Staff Picks: Turkeys and French Cinema
Most accounts of turkeys in literature describe the process of hunting or cooking them (Teddy Roosevelt’s sketch of stalking the “peevish piou-piou! of the sleepy birds” is rather lovely, even though...
View ArticleStaff Picks: Alcoholics Anonymous, Hollywood Star Whackers
Clancy Martin. Photograph by David Eulitt. The cover story in this month’s issue of Harper’s: “The Drunk's Club,” by Clancy Martin. An irreverent, harrowing, tough-minded account of Martin’s experience...
View ArticleWhat We’re Loving: Don B., B. Dole, /u/backgrinder
“How hard was it to supply archers arrows in ancient battles?” Bryson Burroughs, The Archers, 1917. Sozzled novelists (aka, lit lit) seems to be the thing to write about lately, but it’s more fun to...
View ArticleRealism for Everyone
Donald Barthelme would’ve been, and should be, eighty-three today. It would be an exaggeration to say that I feel the absence of someone I never met—someone who died when I was three—but I do wonder,...
View ArticleRaskolnikov Meets the Caped Crusader, and Other News
Image via Open Culture If you’re having trouble getting serious reading done, you can go ahead and blame the Internet, which fosters deleterious skimming habits. “It was torture getting through the...
View ArticleThe Birth (and Death) of Edward Lear
You’d think it would be easy to invent nonsense words. After all, the real lexical bummer usually rests in the burden of definition: your average neologism has to mean something. Nonsense words, on...
View ArticleUnder the Volcano
John Gardner in 1979. Photo via Wikimedia Commons I think that the difference right now between good art and bad art is that the good artists are the people who are, in one way or another, creating,...
View ArticleOn Paul Metcalf’s Genoa
Metcalf’s “poeticized collage” reckons with his great-grandfather, Herman Melville. Paul Metcalf It is extremely rare, these days, to encounter something that feels completely new. That is, most...
View ArticleThe “Splendidly Cranky” Utopian: An Interview with Curtis White
Curtis White first came to public attention as a culture critic with his best-selling The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves (2003). Dubbed “splendidly cranky” by Molly Ivins and...
View ArticleOrnery Little Critters
S. J. Perelman, ca. 1957.From a letter sent by S. J. Perelman to Betsy Drake, dated May 12, 1952. Perelman, one of the most popular humorists of his time, was born on this day in 1904; he died in 1979....
View ArticleBastille Day Sale
George Plimpton loved Bastille Day. He also loved the Fourth of July and Saint Patrick’s Day—any event, really, that occasioned a parade and the shooting off of fireworks. “Ecstasy after ecstasy” and...
View ArticleAnother Passionless Day
Our complete digital archive is now available. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe...
View ArticleStaff Picks: Gasps, Giant Cubes, Gay Bars
Toshio Matsumoto’s masterly 1969 debut about queer life in Toyko, Funeral Parade of Roses, has been playing in a beautiful new restoration this week at Quad Cinema; I walked down from our office...
View ArticleJohn Gardner’s Tricksy Death and Tangled Legacy
From the cover of John Gardner’s Grendel. I think it has given a few readers pleasure. And I suppose it may have depressed a few. I hope it does more good than harm. —John Gardner, when asked what...
View ArticleRaskolnikov Meets the Caped Crusader, and Other News
Image via Open Culture If you’re having trouble getting serious reading done, you can go ahead and blame the Internet, which fosters deleterious skimming habits. “It was torture getting through the...
View ArticleThe Birth (and Death) of Edward Lear
You’d think it would be easy to invent nonsense words. After all, the real lexical bummer usually rests in the burden of definition: your average neologism has to mean something. Nonsense words, on...
View ArticleUnder the Volcano
John Gardner in 1979. Photo via Wikimedia Commons I think that the difference right now between good art and bad art is that the good artists are the people who are, in one way or another, creating,...
View ArticleOn Paul Metcalf’s Genoa
Metcalf’s “poeticized collage” reckons with his great-grandfather, Herman Melville. Paul Metcalf It is extremely rare, these days, to encounter something that feels completely new. That is, most...
View ArticleThe “Splendidly Cranky” Utopian: An Interview with Curtis White
Curtis White first came to public attention as a culture critic with his best-selling The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves (2003). Dubbed “splendidly cranky” by Molly Ivins and...
View ArticleOrnery Little Critters
S. J. Perelman, ca. 1957. From a letter sent by S. J. Perelman to Betsy Drake, dated May 12, 1952. Perelman, one of the most popular humorists of his time, was born on this day in 1904; he died in...
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