March 10, 2025 At Work Making a Claim on Language: A Conversation with Adania Shibli By Max Weiss PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ADANIA SHIBLI. The Winter issue of The Paris Review opens with “Camouflage,” a story by Adania Shibli, the first line of which nudges us, ominously, toward a much broader picture: “We have nothing to do with what’s happening.” And yet what’s happening in the story itself isn’t initially clear. Instead, the scene—in which a Palestinian brother and sister inch forward in their car toward a flying checkpoint in torrential rain—comes into focus slowly, with a masterful control that transforms that obscurity itself into a way of illustrating the dread, tension, and uncertainty of living under the control of the Israeli authorities and military. Shibli, who lives between Berlin and Palestine, where she was born, is the author of plays, short stories, essays, and novels, including Touch, We Are All Equally Far from Love, and, most recently, Minor Detail, which was first published in Arabic in 2017 and translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette in 2020. It was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature, longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, and awarded the LiBeraturpreis in 2023. When I met Shibli in Berlin in the fall of 2024, there was a stack of papers on her desk that amounted to the most recent draft of a new novel written in Arabic. The Review had commissioned me to translate its opening pages, but Shibli, apparently keen to protect my innocence, or my confusion, was adamant that I not read beyond them. Over a home-cooked meal, she and I spoke about how I might want to approach the translation that would appear in The Paris Review. I asked basic questions like “Who is the narrator?” and “But what is this novel about?” Shibli was gentle but sometimes elliptical in her responses. Following our work on the translation, I sent her a few questions over email. INTERVIEWER You once told me, half-jokingly, that you’re “just a farmer.” Why? ADANIA SHIBLI You witness the trust that Palestinian farmers have in trees and in the land despite the colonial violence they face every single day of their farming lives as Israeli authorities, military, and settlers see to it that trees are uprooted, crops attacked with pesticides, and farmers killed. Then you have to ask how this trust—its source or even its justification—is any different from the trust that sleepwalkers have in the night. Writers also move through the field of language guided by that trust, but ever more slowly. Read More
March 7, 2025 In Memoriam For Gary Indiana (1950–2024) By Sam McKinniss Gary Indiana in HIS NEW YORK APARTMENT, FEBRUARY 2002. Photograph by SYLVIA PLACHY. “Live Free or Die” is a false dilemma as well as the state motto of New Hampshire, where Gary Indiana was born and raised. The aphorism originated with the American Revolution and was revived in the sixties to boost up the boys sent to kill and die in Vietnam. New Hampshire began stamping it onto license plates in 1970, when Gary was twenty. By then he was living in California (state motto: “Eureka!”), having fled west at sixteen. What has proven true in the ensuing decades is that Gary lived freely and died anyway. Read More
March 6, 2025 Lectures Horrific Surrealism: Writing on Migration By Viet Thanh Nguyen Feliks Michał Wygrzywalski, Charon’s Boat, 1917, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. My father has crossed many borders. Born in northern Việt Nam under French rule in 1933, he was educated in a French Catholic school. More than eighty years later, a widower, he could still sing fragments of French songs when we sat together at the dining table. The meal I could prepare which he most enjoyed was filet mignon, medium rare, with a glass of red wine. He had a cupboard full of Louis Jadot Beaujolais, for when he liked something, he bought it in bulk. When he stopped being able to eat meat and drink wine, I took the last two bottles of Louis Jadot and brought them home with me, where they remain untouched. Perhaps I will drink one when he passes away. Perhaps I will open the second decades from now and see what I remember when I taste it, even if all I will taste is spoilt wine. Read More
March 5, 2025 The Revel Announcing the 2025 George Plimpton and Susannah Hunnewell Prizewinners By The Paris Review Photograph of Elijah Bailey courtesy of the author; photograph of Julien Columeau by Valentina Kim; photograph of Sana R. Chaudhry by Virginia Hobbs. We are delighted to announce that Elijah Bailey will receive this year’s George Plimpton Prize and that Julien Columeau and Sana R. Chaudhry will receive the Susannah Hunnewell Prize. The prizes will be presented at our annual Spring Revel on April 1 in New York, cochaired by Laurie and Oskar Eustis and MCed by Lena Dunham. We’ll also be honoring Anne Carson with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature, which will be presented by Ben Whishaw. Prizewinners are selected by the editorial committee of the Review’s board of directors. The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993, honors our founding editor’s commitment to championing new talent by recognizing an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the magazine during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Jesse Ball, Amie Barrodale, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Yiyun Li, and Ottessa Moshfegh. Read More
March 4, 2025 Bookmarks Accurate Models of Reality By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From William Stixrud and Ned Johnson’s The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child: A Workbook (Penguin Life): Below we’ve listed some research-backed statements about what an accurate model of reality looks like: … Money matters, but not nearly as much as we think it does. … We’re actually not very good at predicting what will make us happy. … If we’re on a bus or plane, we’re happier if we talk to a stranger than if we keep to ourselves. … Some of these statements might sound familiar to you. They come from experts who have published books about their research. Read More
March 3, 2025 On Books On Helen Garner’s Diaries By Leslie Jamison From Claudia Keep’s portfolio, Interiors, in issue no. 246 of The Paris Review. What secret desires and resentments are tucked inside the people we love? A little girl’s diary, with its tiny lock and key, testifies to the impulse to keep parts of ourselves hidden, but it’s impossible to look at a locked diary without imagining breaking it open. What to do then, with the published diary? With its lock removed, its interior offered to the world not only as exposure but as form: a genre beholden to the insight that rises from immediacy rather than retrospection. Many writers’ diaries have been published, but far fewer have been published in their lifetimes—and none carry the singular acuity, wit, and electric grace of Helen Garner’s. An Australian national treasure known for her novels of domestic nuance and entanglement (Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach) and journalism of grand sorrow and fierce controversy (The First Stone, This House of Grief), Garner has given us diaries that read like they are inventing a new language made from utterly familiar materials: fresh, raw, vibrating with life. “Like being given a painting you love gleaming with the still wet paint,” as the writer Helen Elliott put it. They are seductively loose and nimble, delivering shards of experience rather than an overdetermined narrative, pivoting from sharpened skewers of observation (“The writers’ festival. It’s like being barbecued”) to a clear-eyed claiming of pleasure (“tear meat off a chicken and stuff it into her mouth”), swerving from deep reckonings with romantic intimacy and dissolution to sudden, perfect aphorisms hidden like Easter eggs in the grass: “Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.” Read More