Our seminal blonde, Lorelei Lee, comes from Little Rock, Arkansas, with a dubious backstory full of intrigue. An archetypal faux-naïf, she uses her perceived naïveté to get the better of the gentlemen ...

Dreams are trash. Dreams are ash. A man from Los Angeles left a small ziplock bag of his ashes to me in his will.” ...

My mamaw used to say, ‘I thought life was just one damned thing after another until I realized it’s the same damned thing over and over.’ ” ...

Everybody likes ghazals. Or they do when they learn what they are: A ghazal is a poetic form originating in and strongly associated with the Islamic cultural sphere. It is a medieval thing—or what ...

One of Jane Austen’s many mind-bending skills was her ability to wrest so much drama from a world that was, by present-day standards, almost unfathomably static. Austen’s novels are preindustrial time ...

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

May 20, 2025 – On retro screen savers, Bianca Rae Messinger’s pleasureis amiracle, and Grandma’s iMac.

May 12, 2025 – “It turns out that for Ashbery, the big theory was psychoanalysis, the process by which secondhand knowledge becomes firsthand.” ...

Though he is most often associated with New England, Robert Frost (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, taught school like his mother did before him, and ...

Usually, institutional libraries are governed by highly codified policies. Their catalogues are their raison d’être, elegant data structures that facilitate easy circulation and millennial continuity.

This was the farewell: Many friends came with us and whoever did not come was no longer a friend. This was the evening: Haltingly, it slowed our pace, and drew our souls out the window. This was the ...

Doodling today is not what it was. Or is it? Google “doodle” and you’ll find the Google Doodle—what Google calls a “fun, surprising, and sometimes spontaneous” transformation of its logo by a team of ...