October 2, 2026 On Children's Books On Children’s Books: Faith Ringgold’s The Invisible Princess By Asha Futterman The author’s copy of The Invisible Princess by Faith Ringgold. Courtesy of Kenyatta Tatum Futterman. My mom got my sister and me The Invisible Princess from Target, which used to have good Black children’s books. Before writing this essay, I’d forgotten most of the story—a children’s fairy tale from 1998, written and illustrated by the artist Faith Ringgold—but I could still see certain images. I remember, in particular, staring at a picture of a blind child standing in a flat field, looking up at a girl in a red dress. The first girl is Patience, the blind daughter of an evil slave master, Captain Pepper; the second is the Invisible Princess. They both have empty expressions, but Patience’s mouth hangs open as she gestures up toward the spectral princess in red. I remember this arresting feeling of being able to see her blindness. The cotton flowers around them look like molars. Read More
October 1, 2026 Bulletin Writers Whose Names You Don’t Know By Owen Park Illustration by Na Kim Today marks the opening of our October online-submissions period for prose and poetry. This week, we asked our assistant editor, Owen Park, to describe the journey a piece can take from the slush pile into our pages. Over the past seventy-three years, The Paris Review’s commitment to reading unsolicited submissions has yielded the discoveries of work by writers such as Yiyun Li, Philip Roth, and Wells Tower. We know that the next writer we fall for won’t necessarily have an M.F.A. or an agent, and so the slush pile remains our best line of contact with the emerging authors whose names we haven’t yet heard. Read More
September 29, 2026 From the Archive Naked at Last: A Conversation with F. Keith Wahle By Joseph Grantham Photograph courtesy of F. Keith Wahle. When the poet F. Keith Wahle was first published in The Paris Review, he was working at the Cincinnati Public Library. He’d lived in Cincinnati for almost his whole life. A conscientious objector during Vietnam, he completed his service as an orderly for two years in a psych ward at the same hospital where he was born. The only time Wahle didn’t live in the Cincinnati area was when he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with the poets Donald Justice, Mark Strand, and Larry Levis. And then he was back in Cincinnati, where a librarian named Beth, who later became his wife of fifty-two years, helped get him a job. They worked in the same building for three decades. Read More
September 28, 2026 Redux And Then Somebody Handed Me a Story: Gary Indiana, Unlocked By Natalie Shapero Gary Indiana in his New York apartment, February 2002. © Sylvia Plachy. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, we’ve unlocked Gary Indiana’s Art of Fiction interview, selected from the archive by Natalie Shapero, whose poem “The Top of Hell” appears in our new Fall issue. Tobi Haslett’s prefatory note to Gary Indiana’s Art of Fiction interview, published in issue no. 238 of the Review, mentions the very large number of books lining the walls of Indiana’s New York City apartment. “More books,” Haslett observes, “are always arriving.” Three years later, following Indiana’s passing in 2024, this impressive and assuredly eclectic book collection was boxed up and shipped across the country to a planned library site in Altadena, California, where, on arrival, it was promptly incinerated in its entirety by the Eaton Fire. Read More
September 25, 2026 Dispatch Notes from a Party for a Dating App “Grounded in Lacanian Psycholinguistics” By Gemma Sieff Guests at the Readme launch party. Photographs by Matt Weinberger. Dreams can come true, and in dreams begin responsibilities. On a Thursday in September, I embarked on an evening of the sort of arduous New York City fun I used to fantasize about as a suburban seventeen-year-old in the year 2000; if I were so lucky as to one day make it here as opposed to anywhere, I’d be breaststroking in a riptide of scene and culture. Read More
September 24, 2026 At Work John Berger, Death’s Secretary: A Conversation with Tom Overton By Scott Schomburg John Berger in 2014. Photograph by Amarjit Chandan, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. The British writer and artist John Berger is best known for two things: his 1972 book and BBC series, Ways of Seeing, a canonical work of criticism that challenged traditional views of art history; and his acceptance speech that year, after winning the Booker McConnell Prize for his novel G., during which he announced that—in opposition to the prize’s founders, an organization with ties to the slave trade—half his award money would go to the British Black Panthers. That speech is partly why Berger became famous enough for his papers to go to the British Library, where the writer Tom Overton got a job cataloguing them. It is also why, as Overton writes in a new biography, John Berger: From Life, he spent fifteen years of his life piecing Berger’s together. Read More