Clik here to view.
These Penguins Won’t Baptize Themselves
Frank Papé’s endpapers for Penguin Island. Image via the George Macy Imagery.Anatole France won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921; the award committee, maybe taking a cue from his surname, lauded...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Super Sad Woman
On Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s La femme de Gilles.From the cover of Melville House’s new edition of La femme de Gilles.It’s probably not unusual to read a novel whose protagonist bears your own name if your...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Paris from Camus’s Notebooks
We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! Albert Camus. The myth is tenacious: an unknown writer on the verge of international fame,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lamplight and Shadow
Patrick Modiano’s novels gaze through “the glass wall of our consciousness of history.” Patrick Modiano In a French TV show from 1990, the forty-five-year-old Patrick Modiano wanders around a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hugo, Inc.
Les Misérables was born of one of the riskiest—and shrewdest—deals in publishing history. An 1878 caricature of Hugo from La Petite Lune. Earlier this month, Penguin Random House bid more than...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Same Ol’ Shit, and Other News
A sample of Basquiat’s work with Samo(c) I’ve been thinking of getting a tattoo, but all the good ones are taken. Part of the genome sequence of a polar bear? Taken. Abraham Lincoln holding a boombox...
View ArticleClik here to view.
You Lost Your Glove, and Other News
I took the photo above outside The Paris Review’s offices in December 2014. I still think about it sometimes, mainly when I’m listening to Prince’s Batman soundtrack or zip-lining between New York...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Politics of the Mosh Pit, and Other News
The mosh pit at Endfest, in Washington, D.C., 1991. The mosh pit is a great place to reach a state of pure being. It’s also a great place to break your glasses, your jaw, or your spirit. The pit has...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nadar’s Livre d’or
Adam Begley interviews Ali Smith in our new Summer issue. Begley’s new book, The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera—a biography of the fabled Parisian photographer Félix Nadar—is out this month....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Obligatory Readings
I still remember the day when the teacher turned to the chalkboard and wrote the words test, next, Friday, Madame, Bovary, Gustave, Flaubert, French. With each word, the silence grew, and by the end,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cooking with Georges Bataille
It is an unfortunate quirk that when I try to think of food scenes in literature, one of the first that comes to mind is from the opening pages of a 1928 classic of transgressive pornography, The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On Edmond Baudoin, an Ink-Stained Proust
Edmond Baudoin is a force of nature who holds a singular position in the French comics scene. An ink-stained Proust, his drawings and his memory keep bringing him back to the small, Southern French...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Staff Picks: Sports, Sontag, and Scheherazade
SLASH. Image courtesy of Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey. Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey’s play SLASH is so enjoyable it’s like having dessert for two hours with no intermission. One advertisement...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cooking with Colette
In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Any writer who has recently been the subject of a film starring Keira Knightley can be said to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Balzac and the Reassembly of France
Louis Boulanger, Balzac, 1836. In the 1820s, when Honoré de Balzac decided to become a writer, the novel was a minor literary genre in France. Like Voltaire, educated French people preferred poetry and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Redux: April in Paris
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In Praise of Travel, Particularly on Horseback
Carolus-Duran, Equestrian portrait of Mademoiselle Croizette, 1873, oil on canvas. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Michel de Montaigne is best imagined on horseback; firstly, because that was how...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Politics of the Mosh Pit, and Other News
The mosh pit at Endfest, in Washington, D.C., 1991. The mosh pit is a great place to reach a state of pure being. It’s also a great place to break your glasses, your jaw, or your spirit. The pit has...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nadar’s Livre d’or
Adam Begley interviews Ali Smith in our new Summer issue. Begley’s new book, The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera—a biography of the fabled Parisian photographer Félix Nadar—is out this month....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Obligatory Readings
I still remember the day when the teacher turned to the chalkboard and wrote the words test, next, Friday, Madame, Bovary, Gustave, Flaubert, French. With each word, the silence grew, and by the end,...
View Article