Indholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2022 (241) i 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 customers to join us in discussing the thought-provoking ideas explored in its pages. Now more than ever we believe literature has the power to nurture meaningful connections, nourish weary minds, and give voice to those whose words have, for too long, been kept in the margins—so, here’s to the next chapter. Aesop Chelsea 74 9th Ave, New York, NY 10011…

My second conversation with Terrance Hayes failed to record properly. The logical response would be to chalk this technical malfunction up to the device itself, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Hayes’s hyperexpressive, all-encompassing energy had interfered with the batteries. His is a remarkable presence, alive to his interlocutor and to whatever atmosphere he finds himself in. Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971, to a teenage mother named Ethel; she married his stepfather, James, when Hayes was a toddler, and had Hayes’s brother, Spanky, when he was four. Given his parents’ schedules—James was with the military and often stationed abroad; Ethel worked at night as a prison guard—Hayes learned, as a youth, to entertain himself, and he still finds that long stretches of solitude suit him personally…

It was something. Out of nowhere, I didn’t give a shit about anything for like a month. Like nothing. I mean yeah, there’d been plenty of times where I didn’t give a shit about something. Oh that thing? Yeah, fuck that thing. I did it all the time. Multiple things even. Had to. It was part of life, sure. But this time it transcended all things and applied to everything. Like your brain after a severe blow, turning off all functions except what’s needed—breathing, but that’s about it. I just didn’t give a shit, for better or worse. Things I liked / things I didn’t like, didn’t matter. Didn’t want to paint. Didn’t want to write. Didn’t want to talk to anyone. Respond to emails or texts. None of it.…

It wasn’t wind. It differently burned.My child’s child, a reptile in pumice. A whitethat wasn’t a cloud. Santorini, a blowngasket, disappearing into a future without us.I had no skin. So many nights, I held my wristover coal to cauterize the open veins. To not die, you see, was a powerful choice. Toevery morning, this was all to life there was. Burnedand hostile, I wasn’t ready to unhook from your wrist.A wave and then another. Islands flanked with white.I among the seventy-plus lost to the caldera. Among usI lived least on a trajectory. A lit wet stick blown shut. My body? It finally shut, and me? The gases blownup and gone, a decay that tastes azure blue. Tothe charred donkey, pleasure in the gaping ribs, ususurped of equine dust. It wasn’t…

all day I’ve watched two white mothstrail and braid each other in flightover the pond and grassy run-upto the tree line bright whiteagainst the green-leaved paper birches and beechesthen vanish within a cumuluswaiting to appear again against the unyielding bluethat is blue only at this great distancebut a clear invisible just before usas the two white moths tanglein this invisible weaving the airin their flight pattern or maybe a mating tangowhose steps are airborne free of the earthand the possessive rules the earthimposes upon its residentswhat is the program they followand what determines the calligraphyof their commingled flightin late August how do they know the otherand how do they know each other back…

An adolescent shriek woke her. Cockerels, she thought, cockerels, with a wry twist to the word. She lay in the dark listening. There was no use in covering her head; the screaming still came through. The soloist was suddenly submerged in the chorus. Fifty young roosters, their voices high, uncertain, breaking, guttering, and beginning again. She heard the hiss of sheets and felt her husband’s heat moving away from her. “Christ!” came his voice in the dark. She moved an arm until it touched his back; she rubbed softly at the jutting bones of his spine. “I’m sorry,” she said. He didn’t move. “Do it today! I’ve had enough!” She pulled her arm back to her side. “I’ll have to wait until she’s gone to school.” He was silent. The…

HILTON ALS is a staff writer at The New Yorker and an advisory editor of The Paris Review. My Pinup is forthcoming from New Directions in fall 2022. MAYA BINYAM is a contributing editor of The Paris Review. Her debut novel, Hangman, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in summer 2023. DANIEL BOWLES has translated Christian Kracht’s The Dead and Imperium. He is a professor of German studies at Boston College. MICHELLE DE KRETSER’s most recent novel is Scary Monsters. KATHERINE DUNN (1945–2016) is the author of the novels Geek Love, Attic, and Truck. Toad and Near Flesh are forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in fall 2022 and fall 2023, respectively. NATALIE EILBERT is the author of Swan Feast and Indictus. Her collection Overland is forthcoming from Copper Canyon…

