December 23, 2016 From the Archive All This Giving By Nicole Rudick Our new, redesigned website marks the debut of our complete digital archive: now subscribers can read every piece from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading our back issues right away; you can also try a free ten-day trial period. Read More
December 22, 2016 From the Archive Living in the Now By Sylvie McNamara Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial. We’ll use this space to feature recommendations from our staff. This week, our intern Sylvie McNamara recommends Joy Williams. We live in an age of fervent, misguided, conspiratorial belief. Fluoridated drinking water is poisonous. Michelle Obama was born a man. There are incriminating references to “pizza” in John Podesta’s e-mails. We might try to buy our way out: with yoga, green tea, reusable grocery bags, or a two-week fast in Bavaria. But regardless, ideology “proliferates … as merchandise,” as Jia Tolentino has written. “We can buy anything that suits us and nothing that we really need.” “The Yard Boy” is Joy Williams’ answer to 2016, though it was published in The Paris Review’s Winter 1977 issue. It’s a story about a true believer: a self-professed spiritual materialist who does not understand this term to be derisive, a label for those who would seek spirituality through consumerism or ego. He’s a zealot entrapped by platitudes with a New Age aura (“nothing is more obvious than the hidden” or “the moon can shine in one hundred different bowls”). His quest to live “in the Now” unravels his life. Read More
December 15, 2016 From the Archive Rapid Fire By Taylor Lannamann Olive Cotton, Teacup Ballet (detail), 1935. Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial. We’ll use this space to feature recommendations from our staff. This week, our intern Taylor Lannamann recommends Colum McCann. Read More
December 9, 2016 From the Archive Herzog in the Jungle By Caitlin Love Still from Fitzcarraldo. Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. Read More
December 8, 2016 From the Archive What’s Inspiration, Anyway? By Dan Piepenbring Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. Read More
December 2, 2016 From the Archive Grace Paley’s Most Shocking Story By Dan Piepenbring Today, read Grace Paley’s story “The Little Girl,” from our Spring 1974 issue. Without spoiling too much, it’s the most shocking of her stories—and she told the Guardian in 2004 that it’s true. The narrator is a friend of hers she met in the fifties, through the Southern Conference for Human Welfare: “There were a lot of runaways then … and sometimes he would bring these girls to me and say, ‘Put some sense in her head.’ ” Paley, who died in 2007, refused to read the story aloud. It begins: Carter stop by the cafe early. I just done waxing. He said, I believe I’m having company later on. Let me use your place, Charley, hear? I told him, door is open, go ahead. Man coming for the meter, (why I took the lock off.) I told him Angie, my lodger could be home but he strung out most the time. He don’t even know when someone practicing the horn in the next room. Carter, you got hours and hours. There ain’t no wine there, nothing like it. He said he had some other stuff would keep him on top. That was a joke. Thank you, brother, he said. I told him I believe I have tried anything, but to this day, I like whiskey. If you have whiskey, you drunk, but if you pumped up with drugs, you just crazy. Yeah hear that man, he said. Then his eyeballs start walking away. Read “The Little Girl” in full here; and subscribe now for digital access to every short story, poem, portfolio, and essay from The Paris Review.