Winter 2022 (242)

The Paris Review

The world's preeminent literary magazine.

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The Paris Review
EDITOR EMILYSTOKES DEPUTY EDITOR LIDIJA HAAS MANAGING EDITOR AMANDA GERSTEN WEB EDITOR SOPHIE HAIGNEY OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING, ORIANA ULLMAN POETRY EDITOR SRIKANTH “CHICU” REDDY ART DIRECTOR NA KIM MAYA BINYAM, MATTHEW HIGGS, NIELA ORR HILTON ALS, ANTONI
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Aēsop® and THE PARIS REVIEW
The story of Aesop’s partnership with The Paris Reviewis one plotted by a deep reverence for the writtenword. Since 2015, we have been proud to offer thisesteemed quarterly for purchase in select stores acrossthe globe and at aesop.com, inviting cust
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Uncontrollable, Irrelevant
My sister called me the other day. She wanted to let me know that I had once more been merciless and cruel in my relations with our parents. “They say there’s a lot of anger in you,” she said. “It makes them mad. It hurts their feelings. They think y
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Charity Balls
I had an accident but lived in eleganceon methamphetamines and small stacksof Black Beauty paperbacksand plastic plates of breadand black cherry marmalade.Later, a career of killingtime. And wasting money.But I have always been extraordinarily gifted
The Paris Review27 min read
The Art of Poetry No. 112
Driving from Santa Fe’s center to its outskirts, you pass through a wide expanse made vibrant by that particular slant of light Georgia O’Keeffe coveted. Somehow, the sky is more immense here. Hawks circle over dusty fields strewn with yellow-floweri
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Pos De Chantar M’es Pres Talenz
I am William, who by nature needs to chant triste now, I’ll makethis song from it I’ll no more be a lover not in Poitiers,nor in Limoges. In the second verse, triste I depart in dangerous exile in greatperil I leave my son for the neighbors to cheat.
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A Good Samaritan
It was hot that day, hot for the morning and hot for April and with a stickiness in the air that suggested something had to break. I was headed up the street to ask my neighbor Meech to give me a jump when I heard a scream come from the fourplex next
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FROM Old Actress
Two actors—Diane, a white woman in her mid-to late sixties, and Erin, a Black woman in her late thirties—stand on a bare stage with two chairs: one comfy, one less so. There’s a music stand in front of the comfier chair and an end table with tea thin
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William of Aquitaine Returns
I’m going to make a poem out of nothing.You and I will be the protagonists.Our emptiness, our loneliness,the deadly boredom, the daily defeats:all these things will go into the poem,which is bound to be short, since theyfit in a few lines, maybe as f
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What Is It?
For more than thirty years, the Dutch artist Lily van der Stokker has made drawings, wall paintings, and sculptures that explore, often with a disarmingly mordant sense of humor, the mundane but nonetheless pressing realities of her everyday life, in
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My Blockchain
Having worn my camouflage for leisure, having fed upon a shale bed’s vapors, having licked my wounds with glacial pleasure, having found out what of a child’s I could own, having known what the child would buy back later, having lectured on gut healt
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That Is
Kiss the motherthat needs to becomethat needs to needgroundingthat death helps us heave our thoughtsbecome the trying that is trying to becomethe yes that is trying to unify usinto the nothing that is the juttinghelpful greeting that is trying to yea
The Paris Review10 min read
Zalmanovs
My brother Eli and I are lying on the couch, both of us nearly asleep, Eli’s toenails gently kneading my neck. I’m raising my throat to their sharpness, wanting him to press in, when from the next room we hear chimes. Then two clangs. Then: “Hello?”
The Paris Review25 min read
L. R.
Miriam stood at the bulletin board waiting for it to sprout news, delaying the dust mopping to which she had been unjustly assigned. The Men’s and Women’s Work Distributors allotted Saturday-morning chores to all in the community unblessed with offsp
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Two Poems
I told you the words to it oriole.Now when an ear come say it right. Give the true kiss and there isno more two faces but one stone. Meaning how to hold a thing one lovedand how describe custody. If incantation is nationalsay a nation is a plane of e
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The Art of Fiction No. 256
Often, during the course of my interview sessions with Colm Tóibín, which numbered more than a dozen and took place across time zones—he was in Los Angeles, in the Catalan Pyrenees, on the Ballyconnigar coast of his native County Wexford—a disposable
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Intimate Relationship
I bought a hatof faux mink furto wear in the war In my hat I sitin my cellarwaiting The enemy’s lateI read his messageson my phone popping openthe jars of strawberry jamlining the cellar walls Like a lovermy enemy sends meflowers, emojis, words of co
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Two Poems
I’ve only seen a dead bird up close once. It wasn’t red butblue. I named it Happiness before I buried it. My childfound a few sticks so we could make a cross. We dug a holeand dropped the bird in, along with a few flowers we hadplucked. We didn’t tou
The Paris Review22 min read
Where Does This Live?
The Roseville Hotel had closed many years ago, and the rooms upstairs had been converted to apartments, but the bar on the ground floor was still called the Roseville Hotel, because everyone was used to the name. One Saturday in January, John James a
The Paris Review20 min read
Gertrude
“Who are you playing?” “Gertrude. But only today, I’m just helping—” “Oh, hi, Mama.” I laughed. “You’re Hamlet.” “Yeah.” Wael ran a hand through his hair. His cheeks were a little pink. On the drive with Mariam from Haifa into the West Bank, one of h
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Contributors
POLLY BARTON is a translator and writer. Her nonfiction debut, Fifty Sounds, won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. VICTORIA CHANG is the author of The Trees Witness Everything, Obit, and Dear Memory. She is the poetry editor of The New York
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Credits
Cover: Courtesy of Uman and Nicola Vassell Gallery; photograph by Joseph Perez. Page 16, courtesy of Jeremy Deller; page 32, courtesy of the Frances McCullough papers at Special Collections and University Archives, University of Maryland Libraries; p

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