November 3, 2026 Redux Campaign Literature: Election Day 2026 By The Paris Review John Ashbery, Eleven Collages. From issue no. 188 (Spring 2009). Today is Election Day in the United States, the second midterm referendum on the second Trump administration and, given that polls on the West Coast won’t close until eleven this evening, it’s certain to be a long night of scanning the news. If you, like us, have spent the past week, month, year, reading polls, articles, and tea leaves, gaming out the chances that one party may win this or that Senate or House seat, you may, like us, now find yourself in need of some way to kill the next twelve or so hours. Here’s some loosely midterms-adjacent reading from the archive to help you pass the time. Read More
November 2, 2026 Dispatch Belgrade Diary: Election Day in Serbia By Lily Lynch All photographs courtesy of Lily Lynch. October 25, 2026 6:30 A.M. On Election Day, all normal time stopped. From early in the morning, friends sent me footage of lines snaking around buildings, through parks, down city blocks. A friend back in California sent me photos of a party at a café near the Serbian consulate in Los Angeles, with music, dancing, barbecue. A few weeks earlier, the Serbian Republic Electoral Commission had announced that the country’s large diaspora would be allowed to vote only during Serbia’s domestic polling hours. This meant that Serbian voters in other countries and time zones would have to travel to their embassy or consulate at odd hours or in the middle of the night to cast their ballots. The last-minute rule change was widely interpreted as an attempt by the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) to undercut its insurgent rival, Student List (SL). The Serbian diaspora was known to favor the opposition. Read More
November 1, 2026 Redux Kazuo Ishiguro, Unlocked: The Butler as Metaphor By Angie Sijun Lou Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017. Photograph by Frankie Fouganthin, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, we’ve unlocked Kazuo Ishiguro’s Art of Fiction interview, selected from the archive by Angie Sijun Lou, whose story “Bubble” appears in our recent Fall issue. The first book I tried to read by Kazuo Ishiguro was The Remains of the Day. I was disturbed by how convincingly Ishiguro adopts the voice of a midcentury English butler: politely deferential, with tediously long descriptions of his pleasant, unremarkable days. Stevens’s curated inner life made him feel like a mirage of a person. Read More
October 29, 2026 On Music Alisa Weilerstein’s Cello By Lucy Ellmann Photograph by Marco Borggreve. Courtesy of Alisa Weilerstein. It didn’t eat, didn’t drink, didn’t sleep. It certainly didn’t cough and sneeze during performances. It made no demands. Quiescently it languished in its carbon-fiber carrying case, helpless, hidden, and naked as the day it was born. Braced within velvet and Velcro, suspended in a cradle like a baby all unknowing, the cello was propelled up and down escalators and into elevators, cars, buses, bars, cafés, restaurants, and restrooms, through crowds of people completely oblivious to the thing of beauty in their midst. It had its own transit papers, its own seat on the plane, and was accompanied on every jaunt by four loosened bows and various spare strings of gut or steel. In one side pocket lay a tiny forest green canister of peg dope; in the other, a disc of rosin with a well-worn central groove nestled in a square of brown felt. Read More
October 28, 2026 Studio Visit Our Fall Issue Cover: Elizabeth Glaessner’s Big Head By Hazel Byers and Izzy Casey Elizabeth Glaessner in her studio in Brooklyn. Photograph by Hazel Byers. Our recent Fall issue features a painting titled Big Head, by the Brooklyn-based artist Elizabeth Glaessner: a nearly-seven-foot piece that, for the cover of issue no. 257, we shrank down to approximately six inches by five. This September, we visited Glaessner at her studio in East Williamsburg to take a closer look at her process and to hear the origin story of the painting. On display beside other large-scale works were replicas of the same images, only smaller; we learned that Glaessner paints the same motifs over and over again—often with one hand leaning against the wall, leaving multicolored prints beside her paintings. Read More
October 27, 2026 On Books Sexless in the City: The Second Life of Cynthia Buchanan’s Maiden By Walker Rutter-Bowman When the sixties ceased swinging, the sexual revolution diversified and penetrated new markets, like real estate. Adults-only apartment complexes sprang up in answer to the needs of the lost and lonely, the childless and horny, offering experiences both socially stimulating and aquatically immersive. Such is the promise of Villa Dionysus, a club for swingles ages twenty-five to forty, and the setting of Maiden, Cynthia Buchanan’s debut from 1972, her first—and so far only—novel, both deb ball and swan song. Read More