February 6, 2026 The Review’s Review The Garden of Earthly Delights By Rosa Shipley Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, ca. 1480–1490. Photograph by Anonymous, Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage Photolibrary. Public domain. The Garden of Earthly Delights taught me the consequences of looking at something for too long. It was pitch-black in the auditorium where we had art history class, save for my professor’s beacon of pointer light and the vivid glow of the piece on the giant smartboard. We started by looking at the middle panel, then the left panel, then the right one, and, finally, the exterior of the piece—bewildering. An almost sci-fi design on what looked to be a wooden cabinet, which contained the sprawl of the three panels. Why, I still wonder, did we start with the middle? Read More
January 9, 2026 The Review’s Review Two Women, Three Guns: On Hedda Gabler and Anna Christie By Cynthia Zarin Ghost light in a darkened theater. Photograph by Jon Ellwood, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. During a week in December when violence seemed to rap on every door, I saw two plays about women who take their lives into their own hands: Hedda Gabler at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, and Anna Christie at Saint Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The plays were written thirty years apart. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen in 1891, and Anna Christie by Eugene O’Neill in 1921. That year, Alexander Woollcott, reviewing the first production of Anna Christie for the New York Times, wrote, “All grown-up playgoers should jot down in their notebooks the name of Anna Christie as that of a play they really ought to see.” Though O’Neill won the Pulitzer Prize for Anna Christie, the play has been infrequently performed. It is being directed now by Thomas Kail, and Anna is played by his wife, Michelle Williams. On the other hand, Hedda Gabler, directed this time by James Bundy and starring Marianna Gailus, is a warhorse. Both plays are about traps, and both confound expectations. Anna, a pinup saint, is stymied by circumstance but frees herself. Hedda, a monster, steps backward into a baroque ambuscade of her own making. In Anna and Hedda we see our best and worst selves, for who doesn’t wish that things were other than they are? Seen one after another, the plays turn each other inside out: One is about the ability to change—to respond and to evolve. The other is about egomania. Each play is in four acts and begins with the end of a journey. Hedda Gabler, the beautiful, self-absorbed daughter of an impecunious general, has returned to Christiania (now Oslo) after a six-month honeymoon with her new husband, George Tesman; she is now Mrs. Tesman, but the name of the play underscores that her father, dead, remains the center of her life. She has married the pedantic, fussy Tesman as a last resort, but why she chose Tesman over her other suitors isn’t clear—he’s as friable as a dry leaf. Marianna Gailus plays Hedda so splendidly—like a painted top at top speed—and Max Gordon Moore is so clownishly devoted as her dotard of a husband that, at least for a minute, we’re mesmerized by her and discount him. Hedda is as willful as Eris, who threw the golden apple and started the Trojan War. Her traits are egotism, cruelty, and dissociation. Her interest is showing off, and her hobby is belittlement. She insults George’s Aunt Juliane by mocking her new hat and pretending to mistake it for the charwoman’s. “Is there anything the matter with you, Hedda? Eh?” asks George, at the end of the first scene. Read More
December 12, 2025 The Review’s Review Our Favorite Books of 2025 By The Paris Review This year, we asked our contributors, our readers, our current and former interns, and other friends of the Review for their favorite books of the past year. Here’s what they said. Service by John Tottenham is a novel about a disgruntled, begrudging, malcontent man who works in a bookstore and is also a writer. So immediately you understand why he is disgruntled, begrudging, and malcontent. He is robustly rude to everyone, delivering diatribes on the customers’ vapidity and eviscerating his own brooding arena of envy and failure as well. At first this is entrancing. Soon it becomes too one-note; we seek even the slimmest hint of redemption. But you must persevere—maybe skim the complaining a bit—as the novel eventually becomes a discourse on the vagaries of writing: obstacles, setbacks, successes, tricks of the trade. Pills are involved. —Nancy Lemann, author of “A Person and a Robot” Rie Qudan’s Sympathy Tower Tokyo (translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood) follows Sara Machina, an architect tasked with drafting a new tower to house convicted criminals—in comfort. The novel troubles staid discourse about crime and punishment in a tone so perfect I realized I’d been waiting for it too long. Querying our capacity to create anything right alongside language and history, representation and reality, Qudan never overplays her hand, nor does she smooth over the rough edges of difference or difficulty via sociological, philosophical, or even narrative retreat. With its subtle lyricism, this book is a masterclass in how to consider the instability of the present without falling into the strict trappings of the topical. I’m still thinking about its dedication to inquiry, existence, and the idiosyncrasies of thought. —Joseph Earl Thomas, author of “I Got Snipped: Notes after a Vasectomy” Mike Powell’s New Paltz, New Paltz follows Ben, a New York gossip-mag fact-checker, as he blunders, detached, through the magazine world. For Ben (and maybe for Powell, who once held such a job for Us Weekly), the