Indholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2017 i The Paris Review

For the first two decades of its existence (1953–73), The Paris Review was a transatlantic operation. It was printed in Europe. It was distributed mainly in America. And it was edited in both places, by George Plimpton— who moved back to New York in 1956—and by a series of Paris editors, who also oversaw the physical production of the magazine. These Paris editors were a distinguished group: over the years they included Robert Silvers, Nelson Aldrich, and Frederick Seidel, among others. But the person who held the job longest, and left the biggest stamp on the Review, was Maxine Groffsky, who worked in the rue de Tournon office from 1965 until it closed in January 1974. Although Groffsky went on to become a wellknown literary agent, until now she has…

SPEECH ACTS FOR A DYING WORLD A field sparrow is at my window, tapping at its reflection, a tired New England god trying to communicate it’s getting to me as I set out to sing the nimbus of flora under a partly mottled sky as I look at the end and sing so what, sing live now, thinking why not I’m listening and receiving now and it feeds me, I’m always hungry when the beautiful is too much to carry inside my winter when my library is full of loss full of wonder when the polis is breaking and casts a shadow over all of me, thinking of it when the shadows fall in ripples, when the medium I work in is deathless and I’m living inside one great example…

BARDING We were between armor and mummies on the ground floor, weighing preservation in a tin vs humidor, the hollow man vs stuffing for a sarcophagus— forgetting for a moment there were portraits, sebaceous, upstairs . . . here was, if not great art, the artistic object, cut to the measure of man (and child). Horrors collect no dust; rows of swords in side rooms and outmoded firearms impressed us less than the siren cresting with unsettling charms on the ridge of a helmet: a psychological weapon —to judge from the masterfully kinked facial expression— like barding. Hammering armor for horses created goods as enduring as this queasy masterpiece: a spike protrudes from the brow of a chamfron in a vitrine (like freesias keeping in a block of ice), as…

They’ll have to hire a girl. The father knows why. The daughter will no longer tolerate any housework that gets hands dirty. She gives excuses the father doesn’t believe, but he doesn’t argue. After he lost the use of his legs, the daughter learned to organize her time and energy. She took care of him, made meals, kept house, and ran the shop, small enough to be tended by a single clerk, eight hours a day. That was fifteen years ago. Since then, the father has come to believe that the daughter is disillusioned with men. He’s only heard her mention them to deplore their vulgarity, as well as other, less obvious defects she later discovers. When they took on the new clerk—who didn’t impress the father: too polished and…

THE KISS for Jack Ceglic and Manuel Fernandez-Casteleiro In a sense, Jack and Manuel were starting over again. Jack, a Romanian Jew who designed our house, drank our kids’ “concoctions” made out of everything on a restaurant’s table, which we wouldn’t do, and Manuel, who shared his amazement with a perplexing world while surviving Cuba, communism, and aids, got married at City Hall not long after two men could. To help them celebrate, Monica and I brought a fancy bottle of champagne we could never find a reason to open before. As is the custom, we kissed after my toast, while they just looked at each other, curiously. “Never in public before,” Jack said. Okay, I know what it feels like to see myself through the harsh light of another’s…

COUPLES IN THE DEATH OF WINTER Now this is a city held by winter, and this is a glass splinter. Now this is a day as short as a short vowel, and this is a night as long as a wandering owl. Now this is how brilliance fails, and this is the sun wearing hundreds and hundreds of veils. Now this is a road scratched in a black window, and this is what men and women do. Now this is a black dress in a storm, and this is a table spilling with charm. Now this is the lip of a moment, and this is what they both partly wanted. Now this is a door made of pages, and these are the large eyes of your rages. Now this is…

It happened like this. A week after the Six-Day War, Sam walked to the eastern bank of the Jordan River. He was working as a counselor that summer near Karameh, at a day camp for boys. Although the fighting occurred further upstream, camp activities had been suspended. Then came the cease-fire, and the usual schedule resumed: football in the morning, literacy after lunch, assorted games in the afternoon, orange juice and croissants in plastic wrap, and a bus to take them back to the city. That Tuesday it was sweltering. After taking the register and sending the boys outside, the supervisor told Sam that a new counselor-in-training would referee the match that day, which gave Sam the morning off, if he wanted it. At first Sam considered hanging around all…

DELIVERY WARD We trusted no one so he came along that first dinner and felt or inferred the pile under footfalls ordering things there. Their legacies of taking notes, who’d blame us for having a flattering evening clocking the imprints of our friends. Thoughtfulness drew with a huge compass a circle on the hardwood so the hole for falling through would be clean. Oh city of one mind, the flash which alone shows everything so much so that after you close your eyes the valley lives whereas those slow good questions, the visitor leaves going They know very well what’s coming. Even things you set in motion may grab you from behind in a corridor as though you were part of some larger scheme. At that time I’d already dreamed…

September 1970. Eisenhower High School. I can’t get into the teen spirit of the Hopkins High pep rally. Purple Power! Youth Fever! Sieg Heil! Makes me sick. I put out a comic book with some other freaks that is sold in the hallways for a dime. The Daily Planet. My mom gets a call from a concerned parent who’d said she’d already had enough trouble with her son without this pornography inciting him to take drugs. Lady on the phone said I had to be on drugs to do the awful things to her son that I did. (IN A COMIC BOOK!?!?) Mom’s scared and shaking. Poor dear. She weakens and tells me I’m missing out on the best years of my life. But meanwhile, my art teacher Vern says…

