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Staff Picks: Sleepless in a Sleeper, Murdered Beavers
I have been reading Richard Holmes’s Footsteps. If you're ever sleepless on a sleeper train at two o’clock in the morning crossing southern Illinois (or shunning breakfast conversation in the diner six...
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Staff Picks: Food Rules, the American Dream
I turned to a former history professor of mine, Niall Ferguson, for some interesting thoughts on Wall Street: “The American Dream is about social mobility, not enforced equality.” —Natalie Jacoby...
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The Driftwood Remains: My Search for A Bankable Title
Hope: A Tragedy was the first title I suggested to my editor. I really thought it was right. “No,” he said. My parents didn’t love me, so I have low self-esteem, and I agreed to keep working. These are...
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Lysley Tenorio on ‘Monstress’
I first heard of Lysley Tenorio a little more than a decade ago, when his story “Superassassin” came out in The Atlantic. “Superassassin” is the rare work that gets a child narrator right, and it...
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Michael Robbins on ‘Alien vs. Predator’
Michael Robbins. Reading the poetry of Michael Robbins is kind of like driving around the parkways and frontage roads of America’s suburbs. His poems have a Best Buy, a Red Lobster, a Kinko’s, a Pizza...
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Notes from a Bookshop: February, or the Folly of Love
Sitting alone in my tiny bookshop on a cold February morning, I have the sensation that I’ve conjured a dream into reality. The light is crisp and blue through the door. A flight of red paper...
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Gchatting with George Saunders
On Valentine’s Day, George Saunders agreed to Gchat with The Paris Review Daily to discuss his use of the modern vernacular in fiction; his new book, Tenth of December; as well as Nicki Minaj and what...
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Notes from a Bookshop: March, or Waiting for Redbird
“The sky was darker than the water—it was the color of mutton-fat jade.”—Elizabeth Bishop, “The End of March” On more Saturday afternoons than not this month, I’ve watched swirls of snow blow past the...
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To Be or Not To Be? And Other News
“I don’t want to kill you”: a summer camp based on The Hunger Games. To Be Or Not To Be: That Is the Adventure is, yes, a choose-your-own-adventure take on Hamlet. George Saunders’s much-lauded...
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What We’re Loving: Roller Skates, Arson, Eliot
Just this morning, I read eagerly through Sam Anderson’s profile of Gary England, Oklahoma’s “benevolent weather god,” in a preview from this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. I’ve heard a lot about...
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Jumping Off a Cliff: An Interview with Kevin Barry
Photo credit: Murdo Macleod. It is common, when assessing the achievements of a fiction writer, to consider how “well-rounded” his or her characters are. But one of the many pleasures of Kevin Barry’s...
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Listening to Stonehenge, and Other News
Photo: The Stonehenge Stone Circle, via Flickr George Saunders is the first to win the new £40,000 Folio Prize. Joe McGinniss is dead, at seventy-one. Illustrations from international editions of Don...
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How Your Gender Affects Your Vocabulary, and Other News
Hans Thoma, Adam and Eve, 1897. George Saunders talks “about his family’s sense of humor, the connection between satire and compassion, his early comedy influences, and how he came to embrace the funny...
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What We’re Loving: Algiers, Aliens, Adulthood
George Saunders talks to an alien. Detail from an illustration by Thomas Allen, in O, the Oprah Magazine. I went on vacation planning to read Tristram Shandy, at last. Instead I read Frank Kermode on...
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Redeeming Greek Speak: An Interview with Benjamin Nugent
Our Summer issue features Benjamin Nugent’s story “The Treasurer,” which follows Pete, a junior at UMass Amherst, through the aftermath of the initiation ceremony for his being elected treasurer of...
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Staff Picks: Bey, Bureaucrats, Bloody Hands
From There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. In the early 1920s, a series of unsolved murders terrorized the residents of Osage County, Oklahoma. Most of the victims were members of the Osage...
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Cameras Aren’t Magic, and Other News
Robert Cumming, Quick Shift of the Head Leaves Glowing Stool Afterimage Posited on the Pedestal, 1978. Image via Aperture So you want to learn how to write well: you’re in luck! There are hundreds,...
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Now Mend My Silks, Boy, and Other News
From Les Modes magazine, 1910. Happy International Women’s Day. A century ago, in Paris, as the Great War raged, women were putting on pairs of coveralls and taking to the factories, trying to...
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Staff Picks: Spooks, Oddballs, Dopes
Jan Morris. I went to visit Jan Morris in North Wales a few months ago and heard her saying some of the same things you will hear in this recording. Nothing made me miss America—and especially New...
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Staff Picks: Foxes, Unicorns, and Ghostworms
Yrsa Daley-Ward’s new collection, bone, opens with a small explosion, a two-line poem called “Intro”: “I am the tall dark stranger / those warnings prepared you for.” The poems that follow pick up...
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