work of a fact-checker seems to consist of deconstructing narrative into its essentials—the paltry and random moments that together make up Ben’s life. I read Powell’s debut in the midst of doing an intensive fact-check, and steeled myself against the adoption of Ben’s laconic and sort of miserably curious temperament (which I presumed to be a side effect of the profession). Ben’s disposition didn’t stick with me, but the book did; New Paltz, New Paltz is keen and economical—an easy read. “The truth of certain moments,” Powell writes, “can only be attained when the facts are set aside.” —Hazel Byers, former intern I always like stories about strange, small towns. This year I read Someone to Watch Over You by Kumi Kimura, translated from the Japanese by Yuki Tejima: a shimmering, unsettling little novel about two people trying to get through each day. A sense of the profound bleakness of an average life pervades the book. But this oppressiveness is cut by instances of sharp, poetic sadness, such as a description of a train briefly held up in the dark after it runs over a “large, soft” animal. It’s the kind of novel that feels like looking out of a window at night. —Hua Xi, author of “Toilet” Read More
October 28, 2025 The Review’s Review The Tootsie Roll: On Blue Cowboy By Laurie Stone Cowboy in action. Photograph by Erwin Evans, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The other day, I was on the phone with the playwright and actor David Cale, and he told me about filming a movie in Montana, where a cowboy gave him a cowboy hat. He wore it all the time. He wouldn’t take it off, even back in New York. Guys started hitting on him who would never have sniffed around before. Was the hat the germ for his latest monologue, Blue Cowboy? Sort of. In 2021, Cale was invited to Ketchum, Idaho, for a residency at the house where Ernest Hemingway had lived. When Cale learned that Hemingway had killed himself in the house, in 1961, he felt spooked and bought a plane ticket home. Then these elks appeared at the windows of the house, and Cale stood looking into the eyes of a bull elk. It was a staring contest. And because Cale fell into the eyes of the bull elk, he took it as a sign he should stay. Was the bull elk the germ for the monologue? Sort of. Ketchum, Idaho, it turned out, is crazy about dogs. It might be the most dog-centric spot in the States. Cale said that if a person is crossing the street with a dog, every car stops to let them pass, and there is no animal shelter in the area that kills a dog. Not ever. Was the dog thing the germ for David’s monologue? Sure, why not. After he decided to stick around, he biked to town one day—he doesn’t drive. He wanted to see something called “the trailing of the sheep,” a special day when like fifteen thousand sheep are herded from a colder climate on the mountains to warmer areas below, and at this event two cowboys in a car were throwing candy to children. One of the cowboys threw a piece of candy to Cale. It was a Tootsie Roll. Was the Tootsie Roll the germ for the piece? It was. Read More
October 15, 2025 The Review’s Review Death, Love, Taxes, and Beauty, Among Other Issues By Hilton Als Andy Warhol with Archie, his pet Dachsund. Photograph by Jack Mitchell, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 1.0. In The Philosophy, the artist Andy Warhol tells us relatively little about how he became Warhol. He shares parts of his story in this series of aperçus about death, love, taxes, and beauty, among other issues—thus making his philosophy a kind of conversation about what the “I” might mean in general and what his “I” means (at times) in particular. The Philosophy was Warhol’s first book-length work of nonfiction, and if “philosophy,” as we understand the word, means a systematic study of existence, values, dread, the universe, then the book is aptly titled. But the artist slips into other genres as well. He writes a little stand-up banter (particularly with his friend B, with whom he has a kind of deadpan Nichols-and-May routine going on; but unlike Nichols and May, the life they’re talking about is no joke, or not one they’d consider a joke) in a book about removing oneself from the most confusing aspect of existence (or one of them)—that of feeling, which Warhol describes not wanting to experience in The Philosophy. Read More
October 1, 2025 The Review’s Review “Is There More to Life Than This?”: On Dinah Brooke’s Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady By Emma Cline Villa in Versilia. Photograph by Graeme Maclean, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Italy is not always the salvation of English-speaking people—but it does often seem that way. In film, in literature, in food, it’s the place where you go to find yourself. The real you, the one whose blazing depths have been obscured by the cold crust of convention. In The Enchanted April—the 1922 bestseller that turned Positano into a tourist destination—Elizabeth von Arnim suggested that the Mediterranean climate could burn off the impurities of the English soul, as if by a kind of Italian alchemy. English travelers from Byron to E. M. Forster advanced a similar sort of travel magic as a means for getting in touch with one’s soul. Keats, wracked with tuberculosis, went to Italy hoping to save his life. While the sunny views may have limited curative powers, Italy, for the traveler not coughing blood onto their bedsheets, still seems to promise a kinder, more elemental world. Especially in contrast to the modern gray drizzle of England: in Rachel Cusk’s memoir of her family’s months in Italy, the decision to bolt from their Bristol suburb is prompted by an ad on the street with the tagline “Is there more to life than this?” Well, is there? Read More