October 24, 2025 On Books Myths of Meaning: Kay Cicellis’s The Way To Colonos By Rachel Cusk Photograph by Roger Pic. Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. This savage little book is a recasting of three Sophoclean tragedies into the modern era. It unfolds for its reader certain human situations that are familiar enough, with an absence of sentimentality that renders them entirely shocking and strange. Its themes are the pain of youth and the disillusionment that comes with observing the less-than-faithful relationship between authority figures and the truth, but its originality resides in its broaching of the force of tragedy in ordinary human relationships. This is not to say that existence is presented as merely nihilistic or absurd: on the contrary, the characters here are beset by almost ungovernable emotion. What is tragic is the infallibility with which their natural love of justice and truth is taken from the hands of these young protagonists and bruised or broken by the people on whom they rely—rely not just for survival but for the explanation of life and the example of how to live it that their elders are meant to provide. Read More
October 24, 2025 On Books The Female Picaresque: Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver By Amanda Fortini Jan Kerouac in Eugene, Oregon, 1983. Photograph by D. Alexander Stuart, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Halfway through her 1981 autobiographical novel, Baby Driver, the story of her hectic, careening life as a young bohemian woman traveling through North and South America in the sixties and seventies, Jan Kerouac calls herself “a gum wrapper in a whirlwind.” In this moment, Kerouac has just decided to move from Santa Fe, where she’s been sleeping with local politicians for money, to work as an escort at a poolside men’s club in Phoenix. It’s one impulsive decision in a long string of them, and although the remark seems tossed off and casual, it perfectly captures the whole chaotic course of her wayward existence. Not surprisingly, the gig goes awry. The police raid the club for prostitution, and the owners are forced to reconstitute as a “massage parlor” in a trailer outside of town. Kerouac soon grows weary of the work, for which she consumes an obliterating combination of wine, soda, and “bennies” to produce “a loose capable vigor just made to order for the job,” as she winkingly puts it. She makes a snap decision to get back on the highway, leaving as hastily as she arrived: “Bounding along, flashing past saguaros in my silver Caddy, serenaded by Willie Nelson wailing in the desert air … never felt so free,” she writes. “I had $800 and I was going back to Santa Fe. … I was like Marco Polo bringing wondrous bounty to amaze the folks back home.” Read More
October 23, 2025 History The Fall of a Sparrow By Rachel Eisendrath A male sparrow. Photograph by Rhododendrites, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. I. He Who Noteth Everyone had fallen in love with the short (five feet, six inches), young (twenty-four years old), big-hearted leader of the Chicago Zouaves. Even Abraham Lincoln. The president and Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth were as “intimate”—these are Lincoln’s words in a letter to Ellsworth’s parents—“as the disparity of our ages, and my engrossing engagements, would permit.” Lincoln had given Ellsworth a job in his law office in Illinois and then invited the young man to accompany him on his famous inaugural train journey from Springfield, Illinois, to the East Coast. In his hopeful idealism, Ellsworth seemed to exemplify Aristotle’s description of the virtues of young people: “They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things—and that means having exalted notions.” In this account, the young are by nature uncynical, hopeful, magnanimous—in contrast to the pragmatic, fearful, and miserly old, who may maintain their grip on money but not much else; as Mary Chesnut puts it, “all other muscles are relaxed by age.” Read More
October 23, 2025 Bulletin Edward P. Jones Will Receive Our 2026 Hadada Award By The Paris Review Photograph by Hilton Als. In January 2002, Edward P. Jones was laid off from Tax Notes, a weekly trade magazine for tax professionals. He had been suffering from spells of depression, the latest one exacerbated by his upstairs neighbors, who created such a ruckus that, as Jones told Hilton Als in The Art of Fiction No. 222, “I almost fell to my knees at the corner of my street, because I just didn’t want to go back home to the noise.” The firing hurt, Jones recalled, “but I got up the next day, Wednesday, and went to work on the book. Probably five pages that day because I had a plan—not because I knew what I had. Not at all. I mean, I’m me, I’m living in northern Virginia, I don’t know what people want in New York, or wherever the publishing world is centered. … I just had to go on. I’m lucky, because I did things in that novel that I never learned you’re not supposed to do.” The result, Jones’s magisterial novel, The Known World, published in 2003, won the Pulitzer Prize. Set in antebellum Virginia, the novel focuses on a formerly enslaved man, Henry Townsend, who has become an enslaver of others—and expands to take in the lives of several dozen interconnected characters, shuttling back and forth across decades and even centuries. Jones traces the limits of what we can know about the motivations of others with an immersive empathy recognizable to readers of his short stories—one of which was published in The Paris Review in 1992. We are thrilled to announce that Jones will receive the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement, at the Spring Revel on April 14, 2026. Read More
October 21, 2025 On Film Screenwriting 101: How to Reverse Engineer a Puzzle-Box Thriller By Liby Hays Illustration by the author. The first rule of screenwriting is that it’s always formatted in 12-point Courier font—as if ejected from the typewriter of a gumshoe detective. Beyond this, there are no rules. There are no necessary qualifications to screenwriting and no academically paywalled knowledge base. The requisite research is the substrate of our collective consciousness: movies. Have you seen a handful of these over the course of your life? Then you’ve probably internalized the basics and know in your gut how a story should unfold. Penning page after page of dialogue will feel effortless. Unlike other forms of writing, you needn’t worry about transitions or logical coherence. It’s, in essence, the same as playing with dolls. Read More
October 17, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Natasha Wimmer on “I Wasn’t Always This Ugly” By Natasha Wimmer Roque Dalton in exile in Havana, Cuba, 1967. Casa de las Américas, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Roque Dalton’s poem “I Wasn’t Always This Ugly” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 253. Here, we asked Wimmer to reflect on her work. Can you tell us a little about Roque Dalton and your interest in him? Where was this poem originally published? Dalton was born in El Salvador in 1935 and is generally considered one of the greatest Latin American poets of the twentieth century. He was very politically engaged—he lived in exile from El Salvador for most of his life, including some crucial years spent in Cuba. In his thirties, he became increasingly committed to the armed struggle and joined a guerrilla group to fight in El Salvador. Four days before his fortieth birthday, he was shot by his comrades in an incident that has never been fully explained. I first encountered Dalton through my translations of Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño claimed to have met Dalton shortly before he was shot, and The Savage Detectives was clearly influenced by Dalton’s autobiographical novel Pobrecito poeta que era yo … (as yet untranslated). Over the course of translating him, I’ve fallen victim to his considerable charms—as seems to have been the case with everyone who met him. This poem was originally published as part of the collection Un libro levemente odioso (A Slightly Nasty Book, forthcoming), which I’ve been translating along with another work called Taberna y otros lugares (Tavern and Other Places, forthcoming). Both are part of a larger project by Seven Stories Press to bring Dalton into English. Until now, English-language readers have had only an anthology, Small Hours of the Night, and Dalton’s final collection, Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle. Read More