female who expresses herself decisively seems to this world someone armed with ammunition.”
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February 19, 2026 at 11:01 PM
“There are hardly any good poets I don’t like.” —Helen Vendler
“A character moves between sky and earth, from a god to a mortal, and back again, in no time at all.” —Ismail Kadare
Ismail Kadare, The Art of Fiction No. 153
“I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long…
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February 19, 2026 at 8:01 PM
“A character moves between sky and earth, from a god to a mortal, and back again, in no time at all.” —Ismail Kadare
“From Reagan to Trump, history keeps—if not exactly repeating itself—then certainly stuttering. From disaster to disaster, we never seem to learn, to remember.” —Allan Gurganus
Allan Gurganus, The Art of Fiction No. 248
“It takes one durable person to believe that fantasy is as potent as reality. Seeing too far into others’ lives can make you cynical.”
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February 19, 2026 at 2:01 PM
“From Reagan to Trump, history keeps—if not exactly repeating itself—then certainly stuttering. From disaster to disaster, we never seem to learn, to remember.” —Allan Gurganus
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The Paris Review Newsletter
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February 18, 2026 at 11:01 PM
Add literature to your life by signing up for our poetry newsletter to receive an archival poem to your inbox every weekday morning.
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“It didn’t make much sense for me to start writing. My financial circumstances weren’t such that I could afford to be a writer. I didn’t even have a pen.” —Imre Kertész
Imre Kertész, The Art of Fiction No. 220
“I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.”
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February 18, 2026 at 8:01 PM
“It didn’t make much sense for me to start writing. My financial circumstances weren’t such that I could afford to be a writer. I didn’t even have a pen.” —Imre Kertész
“This is all a masquerade.” —Joy Williams
Joy Williams, The Art of Fiction No. 223
“I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don’t do anything with it, you lose it.”
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February 18, 2026 at 2:02 PM
“This is all a masquerade.” —Joy Williams
Stay up to date with the Review by signing up for our Weekly newsletter. Each Friday, you’ll receive a recap of some of the most recent work we’ve published on our website.
The Paris Review Newsletter
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February 17, 2026 at 11:01 PM
Stay up to date with the Review by signing up for our Weekly newsletter. Each Friday, you’ll receive a recap of some of the most recent work we’ve published on our website.
“We need poetry to keep expanding so that it can account for the actual lives that people are living.” —Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch, The Art of Poetry No. 110
“It’s part of your job, as a poet, to write out of experience. To name what matters to you. You’ve only got one life to draw on.”
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February 17, 2026 at 8:01 PM
“We need poetry to keep expanding so that it can account for the actual lives that people are living.” —Edward Hirsch
“Novelists have more of a chance of lasting than historians do. We get supplanted pretty easily. The only way you have a shot at extending your shelf life is by seeking to find and write what you think is the truth.” —Annette Gordon-Reed
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Art of Nonfiction No. 11
“We law professors have a certain arrogance— we think we can be experts on anything.”
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February 17, 2026 at 5:06 PM
“Novelists have more of a chance of lasting than historians do. We get supplanted pretty easily. The only way you have a shot at extending your shelf life is by seeking to find and write what you think is the truth.” —Annette Gordon-Reed
“I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation.” —Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag, The Art of Fiction No. 143
On Yeats’s assertion that one must choose between the life and the work: “Of course, if by life you mean life with other people, Yeats's dictum is true. Writing requires huge amounts of solitude.”
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February 17, 2026 at 2:03 PM
“I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation.” —Susan Sontag
Each week, we unlock from our archive stories, poems, and interviews for our readers.
Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces—by writers like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Kazuo Ishiguro—to your inbox every Sunday morning. buff.ly/vSg5ygo
Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces—by writers like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Kazuo Ishiguro—to your inbox every Sunday morning. buff.ly/vSg5ygo
The Paris Review Newsletter
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February 16, 2026 at 11:01 PM
Each week, we unlock from our archive stories, poems, and interviews for our readers.
Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces—by writers like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Kazuo Ishiguro—to your inbox every Sunday morning. buff.ly/vSg5ygo
Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces—by writers like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Kazuo Ishiguro—to your inbox every Sunday morning. buff.ly/vSg5ygo
“The problem of the narrator is the first problem, and it remains that way forever. How can you remove the narrator from a novel?” —László Krasznahorkai
László Krasznahorkai, The Art of Fiction No. 240
“The smallest details are a question of life and death. A mistake in a sentence kills me.”
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February 16, 2026 at 8:02 PM
“The problem of the narrator is the first problem, and it remains that way forever. How can you remove the narrator from a novel?” —László Krasznahorkai
“What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.” —Mary McCarthy
Mary McCarthy, The Art of Fiction No. 27
“Point of view is the problem that everybody’s been up against since Joyce, if not before. I think this technical development has become absolutely killing to the novel.”
