Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Paris Review

    Staff Picks: Trick Mirrors, Summer Beers, and Bedazzled Pianos

    by The Paris Review Jun 29, 2018 4 minutes

    Photo: M. Sharkey

    All of the essays in Alexander Chee’s marvelous collection  are striking, but I found the shortest essay, simply titled “1989,” the most arresting. In four pages, he describes his participation in an protest in San Francisco—his first protest. As the procession moves into an intersection, the protesters block traffic; they are immediately surrounded by riot police, who begin to brutally drive them off. Chee climbs atop a newspaper box, with a view to the scene, and describes the rise and fall of batons with dispassionate shock, eventually climbing down from his perch to rescue a beaten friend. “This is the country I live in,” he realizes in, atop a knoll, observing the horrors of the Battle of Borodino. In shock and fear, he plunges down the slope and thinks, “Now they will be horrified at what they have done!” They aren’t, of course, and this seems to be the same conclusion Chee comes to: the feeling of incredulousness that violence and death are served up so openly—in a field, in a street—before so many watching eyes. Chee’s essay takes place during an protest but with other details it could easily be about the Holocaust, the Syrian war, or the United States, ca. 2018.

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Paris Review

    The Paris Review35 min read
    An Eye In The Throat
    My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s C
    The Paris Review19 min read
    The Beautiful Salmon
    I’ve always loved salmon. Not to eat, as I don’t eat fish, but I’ve always loved salmon in general because salmon jump and no one knows why. They jump all over the place—out of rivers, up waterfalls. Some say they jump to clean their gills. Others sa
    The Paris Review28 min read
    The Art of Poetry No. 115
    In early March of 2021, Louise Glück visited Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, where I teach. Because of COVID, she was afraid to fly on a small plane to our regional airport, so I drove her myself from Berkeley, where, for some years

    Related Books & Audiobooks