Our 10 Favorite Pieces of 2024

The Latest from The Paris Review Daily.

View this email in your browser The remit of The Paris Review's website is wonderfully, sometimes stymieingly, broad: anything goes, we feel—so long as the writing is good … This year, we published pieces on Costco, containers, and cars; Mallarmé and Mike Mew; porn and poetry and My Little Pony. We reported from the Great Florida Bigfoot Conference and Clownchella. We taught you how to cook. We gave you homework. We journaled a lot. Below, ten of our very favorite pieces from 2024. —Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor   FIRST PERSON The River Rukarara Scholastique Mukasonga "The Rukarara flows in my imagination and my dreams." FIRST PERSON The Landscape Has No Doors Lin Yi-Han "I often think about my time back in the psychiatric hospital." ON BOOKS Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist: Philip K. Dick and Palestine Jonathan Lethem "Empathy is what allows one to circulate between worlds." AT WORK Loving the Limitations of the Novel: A Conversation between Sally Rooney and Merve Emre Merve Emre "Loving the novel is a bit like a rebellious love, like a teenager's reaction to their parents' love." FIRST PERSON Driving with O. J. Simpson Harmony Holiday "My father and O. J. Simpson were passing ships in red Corvettes in Brentwood, Los Angeles." FIRST PERSON Rented Horrors Kathleen Alcott "I believed the horror movie was the start of how I oriented my time, the primacy of the images that were not my life." FIRST PERSON My Childhood Toy Poodles Tao Lin "In middle school, when no one was home, I would lay facing Binky as he lay flat on his side on the carpet. 'I love you,' I would say." FIRST PERSON My Year of Finance Boys Daniel Lefferts "I'd conjured a fantasy of a finance boy, and here he was, in the flesh, as radiantly banal and enthrallingly uninteresting as I'd expected him to be." FIRST PERSON I Got Snipped: Notes after a Vasectomy Joseph Earl Thomas  "I was late, by any reasonable measure, thirty-two with too many kids climbing up my leg, three boys and one girl." FIRST PERSON Bite Morgan Thomas "Maybe I don't want to go to the clinic because the microbes don't. From what I've read, you cannot overstate the effect of microbes upon your decisions." Copyright © 2024 The Paris Review. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: The Paris Review 544 West 27th Street 3rd Floor New York, New York 10001 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe if you must.