"Myths of Paris came to roost at Le Bloc as they did at other squats."

Anne Serre’s “That Summer,” which appears in the new Summer issue of  The Paris Review, opens with an anticlimactic claim: “That summer we had decided we were past caring.” But the story that follows is packed with drama. Over the course of three…

“My guarantor is coming!” Emma said.

“Each neighbor had a different curiosity, or jealousy: an opinion about which apartment is the best.”

“I hate sport, and I have a horror of circus games.”

  Oxana Shachko told me she preferred that spelling, with the x, in 2016, as I was finalizing an essay that would describe, among other things, her life. In news articles about her, which have multiplied since her death by suicide in Paris this Ju…

  Five months after I moved to New York City to pursue a career in writing, I was offered a part-time job composing the dialogue for a chatbot. Called “bots” for short, these are software programs that talk back, answering customer-service que…