IRÚN You can’t get attached to the moments, she said. They fly away. But that is where I live, I protested. I had even been told, Nothing exists except a moment. We were making love on an upper berth of the sleeper to Irún. Claire was naked above me. I had on not just my shirt but the rumpled linen jacket. A corner of my passport pressed into my thorax. In the window, the mining towns flashed by, like voices that speak only once. How to find my way out of this instant, or deeper into it, I thought. Her necklace was slipping into my mouth just under my tongue. The pearl was cool but the copper link was fiery. The border was coming. The searchlight that swept the ceiling…

Our house on Emerald Isle, The Sea Section, is divided down the middle, and has an E beside one front door and a W beside the other. The east side is ruled by Hugh, and the bedroom we share is on the top floor. It opens onto a deck that overlooks the ocean and is next to Amy’s room, which is the same size as ours but is shaped differently. Unlike Lisa and Paul, who are on the west side of the house and could probably sleep on burlap without noticing it, Amy likes nice sheets. She’d packed a new set in her suitcase, and on the night before Thanksgiving, as I helped her make her bed, she mentioned a friend who’d come to her apartment for dinner the previous…

1919 Investment Counsel • David M. Adler • A?sop • Alfred A. Knopf • Theresa Gavin & Mark Almeida • Peggy & Keith Anderson • The Anna-Maria & Stephen Kellen Foundation • Jeff Antebi • Gale Arnold • R. Scott Asen • Debbie & Mark Attanasio • Amanda Urban & Ken Auletta • Ijeomaessica Marshall & Peter N. Belhumeur • Robert Bell • Amy Bennett • Liz & Rod Berens • Kathryn & David Berg • Desiree Welsing & Olivier Berggruen • Joan Bingham • Blaine & Tim Birchby • The Blackstone Group • Leslie Tcheyan & Monty Blanchard • Carol Rosetto & John Blondel • Bloomberg Philanthropies • Suzanne Deal Booth • Susanna & Livio Borghese • Winthrop Brown • Timothy Browne • Brunswick Group • Sarah Burnes •…

I’d started to visit Olivia more often because it was obvious she was lonely. The ALS lady who’d been moved to Hopkins had been Aunt Olivia’s closest friend, leaving aside Merton Hillstead, who actually went home. Even the friendly paperboy who sometimes went into Harmony House to say hello to the ladies at early breakfast had quit the route. One Sunday, she didn’t get her paper at all, which left her with only the two p.m. bingo, or three thirty “Our Friendly World” (slides of places the director of Harmony House and his wife had lived, with soundtracks by their son, who was a fellowship student at Juilliard). Instead of attending either of those activities, O. tore up some magazines and started assembling a collage on special paper I’d gotten…

HYMN TO APHRODITE Ποικιλόθρον᾽ α᾽θανάτ᾽ Αφρόδιτα —Sappho, Fragment 1 I gather you were in the lobby Minutes before. Terrifying to almost see you again. I smelled the shockwave, the burning air. You were too sexual To be bourgeois, screams from the jungle On top of Mount Olympus. You were too violently beautiful. Last night I looked up at the sky, Lights out as I was falling asleep. There was the moon, a full moon, or nearly. It was you. I wasn’t, but I could have been, A god I was living in. I chose not to come out Onstage and tell them what a poem is about. Pubic hair that befits a goddess. Pubic hair that equips a goddess. That little arrowhead of pubic hair that Magnifies your thighs’ magnificence.…

During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khmer Rouge, which had been in power from 1975 to 1979, was well known. Many of the women had been raped or tortured or otherwise brutalized. Most had seen family members murdered in front of them. One woman, who never again saw her husband and three children after soldiers came and took them away, said that she had lost her sight after having cried every day for four years. She was not the only one who appeared to have cried herself blind. Others suffered from blurred or partial vision,…

THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 7 Four deer stood poised down in a valley as the train passed by, like four artworks in a museum, framed in the rectangular windows of the train, a tableau vivant that hardly changes no matter how many times the train passes, heading north or heading south, for the poised deer are the same poised deer that stood there a century ago, the streams ferrying their cargo of dead twigs are the same streams as two centuries ago, the trees felled and planted and tended and felled and planted and tended, and felled, the foresters still sculptural and storied, the kids in the woods flirting with addiction to crystal, crystals forming on the windows of the train carrying the cargo of passengers whose bloodstreams ferry the…

Dany Laferrière was born in Port-au- Prince in 1953. After his father, a former mayor of the city, was forced into exile in 1959, Dany was raised by his grandmother in the coastal village of Petit-Goâve. He returned to Port-au-Prince five years later and eventually became a culture reporter for Le petit samedi soir and Radio Haiti-Inter. When his colleague and friend Gasner Raymond was assassinated in 1976, Laferrière fled to Montreal, where he supported himself with a series of odd jobs. In 1985, he published his first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, which chronicled those first years of his exile. But it wasn’t until 2009, when he received the Prix Médicis for his nineteenth book, The Return, that Laferrière reached a wide readership…

ESTHER ALLEN’s most recent translation, Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama (1956), was published last year. ANN BEATTIE ’s most recent collection is The Accomplished Guest. ANTONIO DI BENEDETTO (1922–86) has been called the most original writer in twentieth-century Argentina. The story in this issue first appeared in 1957. PETER GIZZI ’s most recent books include Archeophonics, a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award, and In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987–2011. ADAM L E ITH GOLLNER is the author of The Fruit Hunters and The Book of Immortality. ISABELLA HAMMAD’s first novel is forthcoming in 2019. DUNCAN HANNAH is a New York–based painter whose diaries from the 1970s, 20th Century Boy, will be published next spring. PATRICK MACKIE is the author of The Further Adventures of the Lives of the…