March 10, 2026 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Spring Issue By Emily Stokes As a child, the writer and activist Sarah Schulman memorized the whole of Bertolt Brecht’s Weimar-era play The Threepenny Opera, with music by Kurt Weill. “I glommed onto that record so bad,” she tells Parul Sehgal in her Art of Nonfiction interview in our new Spring issue. “I listened to it over and over and over and over and over.” Read More
March 4, 2026 Bookmarks Weird Things Occurring There By Tarpley Hitt 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. —Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor From Antoine Volodine’s novel The Monroe Girls (Archipelago), translated from the French by Alyson Waters, an encounter in a hospital for schizophrenics: The comment led to a silence. Everyone was trying to imagine the dark street, unknown, with weird things occurring there. The guy near the door pushed the light timer and the central globe lit up, first with a red glimmer, then a sickly glow. It was an energy-saving lamp and, for thousands of hours, it had been saving its energy and diffusing a light for the dying and sustainable development. When we were in this bedroom, Breton and I, we generally preferred the slightly brighter light from the two streetlamps in the courtyard. “No point staying in the dark,” commented the guy, as if to excuse himself for having modified the lighting. Read More
March 3, 2026 The Revel Announcing the 2026 George Plimpton and Susannah Hunnewell Prizewinners By The Paris Review Photograph of Renny Gong by riel Sturchio; photograph of Bud Smith by Jonathan Aprea. We are thrilled to announce that Renny Gong will receive this year’s George Plimpton Prize and that Bud Smith will receive the Susannah Hunnewell Prize. The awards will be presented at our annual Spring Revel on April 14 in New York, MCed by John Early and Wallace Shawn. We’ll also be honoring Edward P. Jones with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature. The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993, honors our founding editor’s commitment to championing new talent by recognizing an emerging fiction writer of exceptional merit published in the magazine during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Amie Barrodale, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Yiyun Li, Ottessa Moshfegh, and David Szalay. Read More
March 3, 2026 On Books Main Character Syndrome in Wartime By Julian Castronovo Kamala Harris shares a statement to reporters following the mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs parade before boarding Air Force Two at Joint Base Andrews, Wednesday, February 14, 2024, in Maryland. Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson. The White House, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. I have begun to suspect that I am not the main character. I spend my days watching history unfold on the screen of my phone. History, of course, is a story: a narrative sequence of causes and effects. Right now it seems to be a story about intolerable violence, something from which I am, I know, profoundly remote insofar as I continue to tolerate it. This is not very protagonistic of me. Main characters, surely, do not feel the world to be distant and bewildering in its senseless horror. They do not feel the story of history to be totally disconnected from their personal, concurrent experience of being alive. Main characters, after all, drive the plot. Conveniently, real-life main characters love to write about themselves, so there’s plenty of material from which I might learn how to achieve main character status myself. Material, for example, like George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries and 107 Days, two recently published diaristic texts. Both of these meticulous nonfictional accounts of living through history are said to be very novelistic. One is “remarkably vivid and suffused with novelistic detail” such that its author “emerges as an unforgettable, three-dimensional character.” The other, we’re told, “reads like a suspense novel” in that it has “a novelistic feel” and “the pace of a page-turning novel.” It would seem that these writers—George Templeton Strong and Kamala Harris, respectively—are main characters because their realities were, even during times of crisis and dissolution, like books. Things, in other words, make sense when you’re a protagonist because you live inside a novel. The present operates with a narrative purpose and a unifying logic by which the lives and actions of individuals are bound together and to the world at large such that it is possible, as any main character innately knows, to do something important. Read More
February 28, 2026 Arts & Culture Tyrant Style By Thomas Morton Selfie by Giancarlo DiTrapano. Giancarlo DiTrapano was a friend, so take all this with a gram of salt. Gian had two arts at which he was preternaturally talented, what we’d’ve called his genius before that word just meant “smart guy.” One was, I guess you’d say, books. Sounds dumb, but that’s what he did and was good at. He found people who wrote, not always writers, and coaxed them into writing books that were wildly better than what the rest of the book world was crapping out in any given year. I know this probably sounds more like management than art. It’s hard to consider editing an art if you haven’t seen it being done, and publishing is full-well up the stairs at the sausage factory. The books Gian put out weren’t sausages. The writing he knew how to find and to encourage was great from sentence to sentence, that was obviously the big part of it, but the books weren’t just a casing for the writing. The books themselves were fucking Things. They were objects of care and craft—the design, the cover, the typeface, the size of the paper, the blurbs(!), everything was hand-wrought to fit perfectly together with the writing and the writer as one discrete deal, the way a Pink Floyd album in its proper sleeve is. This was at a time when smaller independent imprints would sometimes have a uniform house style that looked all right, and the major publishing houses routinely put out books that looked like slapped-together dog shit. He’d do one or two of these guys in a year, obsessing over them through the whole process, talking endlessly about them the whole way through from manuscript to galley. No one makes two sausages a year without taking a major bath on the enterprise. Read More
February 27, 2026 On Psychoanalysis On Angst By Jamieson Webster Cixous with her children Anne-Emmanuelle and Pierre-François, ca. 1964. Courtesy of Olivier Morel and Hélène Cixous. In her 1977 novel Angst, Hélène Cixous names the quarter hour of Great Suffering—“straight away,” “never again”—when the mother lays the child on the tiles and does not return. Angst divides us: either to remain in unending anguish, or to move to the anguish of an unendingness. This is the threshold into which the text plunges the reader. Suddenly what we never knew is known: we are tossed out to the no place that no one ever leaves. To the unending … This is exactly what I feared, the worst. Towards which corridors were sweeping me at growing speed, and I couldn’t slow down, and I didn’t dare wake up, I was so afraid to find that what it was going to say would be forever true. We come to a woman who has lived this angst to the final hour. There was no relief for her, having lived in and through hopelessness and no-hope, a radical expulsion and the solitude of “facing a faceless wall.” Yet from either side of this fault, one can continue loving, there where it perishes again and again—this is the hand Cixous holds out to us. In her postscript, she writes: “So there was a woman who had taken women’s suffering and their fear upon her without giving way to despair; a woman capable of confronting the Law and its pawns, without letting herself be caught by their sleights of hand, their mirror games, their ivory towers.” Because she was able to be present to herself, there may be “another writing.” Read More