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.

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As we were working on our new Summer issue, my partner and I began fostering a rescue dog, a seven-month-old pit bull named Woody. Left to his own devices on a sidewalk, Woody has the manner of someone searching for a lost earring. Often, having found the thing he was apparently looking for, he refuses to budge. It was only after we had spent a couple of weeks dragging him down our street that a friend advised that, without being given time to sniff at things, he was exhausting his body but not his mind, which was why he was often as antic after a walk as he was before. “Smelling is like reading for them,” the friend said.

I grew up being told that reading makes you a more empathetic, nicer person; more recently, I’ve heard that “deep reading” (which means, essentially, reading a book) is the best way to reclaim your atrophying attention span. For some, who might prefer to outsource the activity and receive a quick description of what it was like, it’s an anachronism. Headlines say that children are spending less of their spare time with books—in Britain, the problem is a “relentless” focus on literacy, which sounds particularly Roald Dahl. What all these conversations are missing, of course, is the fact that reading is one of the most mysterious, pleasurable pastimes we have—which is why we have put together a Summer issue that we believe will fill you with a strange feeling of yearning, like a dog at a tree stump who would like to stay longer than is feasible. So it was after my colleague Dennis passed me Shuang Xuetao’s “God’s Arrow,” which appears in print for the first time in our pages, in a translation by Jeremy Tiang, and is named after a weapon with magical powers. “If it flies through the air,” says an enigmatic benefactor of the kind we could all use, “hold in your mind what you want to happen, and it will come true.”

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As a child, the writer and activist Sarah Schulman memorized the whole of Bertolt Brecht’s Weimar-era play The Threepenny Opera, with music by Kurt Weill. “I glommed onto that record so bad,” she tells Parul Sehgal in her Art of Nonfiction interview in our new Spring issue. “I listened to it over and over and over and over and over.”
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