Sarah M. Broom. Photo: Adam Shemper. Over the holiday weekend, I devoured The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom’s remarkable and deeply researched memoir about her family’s New Orleans home. The youngest of twelve siblings, Broom grew up in a lively—and a

In this previously unpublished essay, the legendary Imagist H.D. muses on the Greek bucolic poet Theocritus. Photo of H.D. taken from a postcard inscribed “To Marianne Moore, H.D.,” ca. 1921. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Where the Greek voic

Writing a weekly column for a Dutch newspaper is a good way to lose heart. Not because whatever topic you choose, you’re bound to receive slews of emails from readers who disagree with you, or because of the amount of hatred people tend to offload in

Advertisement for Mary MacLane’s film Men Who Have Made Love to Me, 1918. Photo: Perfection Pictures / Essanay Film Manufacturing Company / George Kleine System. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. “I of Womankind and of nineteen years, will now be

When my grandmother died she owned no property, personal or real; no goods, durable or consumable. Personal property is also called movable property, personalty, movables, chattels (chattels first meant goods and money, and later came to be associate

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Re

In her new monthly column, “Detroit Archives,” Aisha Sabatini Sloan explores her family history through iconic landmarks in Detroit.  Inside the Whitney Mansion in Detroit A few weeks ago, I met up with my mom and her friend Judy at a Detroit brunch

In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Let’s play “guess the novel”: It was written and first published in French in the mid-50’s, and is set over the course of a single summe

Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college. It has run every Friday this month, and will return for a month each in the winter, spring, and summer. The next installment will arrive the first Friday

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. My thrifty-housewife version of Ma’s “scrap bag” is this colorful mixture of sanding sugar left over from children’s parties. l used it to make

The second season of our celebrated podcast is here to carry you away from all the troublesome sounds of Thanksgiving squabbles. And if you’d like to know how something so excruciatingly exquisite gets made, read on for a behind-the-scenes interview

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Re

Drawing of project for Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. Architectural design by Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius. Photo of original work taken in Harvard Art Museums. Via Wikimedia Commons. Grouping writers into “schools” has alwa

John Vincler’s column Brush Strokes examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world.  Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), 1973. Collection of Aaron I. Fleischman © Vija Celmins, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Ga

© paul / Adobe Stock. “Nigger music,” he said. He paused and thought deeply for a moment. “Yeah, that’s what we do: full on nigger music. It’s fucking great.” I wasn’t quite sure what to say so I leaned into the couch and mumbled something like, “Tha

Our column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Originally begun by Emma Garman, it will now be written by Joanna Scutts.  Mary Heaton Vorse. Mary Heaton Vorse, prolific novelist, journalist, and labor ac

Rev. Pedro Pietri, ADÁL, 1990 On an unremarkable street corner in East Harlem, diagonal from a big gray battleship of new housing development, sits the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, which everyone calls the Centro. This fall, I went to the Centro

Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Caffe Trieste, 2012. Photo: Christopher Michel (CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)). Via Wikimedia Commons. I have always loved November. I don’t know if that’s because I was born in it or because i

Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college. It will run every Friday this month, and then return for a month each in the winter, spring, and summer. I’m sliding into the corner booth when Steve set

Photo: Watson Perrygo. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archive, via Wikimedia Commons. My first encounter with Paulé Bartón’s folktales came in the unlikeliest of places: trawling through the deep wilderness of HTML on the back end of The Par

In the corner of the gallery stands an unassuming white cube. A panel on the front of the cube periodically yawns open, revealing an endless, wondrous, lamp-lit nighttime. And then the door closes, extinguishing the dream. Even in the dreary November

A writer I know, being a little flip, once said that you need to know only three things about James Merrill: he was gay, he was rich, and he was serious about Ouija. The subtext is that it’s already hard enough to be taken seriously as an artist, a w

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 month, Sarah Kay is on the line. Dear Poets, My romantic li

On the day of my induction by, and first visit to, the august institution of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, I was shown to the literature section of the portrait gallery and left there alone among the giants. This may have been a kind of h

Jorge Luis Borges at his office, Argentine National Library, 1973 Let me see if I can summarize this famous short story. I’m going from memory. A guy—Borges—explains that the Zahir is a twenty-centavo coin. If you’re like me, you think, Okay, that’s

Bohumil Hrabal and his cats. When we’d all made it through the winter, and spring had arrived, a small tabby cat showed up at our place and she was pregnant. By this time, Blackie was pregnant, too. The two cats loved each other and, because they wer

A sometimes brutal journey, the length of which we cannot know: making a book is like life in that way. How long it will run? Because a composed book is so finite-seeming, so finished-looking, dazzling even, trying to deconstruct and remember how it

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Re

Gustav Wertheimer, The Kiss of the Siren, 1882 Four surfboards leaned against the wall in an unfamiliar room on the far edge of the city. I’d woken up after two hours of sleep in a bed too small for two people. The concert the night before had been l