Fall 2023 (245)

The Paris Review

The world's preeminent literary magazine.

The Paris Review1 min read
The Paris Review
EDITOR EMILY STOKES MANAGING EDITOR KELLEY DEANE McKINNEY DEPUTY EDITOR LIDIJA HAAS ASSOCIATE EDITOR AMANDA GERSTEN WEB EDITOR SOPHIE HAIGNEY ASSISTANT EDITORS OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING, ORIANA ULLMAN POETRY EDITOR SRIKANTH REDDY CONTRIBUTING EDITOR DAVID
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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
The Paris Review22 min read
Supportive Husband
There were less intimate places available, so it was odd when a woman took the seat directly facing mine across the subway aisle. I looked up from my book and right back down: a couple of months before, we’d gone home together. She had a Southern acc
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Rumor
I was born to be gigantic, said the violet flower that derailed me. this is a rumor, so there aren’t any rules to go with it. I built its shape of pegs, won’t take that lying down, my name is zero, my name is nonce, my name is nobody, who the hell ar
The Paris Review29 min read
The Art of Theater No. 19
Lynn Nottage is one of the most successful playwrights in American theater. She is the only woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice—in 2009, for Ruined (2008), a portrait of a group of women living through civil war in the Democratic Rep
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As for What the Rain Can Do
wash me in blossoms yet to comelift my boat flood the rice fields where the egret landscomplex math rinse off a benchturn on a dime give you something to think aboutfeed an aspiring stream tell you by thunder it’s comingstand you up play a little mus
The Paris Review34 min read
A Narrow Room
She shakes out the blanket, wraps it around her middle, and sits down. The room is cold and dim and full of quiet. She takes the top book from the stack, and her marker out of the book: Sonnet 49. Against that time (if ever that time come). Against t
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Companions
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess was born in 1929 in Caracas, Venezuela. Her earliest works, made in the orphanage where she spent much of her childhood, were paintings on altar cloths of Bible scenes and flowers. As a teenager, she studied landscape painti
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Flip Side
In October, transmissions paused temporarily in certain regions ofthe planet. No marks made it to the page then, hence the retroactive declaratives. If you looked up at the yellow dwarf star at the right time in the right place, you’d see the culprit
The Paris Review40 min read
Living Things
The car was parked on the street where three out of the four of us lived. The trunk was open, and we were loading in our luggage while waiting for G. His being late surprised us less than the amount of stuff he had with him. He’d brought a flamenco g
The Paris Review26 min read
No Changing
When Nick didn’t arrive at the café on time, I was relieved. I thought he’d gotten cold feet. The waitress came to take my plate. “Was there something wrong with it?” she asked, smiling. I assured her the problem was me. Then my phone dinged. “I’m in
The Paris Review1 min read
& Nothing Happens
Peaches bought on Sunday won’t lasta week; Wednesday & I find one; beside the vase of flowers; so soft; my fingersinterrupt it; like a stream; to think this is all I wanted; the plastic bag;the peaches inside; getting moldy; sweetly going with death;
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Sketches
Eric Nathaniel Mack was born in Columbia, Maryland, in 1987. As a child, he often visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where his father was a plexiglass specialist and his mother an archivist. In his teenage years, he worked at hi
The Paris Review2 min read
Noose Soaked In Orange Blossom Water
it’s not a rambling speech mine’s mutepelted by tip-offs and low-life thieveswhile you go on singing of blueberries and myrtle rambling speech to rambling speechthis year ranting is better than fuckingespecially holding on to the end of a noose soake
The Paris Review20 min read
Every Hair Casts a Shadow
“They didn’t even choose an interesting battle to commemorate,” Víctor said. “My God, who cares about sinking some British merchant ships—it’s not like it helped them win the war.” He’d removed the lid from the jar of candies we offer to children who
The Paris Review2 min read
Lover of Cars
all those Stingers Jaguars Tiguans Fiat 500sand San Remo Green Beemer i4s I love allthose model numbers numb-sexy like cashmerethrown over a dinosaur skeleton like a robot’skiss I fell asleep watching an Audi documentaryand dreamt of a low low R8 sco
The Paris Review32 min read
The Art of Fiction No. 260
Robert Glück’s best-known work, Margery Kempe (1994), is an entirely original novel that juxtaposes apparently autobiographical episodes from the life of “Bob,” a man who has an all-consuming passion for his younger lover, L., with the travails of th
The Paris Review1 min read
Aubade
I sit on a chair and the chair touches me back.According to my chair, I have two hipsand bones inside them hard as peach pits. The femurs connected to the pelvislead to the kneecaps. I have kneecaps.In the ancient past of my village, people used them
The Paris Review26 min read
A Room in August Town
The man who was to become my landlord showed me the yellow room in August Town just a couple of weeks before the first semester of my second year began. The day was extremely hot. I recall appreciating the cool of the house, a cool I thought might ha
The Paris Review2 min read
Contributors
JOEUN KIM AATCHIM received her B.F.A. in studio art from New York University and her M.F.A. in visual arts from Columbia University. CHRISTINA ANDERSON is a playwright and the winner of the 2022 Horton Foote Prize for Excellence in American Theatre.
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Credits
Cover: Courtesy of Joeun Kim Aatchim and François Ghebaly Gallery; photograph by Dario Lasagni. Page 12, courtesy of Sam McKinniss and Publicide Inc.; page 40, courtesy of Lynn Nottage and Granary Books; page 44, courtesy of Lynn Nottage; pages 47, 5
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New For Fall 2023
“In this blazing new collection, at times joyfully wry and at other times deeply searing, Kuan deconstructs motherhood, domesticity, racialization, modernity, and more with her wild intellect.”—Natalie Shapero “Poetry as the process of recovering wha

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