There’s a Russian phrase that translates as something like “kitchen talk” and refers to the kind of conversation that, in the postwar Soviet Union, could happen only around the kitchen table. Previously, apartments had been almost always communal, with stovetops shared by multiple households. Suddenly, in poky single-family khrushchevka, a new social culture arose. In a steamy kitchen, you could share risky anecdotes, engage in political debates, and read from samizdat, especially if the tap was running and you put a pillow over the phone.

The spirit of kitchen talk is still alive in the work of the Nobel Prize–winning Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich, the subject of The Paris Review’s inaugural Art of Oral History interview, which appears in our new Fall issue. (To mark the occasion, we have given the Russian version of the interview to our friends at Meduza.) The sessions between Alexievich and her interviewer, the Russian investigative journalist Elena Kostyuchenko, who was not long ago pronounced a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin, took place in Alexievich’s apartment in Berlin, where Alexievich has lived since she was forced to flee Minsk in 2020. Her books—on the Second World War, Chernobyl, and the collapse of the Soviet Union—are drawn from hundreds of interviews, mostly with strangers. The best conversations, she explains to Kostyuchenko, happen behind closed doors, without anyone present who might act as a social censor (Alexievich has harsh words for husbands), and unfurl slowly and intimately. “Just like we’re talking right now,” she says.

Alexievich’s oral histories are sometimes likened to novels, which is most often meant as a compliment, although some critics have questioned her tendency to radically reshape the stories she is told—occasionally even combining two speakers’ narratives into a single testimony. “It’s still nonfiction,” she says. “What’s important is the precision of the impressions, the feelings, the sense of the era. A conversation can flow in any direction, just as how, in a book, you might approach a story from one angle or another.”

You may have read a novella by Ben Lerner in which a writer interviews his mentor for a literary journal and, in a state of anxiety, only pretends to be recording on his iPhone, which he has recently dropped into the sink. Lerner’s plot might hinge on the mistaken assumption that editors of such a journal would not notice if sections of an interview were to be made up—fiction!—but what is true is that the Review’s interviews are all inventions of a kind. We, like Alexievich, are partial to condensing hundreds of pages of transcripts into a couple of dozen and rearranging their component parts—transcripts which, in the case of Alexievich and Kostyuchenko, included philosophical explorations into the nature of hatred and the differences between the sexes, punctuated by questions like “Won’t you have another cutlet?” Or which, for Donald Antrim, the subject of The Art of Fiction No. 270, and his interviewer, Andrew O’Hagan, sometimes resembled a psychoanalytic session in which parts of a life that might seem disconnected cohere in real time. “You just used the phrase ‘when we were divorced,’ ” O’Hagan observes at one point, after Antrim recalls the breakup of his parents’ marriage when he was a child. “Is that how it felt to you?” he asks. “Did I really say that?” Antrim replies. “Well, there you go.”

As we put together an issue of the Review, I often find that I am too much inside each piece to find a vantage from which to view the thing as a whole. Maybe, I tell myself, I’ll be able to see it all more clearly in a few years, or a decade. But I did feel, as we worked on this one, that I was listening in on many voices whose speakers were attempting to locate themselves in what would become history before it hardened into narrative. Take Scott McClanahan’s story of a car trip with his wife and children through a deadly flood in West Virginia. Or “Fisher of Men” by the artist and writer Sam McKinniss, a portrait of a formative friendship set against the Iraq War and debates about the legalization of same-sex unions. Or “Their Utopia,” a haunting debut by Brian Ma, narrated by a refugee of the Vietnam War who goes on to become an electrical engineer in America, developing one of the earliest car phones. As the story begins, he has taken a promotion at a cell phone factory in Vietnam, where he learns that the employees are committing suicide with disturbing regularity. “I’m not interested in events per se,” Alexievich tells Kostyuchenko. “I’m interested in how people make sense of them.” Of course, sometimes doing so is impossible, unbearable. “Did you see aliens during the war?” Ma’s narrator is asked in a job interview. “I’m not sure,” he says. “There was a lot going on.”

Emily Stokes is the editor of  The Paris Review.