September 18, 2026 Home Improvements My Larval Roommates By Sarah Nicole Prickett Wenceslaus Hollar, Moth and Three Butterflies, 1646, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0. Though the print issues of The Paris Review are never overtly themed, it often happens that, in the process of poring over the prose, poems, art, and interviews bundled into each issue, we notice some inadvertently reoccurring motif. Bubbles, for example, or psychosexually fraught adolescent friendships. These motifs sometimes lead to web series accompanying the rollout of the latest issue, as was the case when, a few years ago, my predecessor Sophie Haigney launched Home Improvements. The series—inspired by the fantastically long and architectural first sentence of Mieko Kanai’s story “Tap Water”—invited writers to “consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction.” Read More
September 16, 2026 On Music On the “Chattanooga Choo Choo” By Stephen King Screenshot from Sun Valley Serenade (1941), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. I was a bop kid from the start. When Eric Carmen, the talented lead singer of the Raspberries, wrote “I’m a rocker, I’m a roller / I’ve been a-boogieing since I ditched the stroller,” he might have been talking about me. I can clearly remember my first record, a seventy-eight rpm. It was Elvis singing “Don’t Be Cruel.” (B-side was “Hound Dog.”) Later I graduated to forty-fives and bought Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” for seventy-eight cents. (B-side: “Around and Around.”) My mother—not exactly racist but very much a woman of her time—asked me if Mr. Berry was white. Fearing my precious record might be taken away (I was ten), I assured her he was. Read More
September 14, 2026 Redux You Have to Ask Questions: Svetlana Alexievich, Unlocked By The Paris Review Svetlana Alexievich with a cameraman in Kabul, 1988. Courtesy of Svetlana Alexievich. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, to read alongside our inaugural Art of Oral History interview with Alexievich, we’ve unlocked “Voices from Chernobyl” from issue no. 172 (Winter 2004). “If you cut straight to the part you need, which is what journalists do, it won’t be interesting, and it won’t be the truth, either. Not the whole truth,” the Nobel Prize–winning Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich tells Elena Kostyuchenko in The Art of Oral History No. 1, published in our new Fall issue. “You have to ask questions, of course. Your job is to scour away the banality and return people to their true selves, to make them face what they rarely tap into.” Read More
September 11, 2026 Dispatch Kiss The Ring: Richard Wagner’s Opera Festival in the Age of AI By Krithika Varagur Richard Wagner Theater, Bayreuth, 1908, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Nothing at Bayreuth, the hundred-and-fifty-year-old opera festival created by and dedicated to the works of Richard Wagner, adheres to the pleasure principle. It can take years to get tickets to the Festspielhaus, the purpose-built Festival Theatre on a Green Hill (more of a slope) on the outskirts of town. Those who manage to do so must then sit on hard seats without cushions, which Wagner feared would hurt the acoustics. The operas tend to be epically long and there are no subtitles, in German or otherwise. The opera house itself is so hot that patrons regularly faint. And then there’s the sticky appeal of der Meister himself, whose visionary musical greatness is marred by his unapologetic antisemitism, and later co-opting by Nazism. Wagner, who died in 1883, was a nineteenth-century man—“furrowed by all the century’s features, burdened with all its drives,” per Thomas Mann—but few prefigured twentieth-century German nationalism like he did. Hitler (born in 1889) idolized Wagner and made his music the soundtrack to Nazi rallies. Read More
September 10, 2026 First Person My Grandfather in Grundy, Virginia By Zaina Arafat Photograph by Aaron F. Stone, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. In the late seventies, my grandfather left Nablus and took a job as head surgeon at a hospital in Grundy, Virginia, a coal-mining town tucked between Kentucky and West Virginia in the Appalachian Mountains. Grundy is the rural county seat of Buchanan County and home to Buchanan Mine, the deepest operating longwall coal mine in the United States. Neil Armstrong was rumored to have visited and signed the guest book, after the miners disputed Armstrong’s claim that he was the first man to walk where no man had ever set foot. They did that every day, the miners said. Read More
September 9, 2026 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Fall Issue By Emily Stokes There’s a Russian phrase that translates as something like “kitchen talk” and refers to the kind of conversation that, in the postwar Soviet Union, could happen only around the kitchen table. Previously, apartments had been almost always communal, with stovetops shared by multiple households. Suddenly, in poky single-family khrushchevka, a new social culture arose. In a steamy kitchen, you could share risky anecdotes, engage in political debates, and read from samizdat, especially if the tap was running and you put a pillow over the phone. The spirit of kitchen talk is still alive in the work of the Nobel Prize–winning Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich, the subject of The Paris Review’s inaugural Art of Oral History interview, which appears in our new Fall issue. (To mark the occasion, we have given the Russian version of the interview to our friends at Meduza.) The sessions between Alexievich and her interviewer, the Russian investigative journalist Elena Kostyuchenko, who was not long ago pronounced a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin, took place in Alexievich’s apartment in Berlin, where Alexievich has lived since she was forced to flee Minsk in 2020. Her books—on the Second World War, Chernobyl, and the collapse of the Soviet Union—are drawn from hundreds of interviews, mostly with strangers. The best conversations, she explains to Kostyuchenko, happen behind closed doors, without anyone present who might act as a social censor (Alexievich has harsh words for husbands), and unfurl slowly and intimately. “Just like we’re talking right now,” she says. Read More