October 14, 2026 Diaries My Tamagotchi Diary By Angie Sijun Lou Photograph by Angie Sijun Lou. In the opening scene of Angie Sijun Lou’s short story, “Bubble,” which appears in our recent Fall issue, no. 257, the narrator goes with her father to a parent-teacher conference—an intervention of sorts, regarding the fact that the unnamed sixth-grader “had spoken fewer than thirty words over the past academic year.” During the conference, as her teacher threatens to hold her back barring better socialization, the girl plays with a Tamagotchi Angel—a high-maintenance, limited-edition digital pet which, as it happens, was also based on a toy Lou received in real life. Read More
October 13, 2026 Dispatch Grimes’s Secret Psy Opera Pop-Up By Paul McAdory Photograph by Paul McAdory. Word had reached me early. Grimes, the impish thirty-eight-year-old Canadian musician and mother to three of Elon Musk’s fourteen children—who in 2018 changed her legal name from Claire Boucher to c, as in constant, as in the speed of light—would, at 10 P.M. on the night of October 10, following a surprise day-of announcement online, dance behind the decks, deejay, and play some music from her first album in more than six years in the backyard of my favorite bar, Bed-Stuy’s Singers. Read More
October 9, 2026 Bookmarks Passages We Underlined This Fall By Tarpley Hitt and Emma Eaton Every month, our desks at the Review pile up with dozens of soon-to-be published books, only some of which involve writers we have heard of, or subjects we know anything about. More often, we wind up with a mix somewhere between that of a cabinet of curiosities and a Little Free Library stocked by an indecisive grad student; in the past few weeks, for example, in addition to Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History and Tom Overton’s John Berger: From Life, we found a copy of the agent Ari Emanuel’s memoir, the comedian Ms. Pat’s memoir, a history of the doctor thought to be the real-life inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, and a collection of personal essays on gynecological health. While combing through these galleys for good ideas or good writing, we sometimes save passages we like. Here are a few from September and October. —Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Emma Eaton, editorial intern Here are the opening words of a new release by the author Helle Helle, translated from the Danish by Martin Aiken. The book is titled Hafni Says (New Directions): that she’s getting divorced. Read More
October 8, 2026 From the Archive Anne Carson Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature By The Paris Review Photograph by Peter Smith. Courtesy of New Directions Books. The Nobel Prize committee announced this morning that the Canadian poet, essayist, classicist, and translator Anne Carson has won the 2026 award in literature, praising her “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” Read More
October 8, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Natalie Shapero on “The Top of Hell” By Natalie Shapero Photography courtesy of Natalie Shapero. Natalie Shapero’s poem “The Top of Hell,” which appears in our new Fall issue, no. 257, is nominally about the top of Hell, but it is also implicitly about the bottom, the background bits that its inhabitants don’t see. “It’s weird that Hades, when he dropped,” she writes, “dropped only to the top of Hell. That he didn’t / plunge all the way down.” This is also, more or less, the basic impulse behind our series Making of a Poem, where we ask poets to lift the hood on a poem they’ve contributed to our pages. In this installment, Shapero talks about some of the unseen parts of her process, from watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies to “the physical properties of Hell.” How did “The Top of Hell” start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? Greek mythology does not appear frequently in my writing—usually, I don’t think about it at all. But there was a concentrated period in my life when it was very much on my mind. This was last year, when I was preparing to be a contestant on Jeopardy! Read More
October 7, 2026 On Poetry Prynne’s Last Poem By Ryan Ruby Single Tangle Mine (2026) by J. H. Prynne, Face Press. Courtesy of Ian Heames. Whenever I find myself in London, the first thing I do is go to the London Review Bookshop, down the street from the British Museum in Bloomsbury. I ask a bookseller to take me to the basement floor and open the supply closet. There, along with the shop’s buckets and mops and other cleaning supplies, are two shelves containing the latest sequences by the poet J. H. Prynne (1936–2026). Released in limited editions with print runs of between a hundred and two hundred and fifty copies by small presses in Cambridge, these beautifully designed and sometimes miniature chapbooks are kept in the supply closet in order, I assume, to prevent theft. I must have visited it half a dozen times since 2016, when Prynne was first recommended to me by a friend as a way of getting out of a particularly interminable reading slump. Read More