Summer 2022 (240)

The Paris Review

The world's preeminent literary magazine.

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The Paris Review
EDITOR EMILY STOKES DEPUTY EDITOR LIDIJA HAAS MANAGING EDITOR AMANDA GERSTEN WEB EDITOR SOPHIE HAIGNEY ASSISTANT EDITOR OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING POETRY EDITOR VIJAY SESHADRI ART DIRECTOR NA KIM DESIGNER MATT WILLEY CONTRIBUTING EDITORS MAYA BINYAM, MATTHE
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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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Descent
People got out in strange ways. No stranger, I suppose, than the ways they got in. One year an American military helicopter flew too low over an Italian ski village, killing two families headed up the lift. A woman at Hillcrest had Italian citizenshi
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Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait
Today we’re going to get to work on the detailsof your expression. And believe it or not,the only colors we’re going to use will be blacker than most blacks. We’ll use a black canvasand just a single finger instead of a brush.So let’s take and dab th
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Moon
The pack of boys had released their first album in Seoul two years ago, and now they were selling out corporate arenas and Olympic stadiums all over the world. I was familiar with the story of their explosive ascent, how the premiere of their latest
The Paris Review2 min readChemistry
Zuihitsu
Whoo, whoo. An owl in the tallest blue spruce. Before sunrise.Patches of icein the driveway. Facing each other, we held a single brush in the air with ourright hands.I, left-handed, felt awkward holding it, but, holding it higherup, hebeckoned me to
The Paris Review30 min read
The Art of Fiction No. 253
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a revolutionary. Take nearly any pressing political topic: the horrors of incarceration, the erasure of indigeneity, the oppression of the poor, the rights of the working class, the corrosive effects of neoliberalism. You’ll find
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Tablet
All that is left to one who grievesIs convalescence. No change of heart or spiritualConversion, for the heart has changedAnd the soul has been convertedTo a thing that seesHow much it costs to lose a friend it loved.—Gilgamesh, translated by Herbert
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Ira & the Whale
It is dark in the whale and hot. The air is difficult to breathe. Ira is coated in gunk, sweating in his black Speedo. The whale’s heartbeat booms and echoes like a giant drum. It’s intimidating. It sounds tribal, ritualistic, as Ira wades through th
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Two Poems
Our Father,big chief in heaven,I sent my assistant Calixtoto make an appointmentwith Her Highness, la licenciada,who has left for lunch before noon,gone for the day, was fired, or fled,who can tell; the third directorat this post in fifteen months. D
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Begin Again
My grandfather came to live with me. There was nowhere else for him to go. What had happened to all his children? Death, decay, exile—I hardly know. My own parents died of pain. But I must not be too gloomy, at the beginning, or you will leave me, an
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There Is Nowhere to Go Back To
Tightness in the chest—here’s your Golgothaunder the cross,a hill that riseswith each breath and falls when you exhale.Tightness squeezes the ocean of fish-words,and there’s no home for the pigeon to fly back to.Your place is gone, your land,everythi
The Paris Review15 min read
Riccardo
My understanding of my family’s religion was that we didn’t have to go to church if we didn’t want to and that our belief in God was tenuous at best. I grasped the seventh principle, “the interconnected web of all existence,” and I understood the hum
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Occult
Zero your scales to the burden of a lash, DearJustice, but let Tituba clumsy the Magistrates’minds with a wag of her wizened index. A flightrisk near forests of the Wampanoag where Christianssavaged Queen Weetamoo’s corpse, what else mightTituba, non
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Dinner with Rene Ricard
For three years we metat one or the other LES hovelchosen by Tony the Dealer,who, like all dealers,caught kicks by making you waitwhile he babied Janis, his French bulldog,or chose a new scorched parkafor the day,or breakfasted at ihop,followed by a
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Posters
Marc Hundley was born in 1971 in Toronto, and has worked as a graphic designer, carpenter, photographer, and model as well as visual artist. In the late nineties, he began making T-shirts featuring lyrics from his favorite musicians’ songs. Since the
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About Ed
I walk into the orchid show with Ed. As soon as I see the tumultuous hall I know he won’t last long. Ed walks like an old man though he is forty. After ten minutes on his feet, he vomits on some purple phalaenopsis. I get him outside through a fire e
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Three Poems
Peak gust and west of July.Wind is full-song-singing wings,full-on whistling grass saturation. The aftercast (neither wet-bulb noroldfield lark, not dry punch, notdiablo wind) an atlas of starling- like neglect, flock-overlook. Emily Dickinson wrote:
The Paris Review33 min read
The Art of Fiction No. 254
Sigrid Nunez makes a policy of not inviting interviewers into the studio apartment on West Thirteenth Street where she has lived for decades. But during the last of our sessions, on Zoom, she picked up her laptop and danced me in a circle: bed tucked
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Primm Meadow
In the Gold Creek basina ponderosa trunk’socher plates of barkconverge with blackfault lines we decidesmell like cinnamon.I shoulder a blanket,you the flask wheregin swishes. Rustinghistorically, chassisfrom settler wagonsare ragged beds forMontana w
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Lording
It’s 4:38 P.M., eight minutes after I usually go home, but now I’m rooting around under my chair cushion, double-checking my shirt pocket, hunting for an unmarked baggie of white bars, which I shouldn’t have left in my office, which I shouldn’t have
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For Snow Queens Who Have Considered Suicide Because Paul Newman in the First Twenty Minutes of Paris Blues Is Too Much
But I start with the great Sidney Poitier because his stardom was an established part of the Freedom movement in 1964, and he was to be the chaperone of my inner awakening that dramatic year. Indianapolis, my hometown, had some brave marches and two
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Two Poems
We stay in the apartment of a Croatian couple, husband and wife,both in love with our friend M.,a professional flautist, long-fingered and heron-legged. They’vegone to Zagreb to witness a mother’s death.For the duration, my husband and I walk their m
The Paris Review31 min read
Pleasant Glen
This new lifestyle hadn’t been so bad, had it? Clean living! Or mostly clean. Carter had started drinking a smoothie in the mornings—two raw eggs cracked into a blender with a frozen banana and a scoop of wheat germ. It would have been vastly improve
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Contributors
DAN BEVACQUA is the author of the novel Molly Bit. SANDRA CISNEROS is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist. A new collection of her poetry, Woman Without Shame, is forthcoming from Knopf this fall. HARRIET CLARK is a
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Credits
Cover: © Stanley Whitney, courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York. Page 10, courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York; page 50, courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana; pages 55, 58, courtesy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o; page 61,
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Acknowledges
The Plimpton Circle is a remarkable group of individuals and organizations whose annual contributions of $2,500 or more help advance the work of The Paris Review Foundation. The Foundation gratefully acknowledges: 1919 Investment Counsel • ACE Conten

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