An Ignoble Experiment: Our 10 Favorite Pieces of 2024

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."