Summer 2024 (248)

The Paris Review

The world's preeminent literary magazine.

The Paris Review3 min read
The Paris Review
EDITOR EMILYSTOKES MANAGING EDITOR KELLEY DEANE McKINNEY SENIOR EDITOR HARRIET CLARK ASSOCIATE EDITOR AMANDA GERSTEN WEB EDITOR SOPHIE HAIGNEY ASSISTANT EDITORS OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING, ORIANA ULLMAN EDITOR AT LARGE DAVID S. WALLACE POETRY EDITOR SRIKANT
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Aēsop® and THE PARIS REVIEW
The story of Aesop’s partnership with The Paris Review is one plotted by a deep reverence for the written word. Since 2015, we have been proud to offer this esteemed quarterly for purchase in select stores across the globe and at aesop.com, inviting
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That Summer
That summer we had decided we were past caring. It was just too tiring, rushing back and forth between mental institutions. My father was in a well-known sanatorium in Switzerland, but to see him each month mistaking himself for Alfred de Musset, tal
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Person Walking Backward
Inside the head there lives a lonely dogIt is drooling spitdigging through a mountain pile of garbageopening and closing an empty house’s windowsoverturning footprints in the sandand going into the fog When you’re walking with pounding legs todaywith
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Passengers On The Night Train
Nobody really knows how it began. Word first started getting around on a Thursday, but that doesn’t prove anything: it might have all begun days or weeks before that morning in early summer when the cigarette and the newspaper vendors at the train st
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Metropolitan
1. So do you read literature?2. Yeah.3. Placated and ventilated4. In the room’s relative dimness,5. She waited for the moment6. To pass.7. Then they saw the medieval8. Knights, whose armor9. Did not seem comfortable.10. Would you like something11. To
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The Art of Fiction No. 263
There were a few conditions around my first meetings with Mary Robison. She is an extreme night owl; hates Mondays; preferred a place to talk where she could make endless pots of decaf, someplace where she could easily duck out and smoke. Home wouldn
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The Channel
GLOUCESTER: There is part of a Power already footed … —King Lear, 3.3.13 Through mildewed windshield of the bridge my Franceand I can see the cliffs begin to showthe more as night approaches. Particulatesthat dim the glass release what glows to warme
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Blue
Some natural flowers had been allowed to bloom across the field. Sunflowers, the big ones, he couldn’t remember the name, Giganteus blah blah. Buttercups, he at least knew those. A pinkish type. Fine petals drawn upward like bunched fingertips. Bees
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Paper Bags
G. Peter Jemison was born in 1945 to an ironworker father and a stay-at-home mother, both of the Seneca Nation of Indians. He grew up in Irving, New York, on the border of the Cattaraugus Reservation, where he often visited his cousins and grandmothe
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My Lesbian Novel
I: I think we should begin today by informing the reader that there’s been a considerable break in time since we last met. R: Why should we do that? I: Well, I was thinking about how when we read a novel there’s no real record of the time in which it
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From A Drop Of Ink
March 26, 1901 (Meiji 34) Sachio brought three carp and put them in a basin next to my sickbed. He said, You’re sick and shut inside and don’t know it’s spring out there in the world, so I’m letting these carp out in the water here and you’ll see how
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The Oyster Diaries
I know a certain amount about sports, mainly baseball. Last night the Rangers won the pennant, for example, and I know what the pennant is. The thing my husband finds truly poetic is sports. He’s always trying to talk to me about it and explain. “Wat
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from The Odyssey, Book Five
Hermes strapped the beautiful sandals onto his feet,Immortal, made of gold, which bore him across the wet seasAnd endless expanses of land as swift as the breath of the wind.He took along the wand with which he lulls to sleep the eyesOf any man he pl
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Emajendat
emajendat is, like much of Lauren Halsey’s work, a love letter to the neighborhood of South Central in Los Angeles, where she was born and still lives; it was there, too, that she started making collages, on the walls of her childhood bedroom. This p
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Two Poems by Douglas Kearney
“It’s the bullets what’s silver, ne’er one tongue, mine’s the fleshyou find in men’s mouths; moonneither, though swore they, fired,shone like one, unbinding nightas it do what it does ever unerring,lighting flesh. my tongue thusunprecious, as song to
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Red Lungi
There’s no end to the woes that mothers face come summer vacation. All the children are at home. When they’re not in front of the TV, they’re either climbing the guava tree in the front yard or perched on the compound wall. What if one of them falls
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From “Section Of Adoring Nocturnes”
Stellatundra, Albadune, Whiteout,Zebranivem, Faloop’njoompoola. —Engaland, she said. Or a crystal bead of meager bees, a noctifuge suitcaseon the tip of the tongue. Give me loops.Give me turtles. O remolino de abejas marronesen un veliz “noctífugo.”
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The Art of Nonfiction No. 12
Elaine Scarry lives in a pale pink house near the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A tall hedge runs along the front, rising to the second story and nearly engulfing the white picket gate through which one passes into Scarry’s garden. Flowe
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My Library
My books remain on the shelves as I left them last yearbut all the words have died.I search for my favorite book,Out of Place.I find it lying lonely in a drawer,next to the photo album and my old Nokia phone. The pen inside the book is still intact,b
The Paris Review28 min read
The Ways of Paradise: Selected Notes from a Lost Manuscript
The author of this text was a familiar figure at the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm’s Humlegården park. Almost every day for more than three decades he could be spotted in the serene reading room, absorbed in his studies and in reverie. It w
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Contributors
MOSAB ABU TOHA is a poet, short-story writer, and essayist. His second poetry book, Forest of Noise, is forthcoming from Knopf in fall 2024. REBECCA BENGAL is the author of Strange Hours. DEEPA BHASTHI is a writer and critic who translates Kannadalan
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Credits
Cover: © Jeremy Frey, courtesy of the artist, Karma, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Page 12, © Jeremy Frey, courtesy of the artist, Karma, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; pages 34, 43, 48, 50, courtesy of Mary Robison; page 53, photograph by
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2024 New Members and Award Winners in Literature
New Members Charles Baxter Margo Jefferson Alice McDermott New Foreign Honorary Member Olga Tokarczuk Gold Medal for Biography Doris Kearns Goodwin Christopher Lightfoot Walker Award Darryl Pinckney Arts and Letters Awards Luis Alfaro Lan Samantha Ch

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