September 18, 2026 Home Improvements My Larval Roommates By Sarah Nicole Prickett Wenceslaus Hollar, Moth and Three Butterflies, 1646, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0. Though the print issues of The Paris Review are never overtly themed, it often happens that, in the process of poring over the prose, poems, art, and interviews bundled into each issue, we notice some inadvertently reoccurring motif. Bubbles, for example, or psychosexually fraught adolescent friendships. These motifs sometimes lead to web series accompanying the rollout of the latest issue, as was the case when, a few years ago, my predecessor Sophie Haigney launched Home Improvements. The series—inspired by the fantastically long and architectural first sentence of Mieko Kanai’s story “Tap Water”—invited writers to “consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction.” Read More
January 26, 2026 Home Improvements Mold and Melancholia By Madeline Cash Charles West Cope, Hope Deferred, and Hopes and Fears That Kindle Hope, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. In London, trash is called rubbish and taking it out is a science. There is a bag for trash, a bag for compost, and a bag for recycling, a bag that is bestowed by one’s neighbo(u)rhood council and will not be picked up if not in the proper counsel bag every other week on Wednesday between 6 P.M. and 7 P.M., which are called 18:00 and 19:00. All rubbish goes in a bin with a secure child lock that isn’t for children but for foxes. I moved to the UK with my boyfriend, who’d enrolled in graduate school in London. My work is flexible and I thought I’d tag along. I thought, It won’t be so different. They speak English, after all. Apartments are called flats and applying for a flat isn’t dissimilar, I’d imagine, from applying to the CIA, which is called MI6. If one is approved for a flat, one must order Wi-Fi from a company called EE, which will not send someone to set up your Wi-Fi if it is a bank holiday, of which there are many, or if it is raining. It is always raining. For many flats, the heating is connected to the internet, so one cannot get heat unless one gets Wi-Fi and one cannot get Wi-Fi if it is raining or a bank holiday. Beneath several blankets, my boyfriend said, “It’s like we’re living in a different era,” an era before internet and heating, a time when time moved slower. It took a month before a nonraining nonholiday came along, and with it a man from EE. The man from EE wanted a cup of tea and a biscuit. Cookies are called biscuits because there is a tariff on cookies but not on biscuits, so this is a verbal loophole for the British cookie companies to avoid higher taxes. Read More
November 24, 2025 Home Improvements My Illegal Revenge Pool By Lisa Carver Photographs courtesy of the author. I was married to a moody millionaire Parisian and I was trying to stay with him—I still loved certain things about him, and I loved everything about my stepchildren and the French way of life. But it was hard. My husband wanted to be who he was, and he wanted a happy wife. Not easy to have both at once! I did all these things—got on Zoloft, got a dog, went to spas and Belize and the opera—to make me so-o-o happy it would last through his tirades. He knew he was a monster—he was an honest man—so he did things to help too. He built a cabin outside our home in France for me to go be alone in to recover, and he gave me money to put down on a dilapidated hundred-and-twenty-five-year-old house in Pittsburgh for me to go be alone in and recover even farther away from him. Read More
October 31, 2025 Home Improvements Weatherizing Salem By Nathan Dragon All photographs courtesy of the author. I usually tell people I don’t know well that my work is roofing and siding. I also tell people this when I, correctly or incorrectly, assume they don’t know what weatherization is. When I type out weatherization, a red line appears underneath the word, indicating that the program I use to write doesn’t know what it is either. I don’t explain that I’m usually crawling, crouching, and squirming around an attic, air-sealing; or a knee wall, air-sealing; or in a crawl space, air-sealing. In other words, blasting spray foam in a small, gross space. Sometimes I explain that I’m up on a ladder—anything from a sixteen-footer to a thirty-two- and, sometimes, but rarely, a forty-footer—drilling holes into the wall between each bay, from the outside, underneath siding that has been taken off to expose the home’s sheathing. Sometimes holes have to be drilled inside a house—interior drill and blow—because of asbestos or because there’s a dormer on a third or fourth floor sticking out from a too-steep roof. Sometimes I mix up the job’s jargon—strats, rafters, studs, strapping, joists. Something like foam could mean spray foam or foam board, it all depends on the context. I’m usually covered in dust, mold, and rat shit, squeezing through knee walls, attics, crawl spaces. This is all considered unskilled labor. After holes are drilled into the wall, or the attic’s prepped, the necessary spaces get filled with cellulose, a kind of insulation made of things like shredded newspaper. When I’m cutting open the bags to load it into the blower machine (versus into the truck to transport it), I think: What history or literature is being blown into these walls? Returns that got pulped? My book? My friends’ books, my foes’? Sometimes you can catch a few words from things like grocery-store flyers—FROZEN LASAGNA MEALS $6.99. Read More
September 30, 2025 Home Improvements Speaking Apartment By Jane Stern Photograph by aismallard, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. As a child growing up in Midtown Manhattan, I learned to speak apartment very early. When other parents might ask, “What do your friend’s parents do?” my parents asked, “Where do they live?”—not geographically but wanting to know if they lived in a brownstone, high-rise, railroad flat, classic six, studio, loft, efficiency, or a penthouse. With that information, they could fill in the blanks. Once the basic category of domicile was established, we came to the subsets. Doorman? Fire escapes? Prewar? Tile or linoleum bathroom? Walk-up or elevator? What floor? Super on premises? Elevator man or push button? These may seem like random, slightly odd questions, but believe me, they provided an accurate cultural barometer. It grieves me to see my friends (or, more accurately, their grandchildren) trying to find their first apartment. Reading apartment ads is like trying to understand a list of ingredients on the back of a can written in a language you don’t understand, or maybe like trying to find a mate on a dating site where everything is vague and unclear: “He likes long walks on the beach.” It is a recipe for heartbreak. Read More
January 8, 2024 Home Improvements Ripping Ivy By Mary Childs Ivy. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 2.0. When we moved into our little house, the large beds of English ivy in the front yard didn’t bother me much. It’s not what I would have chosen—who would choose an invasive species?—but my spouse and I agreed we would come up with a Yard Plan and make strategic choices, slowly and deliberately, including eradicating the ivy. Getting rid of ivy is notoriously difficult—my mom warned me it’s “backbreaking work.” I was also, when we moved in, finishing a book project, then in its sixth year and finally arriving at the fact-checking stage. The ivy project existed in the future. One day, in a stolen moment of daylight, I was sitting around in our front yard with my spouse and small childwhen I noticed a little ivy creeper reaching out, venturing beyond its bed into the grass. The beds were bad enough as it was, but they certainly could not be permitted to grow. So, I grabbed it and pulled. It did not yield. Tough guy, huh? I regripped and pulled harder, and it popped out of the ground, spraying dry dirt in my face. I was elated. I had contained the ivy. I grabbed another vine and pulled. Read More