Still from the movie Reds. Screenshot from official trailer.

It is now almost two years that I am at Athens, and I have sent to you many letters, but I have not received any answer of ...

The Wishing Well, Summer 1979. All images reproduced with permission of the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

“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 ...

After eight glorious weeks of freedom, I got rehired. First thing I did was walk over to the machine shop to look for my F-150. The oil stain was there but the truck wasn’t. It wasn’t in the rock lot ...

My new job came with a research stipend. I’d never had one before—a few grand that would renew each year for five years and then end. What could I use it for? “Anything,” I was told, which seemed ...

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 ...

I named her Holy Jemima when I was nine, or thereabouts. I liked the way the words sounded and it was meant cruelly. Holy Jemima was two years older than me, and her family—her mother, father, two ...

The Paris Review’s Writers at Work interview series has been a hallmark of the magazine since its founding in 1953. These interviews, often conducted over months and sometimes even years, aim to ...