I was plagued by remorse, but my remorse seemed inspired by insignificant dumb things—things not really worthy of bona fide remorse. That didn’t make it any less painful or plague-worthy, as I was still riddled with disgrace on a minute-by-minute basis, so I decided to conduct a scientific study to analyze the cause(s). Then I could modify my behavior so as to behave in a way that would not cover me with dishonor. Remorse is akin to regret but more violent than regret. The overall atmosphere in my case seemed to derive from generic self-loathing. But that was too vague. Once I conducted the study, I would be able to identify more exactly the source of the trouble. Meanwhile I went to Rigoletto at the neighborhood movie theater where they…

He’s not what you expectedAs you might have expected. Unkempt. Eyes bright but restrained.Clothes damp from the steady rain Of your most shameful and exciting thoughtsOn the thatched roof of his tiny hut In your underworld, the underworld of you,The place where nothing hopeful goes. But he doesn’t seem to mind.Now that you’ve met, he understands What must happen. He hands you his key chainAnd patiently, almost kindly, explains How to open the hut, where to find towels,How to work the casement windows. Then he offers you his coat, takesYour light, and walks back up the path Through the open gate of the aftermath.…

Blindfolded by its eyethe crowbarsays hello soft lardhello hard breastsweethearthandcartwater lily of suspendersIt’s sunny in the drawersand the protruding chins sleep deeplyat the edge of the wheat fieldswhere the well-seasoned pipes frolicand white and pink like a turniplean gallantlyagainst the blooming cherry treesWouldn’t you say that the locksmiths come back from fishingfor whalestheir hands fulland their looks ecstaticlike a skeleton under the dusty remains of his motherwho trembles at seeing his father appear Translated from the French by Keith Hollaman…

In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up. The radio announced traffic due to an accident involving a taxicab driver, a police officer, and a woman whose occupation the dispatcher did not care to identify. But there was no traffic. My ticket was in the breast pocket of my jacket, which was handed to me as I exited the passenger door. Waiting in line, I felt I had no body, but by the time I reached security I was hungry. Inside my carry-on I found two apples and a croissant, which tasted like nothing. The security…

Helen Garner lives in the Melbourne suburb of Flemington, in an Edwardian-style house with a picket fence. A corridor from the guest bedroom connects to the house next door, where Garner’s daughter, Alice, lives with her family. Most evenings, the two households have dinner together. My first meeting with Garner took place on a summer morning at her kitchen table, which looks out onto a brick patio, a vegetable garden, and a wire enclosure accommodating three ISA Brown chickens—or chooks, as Garner calls them. Garner was born Helen Ford in 1942, the eldest of six children, in the coastal city of Geelong, Victoria. In 1968, she married the actor and writer Bill Garner, a fellow graduate of the University of Melbourne; they separated in 1971, when Alice was two. Garner’s…

Just as Jupiter spirited the girl to Crete,this canvas was conveyed over the seaand must surf its contradictions or drown.(It looks like Europa, her pose indiscreet,should tumble onto us pretty heavily;nothing ruffles the bull’s flower crown.) My memories of being young heresurface as a kind of automatism: lo,my feet take over. Streets haven’t moved,buildings have stayed anchored. I hear,as a couple kneels, pointing out a windowto their child: “That’s where we lived.” Past the public garden (whose willowsare muscly!); past the CLOCK REPAIRSand WATCH HOSPITAL—we’re remindedthat turning back the hands throwsthe interior mechanism into arrearsthough not a minute is rescinded. Past the public clock, then, and the chimeit wears in its funny hat. Once, the hourshad names and designated prayers;now they’re occasion for alarm, mere timethat at its leisure rubs…

