Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year , traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college. It will run every Friday this month, and then return for a month each in the winter, spring, and summer. I’m sliding into the corner booth when Steve sets down a water with two…

Photo: Watson Perrygo. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archive, via Wikimedia Commons. My first encounter with Paulé Bartón’s folktales came in the unlikeliest of places: trawling through the deep wilderness of HTML on the back end of The Paris Review ’s website. I was an intern, dutifully scanning the archive…

In the corner of the gallery stands an unassuming white cube. A panel on the front of the cube periodically yawns open, revealing an endless, wondrous, lamp-lit nighttime. And then the door closes, extinguishing the dream. Even in the dreary November cold, people wait hours to enter the cube and…

A writer I know, being a little flip, once said that you need to know only three things about James Merrill: he was gay, he was rich, and he was serious about Ouija. The subtext is that it’s already hard enough to be taken seriously as an artist, a writer…

In our column Poetry Rx , readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets — Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz — take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This month, Sarah Kay is on the line. Dear Poets, My romantic life has been a…

On the day of my induction by, and first visit to, the august institution of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, I was shown to the literature section of the portrait gallery and left there alone among the giants. This may have been a kind of hazing ritual, like…

Jorge Luis Borges at his office, Argentine National Library, 1973 Let me see if I can summarize this famous short story. I’m going from memory. A guy — Borges — explains that the Zahir is a twenty-centavo coin. If you’re like me, you think, Okay, that’s what Argentines call that…

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter . Isak Dinesen. Illustration by Michael…

Bohumil Hrabal and his cats. When we’d all made it through the winter, and spring had arrived, a small tabby cat showed up at our place and she was pregnant. By this time, Blackie was pregnant, too. The two cats loved each other and, because they were expecting, they followed…