In 1984, Bill Buford, an American literary editor in his late twenties, began devoting his spare time to following “football hooligans”—a distinctive tribe of fans known for committing acts of ...

Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews for our readers from our archive. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The tail, held back along the spine, keeps them—most times—from kicking you. I don’t know why.

I'm looking forward to my death,” she said.I sat upright. I watched her blond hair sway,this college girl who taught our Sunday School.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Four poems by Hannah Piette appear in our new Summer issue, no. 256. Here, ...

When I waded into the Florida humidity, Mom and Mimi were waiting for me at curbside pickup, three hours after the worst airport security I’d ever experienced. The TSA line at JFK had snaked around ...

On a low-pollution Sunday last December, the weekend before Christmas, I headed to People’s Park on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road to visit the city’s so-called marriage market: a cluster of footpaths and ...

Pine Island, despite its name, is not an island. It’s your average Midwestern farm town, population 3,800. Highway 52 cuts through it like a spine, with little to see on either side except corn and ...

My water journey began on the airplane, when I recognized a bottle of Elisabethen Quelle. I remembered this brand from my time at the Doemens water sommelier school in Gräfelfing. It’s a mainstream ...

This year, we asked our contributors, our readers, our current and former interns, and other friends of the Review for their favorite books of the past year. Here’s what they said. Service by John ...

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 ...

Comedy was a theatrical form Paul had never pursued; he had always been more serious, a tragedian. They checked in at the hotel that A. called in his head Hotel Auschwitz, then he spent twenty minutes ...