The Paris Review

For “the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe grinders. So long as they're good.” We are a quarterly literary magazine that was founded in 1953.

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Dakota Johnson reads Dorothea Lasky’s poem “I Had a Man” in episode 3 of ‘The Paris Review Podcast.’

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A visit to Jack Kerouac’s house ends with the story of Buddha on episode #2 of The Paris Review Podcast.

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Listen to archival tape of Maya Angelou interviewed by George Plimpton, the founding editor of the Review in our new podcast!

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The Paris Review by Stitcher on Apple Podcasts

Download past episodes or subscribe to future episodes of The Paris Review by Stitcher for free.

Announcing The Paris Review podcast. Listen to the trailer here.

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We are proud to announce Women at Work—our first collection of interviews in nearly a decade. Click here to preorder your copy today!

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Writers on Pencils

A collection of thoughts on pencils from our Writers at Work interview series.

“Sometimes just the pure luxury of long beautiful pencils charges me with energy and invention.” —John Steinbeck, The Art of Fiction No. 45

There’s only one way to stay sharp this fall: with a pack of Paris Review pencils and a subscription to our magazine. Subscribe today and we’ll toss ten writing implements your way.

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Our subscription deal with The London Review of Books ends tomorrow. Don’t miss your chance to get two great reviews for one low price!

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Successful satire has to be good the day after tomorrow.

Dorothy Parker, who was born on this day in 1893

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Of course dogs don’t seem to lend themselves to verse quite so well, collectively, as cats.

T. S. Eliot

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The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning.

Sam Shepard

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Aldous Huxley, The Art of Fiction No. 24

Aldous Huxley was born on this day in 1894. Read his Art of Fiction interview here.

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What We’re Reading: Disaster, Calamity, Ecstasy – The Paris Review

I bet you didn’t know that Patrick Leigh Fermor, recognized as Britain’s greatest travel writer during his lifetime, penned a novel, or that it was adapted into a three-act opera in 1966. No new productions are scheduled, but The Violins of Saint-Jacques was reissued last week, so I’ve spent my mornings with a nameless narrator …

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If I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard.

William Faulkner

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Consider it the best of times.

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The Psychology of Fainting

Freud is right to associate fainting and death. Fainting is some kind of pantomime of dying. You abscond, momentarily, from the world.

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Lonely Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Film

In 1963, The New Yorker published five articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi chief of Bureau IV-B-4, a Gestapo division in charge of “Jewish Affairs.” Written by political thinker and Jewish activist Hannah Arendt, the articles and ensuing book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, unleashed what Irving Howe called a “civil war” among New York intellectuals. While some reviews cursed Arendt as a self-hating Jew and Nazi lover, the Jewish Daily Forward accusing her of “polemical vulgarity,” Robert Lowell termed her portrayal of Eichmann a “masterpiece,” and Bruno Bettelheim said it was the best protection against “dehumanizing totalitarianism.” Across the city, Arendt’s friends chose sides. When Dissent sponsored a meeting at the Hotel Diplomat, a crowd gathered to shout down Alfred Kazin and Raul Hilberg—then the world’s preeminent Holocaust scholar—for defending Arendt, while in The Partisan Review Lionel Abel opined that Eichmann “comes off so much better in [Arendt’s] book than do his victims.” …