Let us consider, for example, Kafka’s elegant diary entry on 2 August 1914: ‘Germany has declared war on Russia—Swimming in the afternoon.’ From Xiao Hai’s memoir Adrift in the South (Granta Editions) ...

The man was writing like his typewriter was on fire and in flaming succession produced three books that have been called a ...

The nation is splattered with these zombie structures, or sutures, with nowhere to be and no path to total erasure.” ...

A sense of stagnation and stillness when what I want is for the book to open, open, open into something expansive and true.

For some months—since I was told about this award—I have been trying to find the point in my life when this fiction stuff and ...

My water journey began on the airplane, when I recognized a bottle of Elisabethen Quelle. I remembered this brand from my time at the Doemens water sommelier school in Gräfelfing. It’s a mainstream ...

Just as the sun begins to peek over the flat horizon of Coon Rapids, Iowa, 1,383 pigeons fill the sky. The birds pour out as a single winged mass from the rows of flung-open coops on the transport ...

“Who is Madeline?” asks my daughter. We’ve been singing that new Lily Allen song all morning—“Da da da da da da da who’s Madeline?”; we can’t get it out of our heads. How should I answer? Madeline ...

The Paris Review is a literary magazine featuring original writing, art, and in-depth interviews with famous writers.

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

The mind is always too simply seeking meaning, trying to boil some beautiful thing down to its conceptual essence. What can stun the mind into quietness? What can briefly flummox the mind in its quest ...

I tend not to think that stuff other people think is obvious is obvious. Everyone feels like they have some sense of Frost. Everyone knows a poem or two. That kind of overexposure lends an aspect of ...