October 8, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Natalie Shapero on “The Top of Hell” By Natalie Shapero Photography courtesy of Natalie Shapero. Natalie Shapero’s poem “The Top of Hell,” which appears in our recent Fall issue, no. 257, is nominally about the top of Hell, but it is also implicitly about the bottom, the background bits that its inhabitants don’t see. “It’s weird that Hades, when he dropped,” she writes, “dropped only to the top of Hell. That he didn’t / plunge all the way down.” This is also, more or less, the basic impulse behind our series Making of a Poem, where we ask poets to lift the hood on a poem they’ve contributed to our pages. In this installment, Shapero talks about some of the unseen parts of her process, from watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies to “the physical properties of Hell.” How did “The Top of Hell” start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? Greek mythology does not appear frequently in my writing—usually, I don’t think about it at all. But there was a concentrated period in my life when it was very much on my mind. This was last year, when I was preparing to be a contestant on Jeopardy! Read More
October 7, 2026 On Poetry Prynne’s Last Poem By Ryan Ruby Single Tangle Mine (2026) by J. H. Prynne, Face Press. Courtesy of Ian Heames. Whenever I find myself in London, the first thing I do is go to the London Review Bookshop, down the street from the British Museum in Bloomsbury. I ask a bookseller to take me to the basement floor and open the supply closet. There, along with the shop’s buckets and mops and other cleaning supplies, are two shelves containing the latest sequences by the poet J. H. Prynne (1936–2026). Released in limited editions with print runs of between a hundred and two hundred and fifty copies by small presses in Cambridge, these beautifully designed and sometimes miniature chapbooks are kept in the supply closet in order, I assume, to prevent theft. I must have visited it half a dozen times since 2016, when Prynne was first recommended to me by a friend as a way of getting out of a particularly interminable reading slump. Read More
October 6, 2026 First Person A Battle We Had to Win: Yan Lianke on Matchmaking By Yan Lianke The author with his wife, Zhai Lisha, at the Longmen Grottoes near Luoyang, 1984. Courtesy of Yan Lianke. I was promoted to the rank of cadre in late 1982, with much fanfare. The next spring, I returned home in a blaze of glory, ready to meet a mate. Back then, if you were still unmarried at twenty-five, people said you’d been left on the shelf. Even so, I’d never, not in my whole life, thought about what kind of person I wanted to marry. I’d never considered how love would begin, how it might unfold. Not even what love was made of or how much it weighed, what proportion of its significance was emotional or physical, or which was more important: spiritual or sensual love. Now I think that’s like asking whether planting or harvesting matters more. Read More
October 2, 2026 On Children's Books On Children’s Books: Faith Ringgold’s The Invisible Princess By Asha Futterman The author’s copy of The Invisible Princess by Faith Ringgold. Courtesy of Kenyatta Tatum Futterman. My mom got my sister and me The Invisible Princess from Target, which used to have good Black children’s books. Before writing this essay, I’d forgotten most of the story—a children’s fairy tale from 1998, written and illustrated by the artist Faith Ringgold—but I could still see certain images. I remember, in particular, staring at a picture of a blind child standing in a flat field, looking up at a girl in a red dress. The first girl is Patience, the blind daughter of an evil slave master, Captain Pepper; the second is the Invisible Princess. They both have empty expressions, but Patience’s mouth hangs open as she gestures up toward the spectral princess in red. I remember this arresting feeling of being able to see her blindness. The cotton flowers around them look like molars. Read More
October 1, 2026 Bulletin Writers Whose Names You Don’t Know By Owen Park Illustration by Na Kim Today marks the opening of our October online-submissions period for prose and poetry. This week, we asked our assistant editor, Owen Park, to describe the journey a piece can take from the slush pile into our pages. Over the past seventy-three years, The Paris Review’s commitment to reading unsolicited submissions has yielded the discoveries of work by writers such as Yiyun Li, Philip Roth, and Wells Tower. We know that the next writer we fall for won’t necessarily have an M.F.A. or an agent, and so the slush pile remains our best line of contact with the emerging authors whose names we haven’t yet heard. Read More
September 29, 2026 From the Archive Naked at Last: A Conversation with F. Keith Wahle By Joseph Grantham Photograph courtesy of F. Keith Wahle. When the poet F. Keith Wahle was first published in The Paris Review, he was working at the Cincinnati Public Library. He’d lived in Cincinnati for almost his whole life. A conscientious objector during Vietnam, he completed his service as an orderly for two years in a psych ward at the same hospital where he was born. The only time Wahle didn’t live in the Cincinnati area was when he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with the poets Donald Justice, Mark Strand, and Larry Levis. And then he was back in Cincinnati, where a librarian named Beth, who later became his wife of fifty-two years, helped get him a job. They worked in the same building for three decades. Read More