When I was a girl in Beverly Hills,and things were just beginning to get bad, they brought handwashing experts to prep schoolone day. There were two, and the two of them lectured on proper procedure: how to turn the water offwhile you lather, how to take a paper towel and turn the water off for good, after rinsing,with it on your hand, so as not to pick back up the germs that were on you when all this began.And I remember waterfalls, which the other silver-spoon girls found essential: sharing by pouringa little of another girl’s beverage into your mouth, so that nothing touched her mouth, then yours, then hers.I remember their bubble handwriting, how it curved, and how the girls repelled the ground, and spit, and birds.“Who knows where…

She walked to school along streets named for English poets, but the one thing everyone in Melbourne knew about her suburb was its nameless canal. It was held to be behind headaches, sore throats, and babies who wouldn’t settle, and was considered little better than an open drain. The reek of it sprawled in summer. Halfway along, the towpath relaxed into an open, grassy patch where, all year round, fights took place after school. She’d been called Anny since arriving in Australia two years earlier. Her best friend was Lou. Lou lived minutes from school, but the morning bell often found her racing, and she would burst into classrooms with hair that looked as if it contained twigs. Mr. Cullen (history) didn’t mind, nor did Mrs. Dobek (maths), but on…

Someone’s raising money, a sweet sickfriend from a former life in present need.You follow the link from Facebookto PayPal, happy to help, and back. Children in cages,friends of friends are posting at the hive.Lead in the water, a new celebrity screamsif you click on her video clip.You click and click on the streaming, screaming clip.Someone posts a rant on the perils of passive voice.Someone else replies, in defense of passive voice—snidely, shyly. What does it mean, body of the text?you type, chatting in a box on the side.You probe your metaphor from two angles:From one, the body is active and contained.From the other, the body is passive and contained.A nursing mother attempts escape but is caught,tortured, returned. So confesses the text:Multitudes, multitudes. On a pig farm in Americaa worker and…

Breathe these words in all languages before they’re lost, thank you and mean it. The things we take for granted and now have abandoned us. Or will. Water, air, rich earth beneath the rubble, thank you for our daily breath. Give us this day. Exhale the little thank you words, they’re quick, slip out our pores, clean hair. A shower. Soap and aspirin. Thank you. Whoever “you” might be. Appreciation. A survival skill we never get to hone enough. Thank you. For life. For health, for the newborn baby slipping out between the hips. For wondrous eyes and little rosebud fists, thank you, sweet pea. And jump ropes, patience, teachers of the world, and teach me self-control. Migration, vanishing, the butterflies, the orange peach of the oriole. Whatever bright-eyed bird…

Love brought these readers into the worldThe cuplike structuresof their eyes were formedinherited color, and loveand argument must be conducted differently nowthat the sounds through the wallare interpreted, and a gentle relentless pressure has been placedon the page. I paid someone to care for them so Icould pattern these vowels and oneis eight and asking me eachnight to read what I’ve madein what they call my officeI am afraid they will understand it or won’t, will seesomething they shouldnot remember when I’m gone, the voice that ismine only in part must be keptsafe from them. They are too trivialmy offices, too intimate, it isn’t laborI cannot bring my daughters to work or not bring themhere. They have learned to pauseat the end of lines, they want to know if I…

So I had to go to Zurich again for a few days. My mother wished to see me. And because of my nerves about it, I’d felt so unwell over the whole long weekend that I suffered from severe constipation. On top of this, I should say that I’d written a novel a quarter century ago which I’d titled, for some reason I regrettably no longer recall, Faserland. It ends in Zurich, out in the middle of the lake, so to speak, somewhat traumatically. That chapter of my life came back to me for the first time in years when, in Zurich as I said, down on Bahnhofstrasse, I purchased a dark brown, rather chunky wool sweater at a little stall hammered together from wooden beams, not far from Paradeplatz.…