December 18, 2025 From the Archive New Optic By Anya Berger Snapshot of Anya Berger in the late 1960s, taken by Jean Mohr in Ornans, France. Courtesy of Katya Berger. The following fragment, which dates to 1969, was unearthed in the archives of John and Anya Berger by their daughter, Katya, and John’s biographer, Tom Overton. Read more about its history and their working and romantic relationship here. When I was twenty-five, I had a short love affair with a pompous man who said things like: “You look marvelous, marvelous, and the most wonderful thing is that, looking at you, one knows that you will be just as desirable in fifteen years … No, thirteen years.” I forgot everything about this person with lightning speed, except this particular remark, and when thirteen years were up, I said to his ghost, “How about it?” And when fifteen years were up, I said, “Now how about that?” I have always been very healthy, and such changes in my body as have occurred have either been for the better—more covering on the bones, the legs a little finer—or can be accounted for by four pregnancies and four nine-month periods of lactation. My parents were quite old when I was born, my father fifty and my mother thirty-eight. My mother has been completely shapeless for as long as I can remember, but I am not much like her physically, and emotionally I’m actually her opposite, so there was no identification. My father, whom I loved and admired, I was separated from for seventeen years for reasons connected with world history in those decades: I saw him first as a slim, upright, elegant man of sixty-three, and then again as a haggard, bony relic of eighty, until finally he died senile and shrunken at eighty-five. Read More
December 18, 2025 On History The New Way of Seeing: In Anya Berger’s Archives By Emily Foister Anya Berger in the early 1960s. Courtesy of Katya Berger. Anya Berger (1923–2018) is most famous for being the wife and “muse” of art critic and novelist John Berger. In 2018, after both John and Anya Berger were dead, their daughter Katya Berger was with John’s archivist and biographer, Tom Overton, when they unearthed paper records in the family’s basement. These suggest that the work published in John’s name during their relationship, from 1958 to 1973—The Success and Failure of Picasso, Ways of Seeing, G., and A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor—could be considered joint projects. The private family archive documents a period largely missing from John Berger’s main archival holdings at the British Library. Née Zisserman, Anya Berger was born in Manchuria to a noble Russian father and Viennese Lutheran mother, considered Jewish by the Nazis. She came to England as a refugee in her teens, first on scholarship to St. Paul’s boarding school, and then to read modern languages at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. She was a polyglot, responsible for shaping the English-speaking left with her translations of Marx, Lenin, fallen Freudian Wilhelm Reich, and architect Le Corbusier. The collaborative nature of her relationship with John was no secret; they once signed a telegram “jonanya.” Although Anya was the linguist, they worked together “officially” on a few translations, most famously Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land (1939, trans. 1970). Ways of Seeing (1972), the TV show and subsequent book which made John Berger a household name,drew heavily on Walter Benjamin’s writings on art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Anya, a fluent German speaker, had introduced her husband to Benjamin’s ideas before the Arendt-Zorn translation of Illuminations was published in English in 1968. Anya Berger appears in the second episode of Ways of Seeing, on “Women and Art.” The show presents the concept of the male gaze to a mainstream audience a year before Laura Mulvey would write her canonical essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Part of a roundtable of women tasked with responding to female nudes, Anya is the first to speak, seated across from her husband, leaning forward assertively over her widespread knees. “Of course, weall have an image of ourselves, and it’s a visual image, but I wonder how much this sort of classical, European painting has shaped that image.” She is animated. “When I look at the paintings that you show in your film, I can’t take them seriously, I cannot identify with them because they are so immensely exaggerated always, they fasten on to some sort of secondary sexual characteristic, these enormous breasts and great big bee sting bottoms [John Berger’s laughter], huge things like that, and they just aren’t real … Nearly all the paintings you have shown are what is called idealized, and therefore they are to me very unreal in connection with any deep down image that I might have of myself, and in connection with any deep down pleasure that I might have in looking at another female body.” Read More
December 17, 2025 On Photography Eve Babitz’s Photographs By The Paris Review Hollywood, California. Photographs courtesy of the Huntington Library. In 1969, five years before Eve Babitz published her first book, Eve’s Hollywood, she kept a journal—her only surviving diary—in which she honed the voice that would make her the consummate chronicler of seventies Los Angeles. A selection of entries appears in our new Winter issue. In the journal, Babitz also detailed her experiments with several other art forms, including collage and photography. “I got a camera for $7.98—a Brownie,” she notes on December 21, 1969, “and have been taking pictures of palm trees which are turning out very well.” The Huntington Library, which acquired Babitz’s archive in 2021, is currently displaying several of those photographs in an exhibition that features, among other subjects, those very same palm trees near Babitz’s Hollywood home, and members of her family and her famous circle of friends: Babitz’s father, Sol, a former violinist for the 20th Century–Fox studio orchestra, a bespectacled Annie Leibovitz, and Linda Ronstadt, swaddled in furs. Annie Leibovitz. Linda Ronstadt. Sol Babitz. Linda Ronstadt. Eve Babitz’s brownie camera.
