July 21, 2026 Redux How Could I Forget Odysseus? By The Paris Review “An ambitious adaptation of the Odyssey, enacted by us children.” Photograph courtesy of Emily Wilson. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces in your inbox every Sunday morning. In 2017, to accompany her translation of the Odyssey, which was excerpted in issue no. 221 of the Review, Emily Wilson wrote a piece for our website in which she recalls performing in a children’s production of Homer’s epic at eight years old. It was this turn on the stage that inspired Wilson’s early encounters with the text she would come to translate. “I loved that Odysseus could transition so easily from being somebody to being nobody, and back again,” she writes. Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost … Read More
July 20, 2026 On Books Charles Brockden Brown Declares Independence By Ed Simon Fire (circa 1805), William Blake, The Morgan Library via Wikimedia Commons. The philosopher’s stone, desired by alchemists for its mythic ability to transmute lead into gold, was once in Philadelphia. Johannes Kelpius—mystic, monastic, and magician—supposedly came into possession of said stone shortly before his death in 1708. But rather than letting it be acquired by less reputable occultists, he dispatched a confidant to throw it from Germantown’s banks deep into the water of the Wissahickon Creek or the Schuylkill, depending on which account you believe. The German-speaking Transylvanian was a character from a gothic novel—an apocalyptic wizard who (so it was claimed) lived in a cave where he transformed “darkness into light, death into life,” and “metals into gold.” At the very end of that revolutionary century another Philadelphian had similar occult ambitions, albeit of a literary sort, in generating something new and glowing from the base materials of gothic literature. Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale—frequently claimed to be the first novel published in the United States—begins with a religious iconoclast not unlike Kelpius who spontaneously combusts while worshipping in a temple overlooking the Schuylkill. Brown describes how a “faint gleam suddenly shot athwart” the temple, seemingly the result of some occult experimentation. “In a moment,” he wrote, “the whole was reduced to ashes.” Read More
July 17, 2026 First Person In Paris, in Tokyo, in Singapore, in Prague, I Stumble Out, Insane with Coffee By Ed Park Hannah Tishkoff, Beginning of a Poem, 2026, colored pencil on found wood, 9 x 9.5 x 1 in, from issue no. 256. Courtesy of Hannah Tishkoff and OCHI, photograph by Deen Babakhyi. In the airport the bald man with the salt-and-pepper mustache is saying to three women, Unless you’re a comedian—listen to me—unless you’re a comedian, it’s not smart to have a favorite expression. In the mirror I see a bug crawl down my face, eliciting curses. But it’s just a dark wound in the mirror, an immobile injury to the silver. My eyes have gotten so bad that everything’s a bug. In the raised drain-stopper I see my miniaturized face, with a long glass horn emerging from my forehead—the tap’s steady gush. In Edward P. Vining’s An Inglorious Columbus (1885), a massive, labyrinthine book presenting “Evidence That Hwui Shän and a Party of Buddhist Monks from Afghanistan Discovered America in the Fifth Century, A.D.,” we find “that large armies of mice occasionally migrate from Asia to America, or in the other direction.” Probably not unrelatedly: a UPI article of April 1996 reports that an Ohio man was indicted for ordering vials of bubonic plague bacteria, which he claimed he needed to defeat a horde of disease-bearing rats deployed by Iraq against the United States. Read More
July 15, 2026 First Person A City Bigger Than a Bomb: Dispatch from Beirut By Jacob Russell Maaysra, Lebanon. The site of an Israeli air strike that destroyed a house and killed fifteen people in the small village of Maaysra, north of Beirut. Hezbollah installed a poster blaming the United States for the deaths. Photograph by Jacob Russell. In Lebanon the rains usually start around the end of October. There is little transition from summer. One day the weather is fine. The next great squalls come off the sea accompanied by thunder that shakes the walls. So we were cutting it close, planning our wedding for October 7. It was to be a garden wedding, and hostile skies would certainly spoil everything. That morning I woke up hazy from dinner the night before. The mountain air was a little brisk, but the sky seemed clear. I stood over the stove waiting for the rakweh to boil and letting the chill soothe my hangover. I checked my messages to see which guests might be lost on their way to the village, whether the caterers and DJ were going to be on time. The first was from a childhood friend who had traveled from London. “Should we be heading to the airport? A colleague’s telling me this is going to be really bad.” I asked him what had happened, and he suggested I check the news. Read More
