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Staff Picks: ‘DOC,’ ‘Luminous Airplanes’
H. L. “Doc” Humes in Greenwich Village, ca. 1961. Photo: Courtesy of the Humes family. A gregarious talker, novelist, activist, hippie, druggie, filmmaker, and original hipster, Harold L. “Doc” Humes...
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Philip Hensher on ‘King of the Badgers’
Philip Hensher. King of the Badgers, Philip Hensher’s seventh novel, comes on the heels of his ambitious, fictional survey of seventies Britain, The Northern Clemency. King of the Badgers focuses on...
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Anne Enright on ‘The Forgotten Waltz’
The writer Anne Enright, a native of Ireland, is perhaps best known for her 2007 Booker Prize winning novel The Gathering, a darkly beautiful novel about a family gathering in the wake of a suicide....
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William Kennedy on ‘Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes’
Revolutionary times fuel William Kennedy’s newest book, Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, which follows the career of journalist Daniel Quinn. The novel’s first half takes place in 1957 Cuba, where...
View ArticleDocument: The Symbolism Survey
In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did...
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Anthony Giardina on ‘Norumbega Park’
In five novels and a collection of short stories, Anthony Giardina has written about the conflicts at the intersection of social class, family, and sexuality. Recent History explores the anxieties of...
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Dear Paris Review, Where Do I Publish?
Dear Editors: Have made writing full time. Have novel and short essays. Attended NYU’s Summer Writer program last year. Would you have a good list of places for submissions beyond The Paris Review,...
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Nimble Surrealism: Talking with Gabrielle Bell
Whether delving into memorable personal stories or exemplifying a sort of nimble surrealism, Gabrielle Bell’s comics are harder to classify than one might think. Reading her work chronologically, one...
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Drunk Texts from Famous Authors
We’re out this week, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2012 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year! Read More »
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Underwear Life: An Interview with Francesco Pacifico
Francesco Pacifico’s novel The Story of My Purity is narrated by Piero Rosini. This Piero seems like most other modern schlubs—thirty, overweight, bourgeois, in a sexless marriage, you know it—but the...
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Bride of Gertrudestein, and More Literary Halloween Ghouls
Tim Taranto hails from Upstate New York and attended Cornell. In addition to The Paris Review Daily, his work has appeared on the Rumpus and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Tim lives in Iowa City,...
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“The Swimmer” and The Swimmer
It’s John Cheever’s birthday, and courtesy of 92Y, you can listen to a recording of the author reading his most famous story, “The Swimmer,” in December 1977. It’s easy to shrug off such a canonical...
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Ovid (or You) in Ossining, and Other News
Photo: Jason O'Neal, via Newsweek Want to buy John Cheever’s old house in Ossining? Have at it. (A mailbox bearing the Cheever name is still there.) On the late Thomas Berger’s Arthur Rex, a 1978...
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The Cowboys of Europe, and Other News
From The Sons of Great Bear, a 1966 Romanian Western. The Western is an integral part of the Hollywood canon, but European filmmakers weren’t about to let Americans have all the fun. Germany and France...
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Party Line
Not Nabokov’s kind of place. Reading about the parties of decades past, it sometimes seems they were all similar, and all awful—or at least that they had an intolerably high jerk quotient. Think of the...
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M.F.A. vs Donleavy
John Deakin’s portrait of J. P. Donleavy in London, 1950s. An exchange between J. P. Donleavy—who’s eighty-nine today—and John Irving, from our Spring 1988 issue. Some two years previous, in his Art of...
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False Alarm
Cheever, right, with Updike on The Dick Cavett Show in 1981. From “On the Literary Life,” a series of excerpts from John Cheever’s journals published in our Fall 1993 fortieth-anniversary issue....
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Cheddar, Cheever, and the Burbs
An illustration from Muriel Stanek’s How People Live in the Suburbs, 1970.Fifty years ago, John Cheever published The Wapshot Scandal, his second novel. Like many second novels, it’s more ambitious and...
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The Ghost in the Machine, and Other News
A man and his son listen to their battery radio, September 1946.Jonathan Franzen investigates the necessary and sufficient features of that classic, oft-maligned form, The New Yorker story: “What made...
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We Guarantee It
From a vintage Sealy mattress ad.“Oh my God,” I said, turning to my husband with tears in my eyes.“What is it?” he asked, understandably alarmed. The train had stopped at a Connecticut...
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