December 16, 2025 Car Crushes Forest Green Ford Contour By Mathew Weitman Forest Green Ford Contour. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 1.0. In 2016, I bought my first car—a 1997 forest green Ford Contour—for eight hundred bucks cash. Though almost twenty years old, the car had only forty thousand miles on it, which at the time I believed to be an indication of the shape it was in. My main worry was how difficult it would be to find parking in Brooklyn, but when I expressed this, the old Italian woman who sold it to me said, “Oh, honey, don’t worry. This car was blessed by the Pope.” So I gave her the money, and she gave me a comically large car key and a crucifix to hang from the rearview mirror. It turned out that the car had not been blessed by the Pope. As soon as I drove off, I learned the AC didn’t work. That’s okay, I thought, at least the windows roll down. Minutes later, I was stuck behind a garbage truck in the dense New Jersey traffic in the middle of July. That’s fine, I thought, at least it drives. That night, for reasons I can no longer remember, I christened the car My Sweet Henrietta. Read More
December 15, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Millicent Borges Accardi on “Good Tank Farms” By Millicent Borges Accardi Tetney Tank Farm: aerial 2025 (2) by Simon Tomson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Millicent Borges Accardi’s “Good Tank Farms” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 254. How did this poem start? A teacher, Gay Talese, once advised me to incorporate my day jobs into my writing. At the time, I was working for a dog food manufacturing plant on Malt Avenue in Commerce, California. I’d also worked in oil refineries for ten years or so. I worked at the ARCO Carson refinery as a technical writer from 1992 to 1997, as well as for other refineries and oil-related companies such as BP, ampm, and ARCO Marine (oil tankers). From 1997 to 2016, I was a contractor at Chevron, supporting their refineries from El Segundo, California, to Pascagoula, Mississippi. I had my own safety glasses, hard hat (adorned with worn stickers), and blue fire-retardant Nomex coveralls with my name patch over the pocket. I was familiar with the quirky systems and individuals who make up a ruff-and-ready refinery workplace. I wanted to write about a technical work location in a poetic way—about the serious aspects of blue-collar work, but also its magnificent moments of reflection. I’ve always admired Fred Voss, and his poetry about being a machinist at an aircraft plant in Long Beach. I wish we had more blue-collar writers these days. Where are the Jack Londons? And the Steinbecks? Where are the writers who work on the dock? Where are stevedores, the longshoremen? The pipe fitters? The electricians? Read More
December 12, 2025 The Review’s Review Our Favorite Books of 2025 By The Paris Review This year, we asked our contributors, our readers, our current and former interns, and other friends of the Review for their favorite books of the past year. Here’s what they said. Service by John Tottenham is a novel about a disgruntled, begrudging, malcontent man who works in a bookstore and is also a writer. So immediately you understand why he is disgruntled, begrudging, and malcontent. He is robustly rude to everyone, delivering diatribes on the customers’ vapidity and eviscerating his own brooding arena of envy and failure as well. At first this is entrancing. Soon it becomes too one-note; we seek even the slimmest hint of redemption. But you must persevere—maybe skim the complaining a bit—as the novel eventually becomes a discourse on the vagaries of writing: obstacles, setbacks, successes, tricks of the trade. Pills are involved. —Nancy Lemann, author of “A Person and a Robot” Rie Qudan’s Sympathy Tower Tokyo (translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood) follows Sara Machina, an architect tasked with drafting a new tower to house convicted criminals—in comfort. The novel troubles staid discourse about crime and punishment in a tone so perfect I realized I’d been waiting for it too long. Querying our capacity to create anything right alongside language and history, representation and reality, Qudan never overplays her hand, nor does she smooth over the rough edges of difference or difficulty via sociological, philosophical, or even narrative retreat. With its subtle lyricism, this book is a masterclass in how to consider the instability of the present without falling into the strict trappings of the topical. I’m still thinking about its dedication to inquiry, existence, and the idiosyncrasies of thought. —Joseph Earl Thomas, author of “I Got Snipped: Notes after a Vasectomy” Mike Powell’s New Paltz, New Paltz follows Ben, a New York gossip-mag fact-checker, as he blunders, detached, through the magazine world. For Ben (and maybe for Powell, who once held such a job for Us Weekly), the work of a fact-checker seems to consist of deconstructing narrative into its essentials—the paltry and random moments that together make up Ben’s life. I read Powell’s debut in the midst of doing an intensive fact-check, and steeled myself against the adoption of Ben’s laconic and sort of miserably curious temperament (which I presumed to be a side effect of the profession). Ben’s disposition didn’t stick with me, but the book did; New Paltz, New Paltz is keen and economical—an easy read. “The truth of certain moments,” Powell writes, “can only be attained when the facts are set aside.” —Hazel Byers, former intern I always like stories about strange, small towns. This year I read Someone to Watch Over You by Kumi Kimura, translated from the Japanese by Yuki Tejima: a shimmering, unsettling little novel about two people trying to get through each day. A sense of the profound bleakness of an average life pervades the book. But this oppressiveness is cut by instances of sharp, poetic sadness, such as a description of a train briefly held up in the dark after it runs over a “large, soft” animal. It’s the kind of novel that feels like looking out of a window at night. —Hua Xi, author of “Toilet” Read More