In the Current Issue
Agues and Fugues
By Martha Ronk
What David Foster Wallace Ate
By Valerie StiversThe writer David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) didn’t really eat food. When I met him, in 1996, when I was twenty-three years old, I really couldn’t cook, though it wouldn’t have occurred to me to consider this something we had in common. Wall…
The Daily
Eat Your Words
A Wrestler With Sharks
By Richard YatesNobody had much respect for The Labor Leader. Even Finkel and Kramm, its owners, the two sour brothers-in-law who’d dreamed it up in the first place and who somehow managed to make a profit on it year after year even they could take little pride in the thing. At least, that’s what I used to suspect from the way they’d hump grudgingly around the office, shivering the bile-green partitions with their thumps and shouts, grabbing and tearing at galley proofs, breaking pencil-points, dropping wet c…
From the Archive, Issue 13
Fiction
James Joyce’s Baby Talk (and Swift’s and Lear’s)
By Anthony MadridI don’t know that much about what babies actually say. I don’t have any. The ones I’ve seen in people’s apartments didn’t say anything. In one of my poems, I call babies “the crying people.” Heard plenty of that. The ones who said t…
The Daily
Arts & Culture
Little Expressionless Animals
By David Foster WallaceIt’s 1976. The sky is low and full of clouds. The grey clouds are bulbous and wrinkled and shiny. The sky looks cerebral. Under the sky is a field, in the wind. A pale highway runs beside the field. Lots of cars go by. One of the cars stops by the side of the highway. Two small children are brought out of the car by a young woman with a loose face. A man at the wheel of the car stares straight ahead. The children are silent and have very white skin. The woman carries a grocery bag full of someth…
From the Archive, Issue 106
Fiction
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Redux: Such Is the Way with Monumental Things
By The Paris ReviewEvery 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 Daily
Redux
Exile
By Donald HallEach of us waking to the window’s light / Has found the curtains changed, our pictures gone; / Our furniture has vanished in the night / And left us to an unfamiliar dawn
From the Archive, Issue 1
Poetry
It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?
By Jay McInerneyYou are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But you are here, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are a little fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head.
From the Archive, Issue 86
Fiction
An Exchange
By Jeffery DonaldsonTo the Editor: With reference to your interview with John Irving appearing in your Winter 1987 edition in which Mr. Irving alleges I was rude and snubbed Mr. John Cheever during a visit to Iowa: I was not carrying a cane at the time but remember a request from Mr. Irving to speak with him privately which I did and during which meeting I suggested to him, that if he had the option to leave the cosy world of teaching, it was better to go suffer and p…
