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
December 11, 2025 First Person Balthazar, 1997 By Heather Bursch Balthazar in the nineties. Photo by James Leynse/Corbis, via Getty Images. It was lunchtime at the restaurant. Sunlight streamed through the blinds, cutting the halogens from the side so you could see everyone’s lines and shadows and they could see yours. It was loud, and the air between me and the customers was caffeinated. Lunches were always rush, rush, rush. They gave us twice as many tables as they did at dinner, and I was usually behind on orders, showing up at the table pale and sweaty. At dinner, there was the wine haze. The lights were dimmer, and you could duck in and out of view. Dinner meant grappa and lingering and more time to charm the customers. At lunch, we turned our tables fast—it was the fall of 1997, and the crowds kept coming. I was twenty-six, with a bunch of other lives behind me—or beside me, or in front of me. Balthazar had just opened that April. I lied on my resume and I had the look. I checked the floor plan. I was penciled to work the big tables. The VIP section was easy to spot, and everyone wanted a seat at the red banquettes that lined the back wall. Was this a mistake? It was probably a test. Back then, the restaurant was always testing us, and we never knew if our customers were plants. Balthazar wanted stars from a New York Times review, and the general managers trained us to get them. One of the higher-ups (I’ll call her Debra) told us the restaurant hired an outside service to dine anonymously and rate the staff. If I hear something like this, I will approach every table with suspicion, asking myself, Are they a little too attentive? Too plainclothed? Too curious about the menu? Are they exchanging knowing glances after I mispronounce the name of a cheese or let a water glass sit empty while they thrum their fingers against it? I smoked a lot in those days and ate Clif Bars I’d stuff into the pockets of my apron. I looked like a French maid in my uniform. I bought black loafers with the thickest heels I could find. You think restaurant work is easy? You probably don’t think that. Maybe you think it’s hard, but honestly, if you haven’t served at a place like Balthazar in the nineties, you have no idea. Read More
December 8, 2025 History Thomas Manning (1772–1840) By Eliot Weinberger J. M. Davis, portrait of Thomas Manning, c. 1805, oil on canvas, 76 x 63 cm. Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Thomas Manning arrived in Lhasa in 1811, having walked for months across the Himalayas from Calcutta, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim and accompanied only by a single Chinese servant, with whom he spoke in Latin. He was the first Englishman to enter the city, the only one to do so in the entire nineteenth century, and the first European to meet the Dalai Lama, then still a child. In the orbit of the Romantics, Manning was the best friend of Charles Lamb, close to the mad poet Charles Lloyd, and friendly with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. He knew Tom Paine and Madame de Staël in Paris, and was considered a handsome charmer in its aristocratic and intellectual salons. He spent twelve years in China, India, Vietnam, and Malaysia, and was attached as a freelance interpreter to Lord Amherst’s disastrous expedition to Peking, which was expelled from the Forbidden City after one day, as Amherst had refused to “kowtow” to the emperor. He was perhaps the greatest English Sinologist of his time, before Sinology existed in England, and was the only one for most of the century who was not a missionary or religiously motivated. As an undergraduate, he had written a two-volume textbook on algebra. It was said that he spoke fifteen languages. He was anti-colonialist and anti-clerical, expelled from Cambridge for refusing to sign allegiance to the Church of England. In Asia he was on his own as an impoverished scholar, working for neither the British government or the East India Company, whose functionaries he found exasperating. He was famous in the cantonments for his erudition, his self-fashioned “Oriental” dress of silk robe and turban, and his waist-length beard. Read More
December 5, 2025 First Person This First By Eileen Myles New York City Marble Cemetery interior. Photograph by Dmadeo, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. In issue no. 253, we published an excerpt of Eileen Myles’s “Bird Watching,” a poem written in 1978 and unpublished until now. In this essay, Myles reflects on the time when they wrote it—alongside drinking and dancing and falling in love in New York. “It was a movie for sure,” they write. I think Chelsea Girls is me teaching myself to be a novelist and Bird Watching [and Their First Three Books of Poetry] is me teaching myself to be a poet. Poets have the same rights as all other humans, but each of us in our own exact way has made that be our business. Possibly even being the lawyer of it. Constructing reality inch by inch in language. Making a new space I believe. All poetry is hyperbole. That can’t possibly be true, but it is. Excepting “Bird Watching,” which I think is the main heave of this volume, the three books here are sort of young me taking my measure, figuring out what I’ve got. This is so different from a selected, because it’s not so much about what matters but what I did. And across it all the person is variously asserting their gender and the blurriness of that enterprise (I’m heartened to see that in my twenties I really didn’t feel I fit in this or that gender. Or sexuality). And gender and genre are linked as always, because despite these being my first public assertions of being a poet, the person making them would often have preferred to be a journalist (wanting to be seen in the world rather than in language) and so the direction of some of the poems’ content feels like I was trying to have it both ways. I mean talking to some imaginary everybody, being fun and broad like the village voice. I even wrote for them a while. And then there’s the self that camped out entirely in feminism, even lesbian feminism, making tons of statements (which embarrassed me and I didn’t include in my selected) sounding to me by now (except for the part about shooting the pope) like a middle-aged man. I was trying to sound like the world or how a lesbian like me sounded in it but the result was some horny geezer, a guy being open about his lust for chicks—yet I was one. Read More
December 4, 2025 First Person Scenes from an African Childhood By Patrice Nganang Photograph courtesy of the author. Papa Mama was a man my age today, but by my standards then, he was an old man. I remember him being small in stature but agile on his feet. He wore slippers. He usually dressed in a Hausa gandoura and chechia, the northern classical attire, and had a chewing stick. And he always spat, which I never liked. He was the one who welcomed clients into the garage and settled transactions. This was when his face would brighten with a happy smile. He would snap back to his angry figure the moment he saw a kid misbehaving around, then would mechanically return to the client. The day Papa showed up with me, he was in prayer in his small shack. We waited outside. I would never figure out if he lived in the shack or elsewhere, as night never saw me at the garage. “This is the boy.” Read More
December 2, 2025 Bookmarks The Eyelashes of the Twentieth Century By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor From Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night (newly reissued by Riverhead), translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones: He was often prone to falling into a mindless state, staring at the world in front of him as if it were a picture. Down below, people walked along the asphalt road, herding cows; dogs were running, a man burst into sudden laughter, little bells tinkled on the sheep’s necks, skin itched, higher up a man carried a hare he’d poached, he waved to someone, smoke from the chimneys drifted into the sky and birds flew to the west. This picture goes on forever; it seems to be eternal. It’s a scene that people happen to, rather than it happening to people. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve this young border guard, with a face as ruddy and glowing as a Bath bun, was riding his huge motorbike slowly through the snow. Read More