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February 16, 2026 at 5:03 PM
“What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.” —Mary McCarthy
“When you know you’ve hit the right notes, you just sit there and read the same paragraphs over and over and over again.” —Edward P. Jones
Edward P. Jones, The Art of Fiction No. 222
“Until I can read a story physically, with the eyes, it doesn’t seem to exist for me.”
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February 16, 2026 at 2:01 PM
“When you know you’ve hit the right notes, you just sit there and read the same paragraphs over and over and over again.” —Edward P. Jones
“A routine would be too much like work, and I don’t really like to work, even though I work a great deal. All the things I do that might be considered work are really a form of play.” —Jamaica Kincaid
Jamaica Kincaid, The Art of Fiction No. 252
“I suppose that my work is always mourning something, the loss of a paradise—not the thing that comes after you die, but the thing that you had before.”
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February 15, 2026 at 11:01 PM
“A routine would be too much like work, and I don’t really like to work, even though I work a great deal. All the things I do that might be considered work are really a form of play.” —Jamaica Kincaid
“Grand ideas kill first efforts. Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret.” —Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208
"It’s because you’re always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way."
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February 15, 2026 at 8:01 PM
“Grand ideas kill first efforts. Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret.” —Louise Erdrich
“The history of literature is accounts of consciousness that wouldn’t hold up in a court of law but do hold up on the page and in our hearts and minds.” —Hilton Als
Hilton Als, The Art of the Essay No. 3
“I’ve kept asking questions and trying, through writing, to understand where I come from.”
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February 15, 2026 at 2:02 PM
“The history of literature is accounts of consciousness that wouldn’t hold up in a court of law but do hold up on the page and in our hearts and minds.” —Hilton Als
“Don’t worry about what motivates you to write. If you want to impress your girlfriend, that’s okay. Once you start, the writing takes over.” —Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, The Art of Fiction No. 253
“Gĩkũyũ is the language I feel more. English is just what I’m used to now.”
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February 14, 2026 at 8:01 PM
“Don’t worry about what motivates you to write. If you want to impress your girlfriend, that’s okay. Once you start, the writing takes over.” —Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
“Writing is a way to be in love and not be hurt.” —Hilton Als buff.ly/SyIQCZI
February 14, 2026 at 6:02 PM
“Writing is a way to be in love and not be hurt.” —Hilton Als buff.ly/SyIQCZI
“The best writing is certainly when you are in love.” —Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21
From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation…
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February 14, 2026 at 2:02 PM
“The best writing is certainly when you are in love.” —Ernest Hemingway
“I was a chain-smoker—so that tells you something. Tobacco was the only vegetable I liked.” —Elaine Scarry
Elaine Scarry, The Art of Nonfiction No. 12
“I see my writing on imagination and on war as continuous. Or rather, the two subjects are essentially locked in combat.”
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February 13, 2026 at 11:01 PM
“I was a chain-smoker—so that tells you something. Tobacco was the only vegetable I liked.” —Elaine Scarry
“White writers tell our stories, but we have the ability to occupy some of the space.” —Ishmael Reed
Ishmael Reed, The Art of Poetry No. 100
“I worked at a library and that’s where I first read James Baldwin. I think it was Notes of a Native Son. It stopped me cold.”
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February 13, 2026 at 8:02 PM
“White writers tell our stories, but we have the ability to occupy some of the space.” —Ishmael Reed
“The most clichéd Native images used to be suggested for the cover design, so I fought to have some say.” —Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208
"It’s because you’re always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way."
buff.ly
February 13, 2026 at 2:01 PM
“The most clichéd Native images used to be suggested for the cover design, so I fought to have some say.” —Louise Erdrich
Each week, we unlock from our archive stories, poems, and interviews for our readers.
Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces—by writers like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Kazuo Ishiguro—to your inbox every Sunday morning. buff.ly/vSg5ygo
Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces—by writers like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Kazuo Ishiguro—to your inbox every Sunday morning. buff.ly/vSg5ygo
The Paris Review Newsletter
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February 12, 2026 at 11:01 PM
Each week, we unlock from our archive stories, poems, and interviews for our readers.
Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces—by writers like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Kazuo Ishiguro—to your inbox every Sunday morning. buff.ly/vSg5ygo
Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces—by writers like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Kazuo Ishiguro—to your inbox every Sunday morning. buff.ly/vSg5ygo
“Men have so often written about women without knowing the reality of their lives, and worse, without being interested in that daily reality.” —Grace Paley
Grace Paley, The Art of Fiction No. 131
“One of the first things I tell my classes is, If you want to write, keep a low overhead.”
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February 12, 2026 at 8:02 PM
“Men have so often written about women without knowing the reality of their lives, and worse, without being interested in that daily reality.” —Grace Paley