The Paris Review

Donald Barthelme, via Wikimedia Commons. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Public domain.

Barthelme was a Houstonian. To me this is the single most salient fact about him, though t...

Pine Island, 2026. Photograph by Thomas John Weber.

Pine Island, despite its name, is not an island. It’s your average Midwestern farm town, population 3,800. Highway 52 cuts through it like a spine, with little to see on either side except corn and billboards—unless it’s winter, in which case it’s just billboards. Most advertise burgers ...

From Perte Loss, 1979. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation.

In 1979, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha submitted a proposal for a two-channel video performance titled Perte Loss to the San Francisco–based collective Video Free America. The ...

Alberto Burri, Sackcloth 1953, 1953, burlap and thread on canvas, 33 ⅞ x 39 ⅜ inches. Photograph by Hal Foster.

The Ignorant Art Historian is a series by the art critic Hal Foster, in which he tries to “demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it.” You can read his in...

Wallace Shawn in The Fever. Photograph by Julieta Cervantes.

At an open rehearsal last fall of Wallace Shawn’s new play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, the director, A...