September 22, 2026 At Work Plan B Is Extremely Dangerous: Benjamin Moser on Anti-Zionism By Krithika Varagur Benjamin Moser in 2015, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Benjamin Moser is no stranger to life-writing, having written both the definitive English-language biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector and a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Susan Sontag. In his latest book, he takes on not one but twelve biographies in a sprawling attempt to excavate the lesser-known history of Jewish opposition to Zionism, from the nineteenth century to the present. We might even say thirteen lives, because Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History (out September 22 from Doubleday) is a deeply personal project for Moser, and it opens with an extended meditation on his own migration from passive Zionist, as a Jewish child in Houston, to adult anti-Zionist. He conceived of the book shortly after October 7 and researched it at a breakneck pace, including on reporting trips to South Africa, Germany, and Egypt. We became friends when he was putting the finishing touches on it last year at the New York Public Library, where we were both fellows. The book is an emotional and propulsive attempt to trace a lineage for those in the often-lonely position in which he found himself as an adult. But it’s hardly just for Jewish readers; the book’s diverse, impressionistic portraits of individuals from a nineteenth-century rabbi to the celebrated photographer Nan Goldin suggest, cumulatively, that anti-Zionism has been, and will continue to be, a big tent. Moser spoke to me last month about his work, goals, and process from his home in Utrecht. Usually, he jokes, prepublication activities are the “calm before the calm”—but, given the strong opinions elicited by this subject, he predicted that the rollout of this book might be a little more eventful. Read More
September 22, 2026 Bulletin Adelle Waldman Is the 2026–2027 Paris Review Visiting Professor at the Bard Prison Initiative By The Paris Review Photograph by Lou Rouse. We are delighted to announce that Adelle Waldman is the 2026–2027 Paris Review Visiting Professor at the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI). BPI has provided a full-time, tuition-free liberal arts education to students incarcerated at several upstate New York prisons since 1999, and currently enrolls more than four hundred students across seven campuses; it also offers tuition-free degree programs through the Bard Microcolleges, hosted at local institutions such as the Brooklyn Public Library. In 2024, The Paris Review and BPI announced a partnership, through which a distinguished creative writer would teach the literature that has most inspired them to BPI’s students. Waldman succeeds Javier Fuentes, and will teach three semester-long courses over the next year. Read More
September 21, 2026 Document On “Derek,” Captain Ahab’s Evil Half Brother By John Hay Still from The Sea Beast (1926), Grosset & Dunlap photoplay edition. Public domain, courtesy of John Hay. The Sea Beast, the first film adaptation of Moby-Dick, begins with a leather-bound edition of the novel opening to page one, but the phrase “Call me Ishmael” is nowhere to be found. That’s because there’s no Ishmael in this movie at all. Instead, theatergoers a hundred years ago were introduced to a new character: Captain Ahab’s evil younger brother, Derek. Yes, Derek. Read More
September 18, 2026 Home Improvements My Larval Roommates By Sarah Nicole Prickett Wenceslaus Hollar, Moth and Three Butterflies, 1646, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0. Though the print issues of The Paris Review are never overtly themed, it often happens that, in the process of poring over the prose, poems, art, and interviews bundled into each issue, we notice some inadvertently reoccurring motif. Bubbles, for example, or psychosexually fraught adolescent friendships. These motifs sometimes lead to web series accompanying the rollout of the latest issue, as was the case when, a few years ago, my predecessor Sophie Haigney launched Home Improvements. The series—inspired by the fantastically long and architectural first sentence of Mieko Kanai’s story “Tap Water”—invited writers to “consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction.” Read More
September 16, 2026 On Music On the “Chattanooga Choo Choo” By Stephen King Screenshot from Sun Valley Serenade (1941), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. I was a bop kid from the start. When Eric Carmen, the talented lead singer of the Raspberries, wrote “I’m a rocker, I’m a roller / I’ve been a-boogieing since I ditched the stroller,” he might have been talking about me. I can clearly remember my first record, a seventy-eight rpm. It was Elvis singing “Don’t Be Cruel.” (B-side was “Hound Dog.”) Later I graduated to forty-fives and bought Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” for seventy-eight cents. (B-side: “Around and Around.”) My mother—not exactly racist but very much a woman of her time—asked me if Mr. Berry was white. Fearing my precious record might be taken away (I was ten), I assured her he was. Read More
September 14, 2026 Redux You Have to Ask Questions: Svetlana Alexievich, Unlocked By The Paris Review Svetlana Alexievich with a cameraman in Kabul, 1988. Courtesy of Svetlana Alexievich. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, to read alongside our inaugural Art of Oral History interview with Alexievich, we’ve unlocked “Voices from Chernobyl” from issue no. 172 (Winter 2004). “If you cut straight to the part you need, which is what journalists do, it won’t be interesting, and it won’t be the truth, either. Not the whole truth,” the Nobel Prize–winning Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich tells Elena Kostyuchenko in The Art of Oral History No. 1, published in our new Fall issue. “You have to ask questions, of course. Your job is to scour away the banality and return people to their true selves, to make them face what they rarely tap into.” Read More