Yan Lianke’s story “ Plants, Stones, Dirt, and Sky ,” translated by Jeremy Tiang, appears in the Fall 2025 issue of The Paris ...

From the political philosopher Rahel Jaeggi’s Progress and Regression, translated from the German by Robert Savage (Harvard ...

February 19, 2015 – André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t ...

January 22, 2013 – Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the premiere of The Crucible. In this interview, Arthur Miller discusses the writing of the play, and the McCarthy ...

October 26, 2012 – “TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”Daniel Horowitz takes on Poe’s classic 1843 tale of ...

Have you heard the news? Two weeks ago we launched our very own iPad/iPhone app, which features new issues, rare back issues, and archival collections—along with our complete interview series and the ...

I felt my life flick by at 2x speed. I used to be able to take my time eating the cheese out of a big sandwich or wandering the public library, watching kids peel the cardboard spines off Berenstain ...

Italy is not always the salvation of English-speaking people—but it does often seem that way. In film, in literature, in food, it’s the place where you go to find yourself. The real you, the one whose ...

Mary Stuart was six days old when she became the Queen of Scotland. Her precious body was guarded from that moment onward, moved like a pawn on a chessboard from one castle to another. Maybe the ...

An encounter with Emerson’s essays. This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as ...

The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which ...

Imagine a present-day reader reaching for Philip K. Dick’s 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip in search of transport, out of the here and now to a psychedelically paranoid near-future Mars. This person ...