July 14, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Zain Baweja on “Gloss” By Zain Baweja Scan of Zain Baweja’s notebook. In our series Making of a Poem, we ask poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Zain Baweja’s “Gloss,” which appears in our Summer issue, no. 256, plays with the etymological lineage and various translations of the word gul, or “rose,” across Urdu, Hindi, Persian, and English, among others. Our editorial intern James Langan, who pored over many archaic dictionaries to fact-check Baweja’s poem, spoke with him for this installment. How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I don’t know when my fascination with the word gul began. I kept encountering novel uses of it in my readings of Urdu and Persian literature. In the Indo-Persian epic Dastan-e-amir hamza, for instance, there is a passage that uses the phrase gul khana (“to eat roses”) as the term for scarring oneself. It turns out, according to Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, that it was once a custom for lovers to burn themselves with a hot iron to prove their intense passion; it was also customary to treat “madness” with cauterization. A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English (1884) by John T. Platts. Scan of page 911, via Internet Archive. These archaic uses led me to bilingual dictionaries, like John Thompson Platts’s A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English and Francis Joseph Steingass’s A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary. In both texts, each entry is formatted as one dense and continuous paragraph. Multiscript headwords, definitions, idioms, and compound phrases are all crammed together into a single block of text, separated only by semicolons and em dashes. I felt a peculiar shock when reading these entries, which gather usages that traverse centuries and geographical regions and place them side by side. It is the sort of temporal compression found in a poem, and it attuned me to the mutability of words I thought I knew. I started collecting all the definitions of the word gul I could find. I wrote down entries from Platts and Steingass as well as colloquial uses from my own memory. My notes began to look like a glossary for some absent text. I decided to retain that indexical structure as a poetic form. Read More
July 10, 2026 On Sports The Hydration-Break World Cup By Jonathan Wilson A hydration break during Netherlands versus Tunisia at the 2026 World Cup. Photo by elisfkc3, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. It is axiomatic that countries hosting the World Cup try to put their best face forward. During the monthlong tournament, streets are cleared of anything (and anyone) that might offend the eye, political evils are swept under the rug, warm welcomes generally abound, and even authoritarian states, or those with notoriously disturbing human rights records, present themselves as sporting, full of bonhomie, and as cuddly as their official stuffed mascots. This time around, Mexico and Canada appear to have offered the standard warm embrace to teams and tourists alike; Mexico went so far as to provide a base for the Iranian team after the U.S. refused to allow its members to train, or even stay overnight, on American soil. In general, Trump’s government, which might claim it is simply eschewing hypocrisy, has been proud to display its ruthless, cruel, and ugly side, as if to declare, godlike, “We are what we are.” Hence, before the first whistle had been blown, Omar Artan, the FIFA-approved, award-winning Somali referee, was denied entry and deported, while Iraq’s star player and vice captain, Aymen Hussein, was held by border patrol at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and questioned for almost seven hours before being admitted. The Iraqi team’s photographer was not so lucky, nor were a number of Iranian officials and support staff, who were all given thumbs down for visas, along with untold thousands of fans from countries the U.S. doesn’t like. Despite the hostile intent suggested by their Viking helmets and imaginary longboats, no problems arose for the Norwegians. The question is always, Can the excitement of o jogo bonito transcend not only a host country’s xenophobic politics but also FIFA’s eternal greed and aura of corruption? How much can fans conveniently forget in order to enjoy the games? The answer, evidently, is a lot. A case in point: this year, for the first time, FIFA introduced compulsory hydration breaks at the midway point of each half. This seemed a reasonable response to the extreme heat forecast for some of the venues, and clearly good for the players’ health. However, more than a few games were scheduled in air-conditioned domes, or in locations with temperate climates. The hydration breaks quickly generated an animated fan response. Fox Sports, so the story went, had colluded with FIFA to generate more commercial revenue by turning football into a U.S.-style game with four quarters. “Fucking hydration breaks,” a fan yelled behind me on the way into the newly named New York New Jersey Stadium (it’s in New Jersey) to watch France play Senegal, then added, “Fattening the fucking capitalist wallet.” When the game began and the peerless Kylian Mbappé scored, he forgot all about wallets and I saw him fall into a kind of rapture. Meanwhile, the longest hydration break of all was taken by the Scottish fans in Boston, who may have drained the city of beer. Among its rewards for Scotland’s win, Boston became Glasgow’s sister city. It was surprising, given Boston’s fondness for the Celtic tradition, that no one had considered this before. Read More