September 28, 2026 Redux And Then Somebody Handed Me a Story: Gary Indiana, Unlocked By Natalie Shapero Gary Indiana in his New York apartment, February 2002. © Sylvia Plachy. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, we’ve unlocked Gary Indiana’s Art of Fiction interview, selected from the archive by Natalie Shapero, whose poem “The Top of Hell” appears in our new Fall issue. Tobi Haslett’s prefatory note to Gary Indiana’s Art of Fiction interview, published in issue no. 238 of the Review, mentions the very large number of books lining the walls of Indiana’s New York City apartment. “More books,” Haslett observes, “are always arriving.” Three years later, following Indiana’s passing in 2024, this impressive and assuredly eclectic book collection was boxed up and shipped across the country to a planned library site in Altadena, California, where, on arrival, it was promptly incinerated in its entirety by the Eaton Fire. Read More
September 25, 2026 Dispatch Notes from a Party for a Dating App “Grounded in Lacanian Psycholinguistics” By Gemma Sieff Guests at the Readme launch party. Photographs by Matt Weinberger. Dreams can come true, and in dreams begin responsibilities. On a Thursday in September, I embarked on an evening of the sort of arduous New York City fun I used to fantasize about as a suburban seventeen-year-old in the year 2000; if I were so lucky as to one day make it here as opposed to anywhere, I’d be breaststroking in a riptide of scene and culture. Read More
September 24, 2026 At Work John Berger, Death’s Secretary: A Conversation with Tom Overton By Scott Schomburg John Berger in 2014. Photograph by Amarjit Chandan, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. The British writer and artist John Berger is best known for two things: his 1972 book and BBC series, Ways of Seeing, a canonical work of criticism that challenged traditional views of art history; and his acceptance speech that year, after winning the Booker McConnell Prize for his novel G., during which he announced that—in opposition to the prize’s founders, an organization with ties to the slave trade—half his award money would go to the British Black Panthers. That speech is partly why Berger became famous enough for his papers to go to the British Library, where the writer Tom Overton got a job cataloguing them. It is also why, as Overton writes in a new biography, John Berger: From Life, he spent fifteen years of his life piecing Berger’s together. Read More
September 22, 2026 At Work Plan B Is Extremely Dangerous: Benjamin Moser on Anti-Zionism By Krithika Varagur Benjamin Moser in 2015, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Benjamin Moser is no stranger to life-writing, having written both the definitive English-language biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector and a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Susan Sontag. In his latest book, he takes on not one but twelve biographies in a sprawling attempt to excavate the lesser-known history of Jewish opposition to Zionism, from the nineteenth century to the present. We might even say thirteen lives, because Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History (out September 22 from Doubleday) is a deeply personal project for Moser, and it opens with an extended meditation on his own migration from passive Zionist, as a Jewish child in Houston, to adult anti-Zionist. He conceived of the book shortly after October 7 and researched it at a breakneck pace, including on reporting trips to South Africa, Germany, and Egypt. We became friends when he was putting the finishing touches on it last year at the New York Public Library, where we were both fellows. The book is an emotional and propulsive attempt to trace a lineage for those in the often-lonely position in which he found himself as an adult. But it’s hardly just for Jewish readers; the book’s diverse, impressionistic portraits of individuals from a nineteenth-century rabbi to the celebrated photographer Nan Goldin suggest, cumulatively, that anti-Zionism has been, and will continue to be, a big tent. Moser spoke to me last month about his work, goals, and process from his home in Utrecht. Usually, he jokes, prepublication activities are the “calm before the calm”—but, given the strong opinions elicited by this subject, he predicted that the rollout of this book might be a little more eventful. Read More
September 22, 2026 Bulletin Adelle Waldman Is the 2026–2027 Paris Review Visiting Professor at the Bard Prison Initiative By The Paris Review Photograph by Lou Rouse. We are delighted to announce that Adelle Waldman is the 2026–2027 Paris Review Visiting Professor at the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI). BPI has provided a full-time, tuition-free liberal arts education to students incarcerated at several upstate New York prisons since 1999, and currently enrolls more than four hundred students across seven campuses; it also offers tuition-free degree programs through the Bard Microcolleges, hosted at local institutions such as the Brooklyn Public Library. In 2024, The Paris Review and BPI announced a partnership, through which a distinguished creative writer would teach the literature that has most inspired them to BPI’s students. Waldman succeeds Javier Fuentes, and will teach three semester-long courses over the next year. Read More
September 21, 2026 Document On “Derek,” Captain Ahab’s Evil Half Brother By John Hay Still from The Sea Beast (1926), Grosset & Dunlap photoplay edition. Public domain, courtesy of John Hay. The Sea Beast, the first film adaptation of Moby-Dick, begins with a leather-bound edition of the novel opening to page one, but the phrase “Call me Ishmael” is nowhere to be found. That’s because there’s no Ishmael in this movie at all. Instead, theatergoers a hundred years ago were introduced to a new character: Captain Ahab’s evil younger brother, Derek. Yes, Derek. Read More