October 1, 2025 The Review’s Review “Is There More to Life Than This?”: On Dinah Brooke’s Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady By Emma Cline Villa in Versilia. Photograph by Graeme Maclean, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Italy is not always the salvation of English-speaking people—but it does often seem that way. In film, in literature, in food, it’s the place where you go to find yourself. The real you, the one whose blazing depths have been obscured by the cold crust of convention. In The Enchanted April—the 1922 bestseller that turned Positano into a tourist destination—Elizabeth von Arnim suggested that the Mediterranean climate could burn off the impurities of the English soul, as if by a kind of Italian alchemy. English travelers from Byron to E. M. Forster advanced a similar sort of travel magic as a means for getting in touch with one’s soul. Keats, wracked with tuberculosis, went to Italy hoping to save his life. While the sunny views may have limited curative powers, Italy, for the traveler not coughing blood onto their bedsheets, still seems to promise a kinder, more elemental world. Especially in contrast to the modern gray drizzle of England: in Rachel Cusk’s memoir of her family’s months in Italy, the decision to bolt from their Bristol suburb is prompted by an ad on the street with the tagline “Is there more to life than this?” Well, is there? 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
September 26, 2025 The Review’s Review What You Know Most Deeply: On Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions By Zhang Yueran Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions. Photograph courtesy of Zhang Yueran. “Little Reunions ought to be burned,” Eileen Chang wrote to her friend and literary executor, Stephen Soong, in 1976, the year she finished what would be her last novel. When it was finally published, in 2009, fourteen years after her death, Little Reunions seemed to carry this curse with it; the book received widespread criticism for its cryptic narrative and for not sounding like Eileen Chang. At the time she was writing Little Reunions, Chang had been living in Los Angeles for two decades. She was born in Shanghai in 1920, to an aristocratic family in decline; shortly after her birth, her father grew addicted to opium and her mother emigrated to Britain. Chang harbored literary ambitions from a young age, and studied English while attending an all-girls Christian school in Shanghai. At the age of twenty-four, she published the short story collection Chuanqi (Romances), whose astonishing assuredness and glamorous portrayal of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan milieu quickly made her the most prominent female author in China of her time. After the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, though, Chang found herself unable to adapt to the new political climate. She left Mainland China in 1952 and spent several years in Hong Kong, where she wrote a pair of anti-Communist novels at the behest of the U.S. government, before arriving in the United States in 1955. Read More
September 23, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Patricia Lockwood on “Party in the USA” By Patricia Lockwood Photograph courtesy of Patricia Lockwood. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Patricia Lockwood’s “Party in the USA” appears online today. Her poems “Perfect Pussy,” “The Ventifact,” and “Cave Painting” appear in our new Fall issue, no. 253. How did this poem start? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? The genesis of this one is almost comically literal. I was recording the audiobook for my new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, at a studio in Savannah, Georgia, and after my first session the sound engineer told me that Miley Cyrus had recorded “Party in the U.S.A.” in that very booth. (Why not tell me beforehand, so I could call upon her power?) On the second day, when we broke for lunch, I looked at my phone and saw that my sister had texted about an active shooter at the hospital where she works. Nothing makes you feel stupider than having just whipped off your bra in the “Party in the U.S.A.” booth while reading a book about your tiny little life so you can get more air into your idiotic diaphragm than your sister suddenly texting you the words “We’re on lockdown.” Were you thinking of any other poems or works of art while you wrote it? I was. Many details in the poem are taken from Roger Shattuck’s 1980 classic The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, which had been sent to me by NYRB. Read More
September 23, 2025 Poetry Party in the USA By Patricia Lockwood FROM JOSH SMITH’S DINOSAURS, A PORTFOLIO THAT APPEARED IN THE WINTER 2024 ISSUE OF THE PARIS REVIEW. ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY FARZAD OWRANG, COURTESY OF JOSH SMITH. After a while English departs and you Find yourself in a realm. Like the Wild Boy Reaching for a potato in the mirror. Someone was holding it behind his head. He never stopped to let it cool but made Little cries to indicate it was burning him. Still, it was his favorite food. After an hour Of reading out loud your carefulness Is mere sound, the city you have built Whistles. Between chapters I wrapped up And shivered, did not eat, so I could go on Speaking what seemed the whole language At once: tongue twisters, all observation. “Party in the U.S.A.” was recorded in that booth, Her platinum record hung on the wall. Active shooter in my building, Mary texted, Just as we broke to stretch. Fucking America, We said, and settled in to read the father Chapter. The Wild Boy would be cared for By a priest, later, but first, a school Gardener. Scenery on the way to Paris Did not impress him, he caught a light Case of smallpox, and insisted on having His potato next to him at all times. There are feats that seem impossible Just before and after: 8,000 signatures, Being alive. You cannot think about page Numbers, your hunger, or Baby Peck, Hysterical, trying to climb into your sister’s Desk with a bottle of bourbon, to hide. They are locked down, quiet, texting. Why had it felt so urgent to be heard? Hold on, baby, I said, and Paul: “I once had an RPG shot at me While dancing to ‘Party in the U.S.A.’ ” We waited for word: OK, they got him. And waited for word: I hate it here. “The boy had grown quite fat now, Loved to be tickled, laughed easily, And apparently dreamed while asleep.” They were saddened that he cared only For his own survival, nourishment. You could not die with your potato Next to you, a potato meant one more day. Little clouds breathed out—cry cry!— And there were jagged peaks. Oh, it was all painful, mealy, wonderful. How it contained—hot hot!—all Custom, rivers of butter, green chives Of trees, a gardener who had promised Him a new home if he ever needed one. Patricia Lockwood is the author of five books, including the novel Will There Ever Be Another You.
September 22, 2025 Document “The Abysmal Scum!”: On Not Reading Ayn Rand By Jordan Castro Rand’s signature created in vector format by Scewing, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. A few months ago, as a result of the strange, hazy possession that occurs while sitting in front of the laptop screen, I “found myself”—a phrase I’ve disliked ever since I read a tweet by Elisa Gabbert pointing out its imprecision (although in this case it’s appropriate)—staring at Ayn Rand’s marginalia in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. I’ve never read Ayn Rand, even though I’ve owned a copy of The Fountainhead since I was twenty-two, when my depressed friend moved to the West Coast and left me his book collection. I agree with Walter Benjamin that it’s good to keep a library regardless of whether or not you actually read the books, and so I brought The Fountainhead with me wherever I moved. My friend Megan, while visiting, said she “actually liked” The Fountainhead, and I took great satisfaction in being someone people felt free enough around to confess things like their love of The Fountainhead to. This was 2017—a time when a Fountainhead confession could get you into real trouble. And so The Fountainhead became a kind of litmus test: if, when perusing my book collection, someone mentioned liking The Fountainhead, I felt I could trust them; if they asked in a baffled, catty tone why I had it, I lost a little respect for them, despite my not having read it and still having only a vague sense that certain people didn’t like Ayn Rand because she was a “capitalist.” Read More