Spring 2024 (247)

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 EDITORS AT LARGE HARRIET CLARK, ANDREW MARTIN, DAVID S.
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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 Review32 min read
The Art of Fiction No. 262
My first conversations with Jhumpa Lahiri took place in Rome this past July, in her apartment near the Janiculum, above Trastevere. It was an extremely hot summer—one of our meetings was on the hottest day in Rome’s history, 110 degrees—and we sat wi
The Paris Review1 min read
The People’s History of 1998
France won the World Cup.Our dark-goggled dictator died from eating a poisoned red applethough everyone knew it was the CIA. We lived miles from the Atlantic.We watched Dr. Dolittle, Titanic, The Mask of Zorro. Our grandfather, purblind and waitingfo
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Concerning The Future Of Souls
As a toddler she had caused a sensation in her family when she announced she wanted to live in a little hole like the ant. Not an ant, the ant. This might have been misheard. She was an easygoing child, not particularly thoughtful and stubbornly inar
The Paris Review1 min read
Trollope
What a sad day,full of black, blue,red, and yellow umbrellas.Everyone in the world,whatever their disposition,seemed to be crying at once,while I hit upon readingTrollope, and so remained a weekamong the grouse. That was mydisposition. Sometimes Iwou
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Passages
Chris Oh began making art as a child in Portland, Oregon, copying pictures from encyclopedias and taking inspiration from the plants and rocks his parents brought home from hikes. After graduating from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 2004, he too
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Tourmaline
is a stone some sayhelps put a feverish childto sleep and othersclaim it wakes actorsfrom the necessarytrance of illusion to become themselves again it comes in many colorslike the strange redstone set into the Russian imperial crowneveryone thoughtw
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 Review1 min read
Hasten Slowly And You Shall Soon Arrive
hasten slowly and you shall soon arrivepriyanka said, quoting milarepa after all this timemy patience waned its wayinto the dipping sun with the pin-tailed onewhose knowledge was encyclopedic…. betelgeuse is turning on and offlike your love—everybody
The Paris Review26 min read
Derrida in Lahore
On the cold night of November 24, 1997, before Shahid disappeared forever, I thought I was his closest friend, his only confidant. We had known each other since we were children, attended primary and high school together, even gone to the same colleg
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Consecutive Preterite
1.That summer I learned Biblical Hebrewwith Christian women heaving themselvestoward ministry one brick building at a time.We got along well, they and I and our teacher,a religious studies graduate student who spenteight hours a day transmitting the
The Paris Review32 min read
The Art of Poetry No. 116
Alice Notley lives in a studio apartment up a single flight of stairs, on the Right Bank in Paris. Her front door is labeled with her name, in looped handwriting on Scotch tape. The small kitchen, which I saw used only for the making of espresso, lea
The Paris Review1 min read
Haptographic Interface
I’m a Keats botso are youour living handsheld toward each otheron the internetsolution sweetI stood on a peakin Darien, googledmy errorI am so colonialI am tubercularmy alveoli a-swellmy actual bloodyour actual bloodwe made loveI planted basilI plant
The Paris Review22 min read
Social Promotion
I didn’t understand. If that boy couldn’t read, why was he up there? The girl they originally had hosting the ceremony didn’t show, but why they put that boy there? Just because he volunteer for everything? You can’t read off enthusiasm. It made the
The Paris Review1 min read
Life Poem 1
A leaf falls here/there, now/thenbehind the rain, a curtain of rain,the trees in their own time.I see now that time falls in layers. There were deer there once, in the clearing,three deer, large as memory objects.They stood in a circleas if they knew
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Farah Al Qasimi
Farah Al Qasimi’s first photographs were of the dreary New Haven winter: reflections in water, a dead cat, an angry dog. She was an undergraduate at the Yale School of Art, where in 2017 she also received her M.F.A. Since then, Al Qasimi has turned h
The Paris Review15 min read
The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees
Bzzzzzzzzzzzz … the humming the soughing the ceaseless the droning the sizzling the moaning the whirring the hissing the whizzing “murmuring of innumerable bees” “They forage with wit and dexterity”“they take the best from every flower”“they read the
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Contributors
GBENGA ADESINA is a poet and essayist. FARAH AL QASIMI is a visual artist. ELIJAH BAILEY is at work on a novel and a short-story collection. SANA R. CHAUDHRY’s Writing Trauma: The Politics of Mute Speech in the Urdu Short Story is forthcoming from Cl
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Credits
Cover: Courtesy of Nicolas Party and the Modern Institute /Toby Webster Ltd. Page 12, courtesy of Alice Notley; pages 32, 36, 39, 42, 45, 48, 52, 55, 56, courtesy of Jhumpa Lahiri; page 59, photograph by Marco Delogu, courtesy of Jhumpa Lahiri; pages
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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 • Gale Arnol

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