The Paris Review

Photograph by Peter Smith. Courtesy of New Directions Books.

The Nobel Prize committee announced this morning that the Canadian poet, essayist, classicist, and translator Anne Carson has won th...

Photography courtesy of Natalie Shapero.

Natalie Shapero’s poem “The Top of Hell,” which appears in our new Fall issue, no. 257, is nominally about the top of Hell, but it is also implicitly about the b...

Single Tangle Mine (2026) by J. H. Prynne, Face Press. Courtesy of Ian Heames.

Whenever I find myself in London, the first thing I do is go to the London Review Bookshop, down the street from the British Museum in Bloomsbury...

The author with his wife, Zhai Lisha, at the Longmen Grottoes near Luoyang, 1984. Courtesy of Yan Lianke.

I was promoted to the rank of cadre in late 1982, with much fanfare. The next spring, I returned home in a blaze of glory, ready to meet a mate. 

Back then, if you were still unmarried at twenty-five, people said you’d been lef...

The author’s copy of The Invisible Princess by Faith Ringgold. Courtesy of Kenyatta Tatum Futterman.

My mom got my sister and me The Invisible Princess from Target, which used to have good Black children’s books. Before writing this essay, I’d forgotten most of the story—a children’s fairy tale from 1998, written and illus...