Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2022 (242) i The Paris Review

The story of Aesop’s partnership with The Paris Reviewis one plotted by a deep reverence for the writtenword. Since 2015, we have been proud to offer thisesteemed quarterly for purchase in select stores acrossthe globe and at aesop.com, inviting customers to joinus in discussing the thought-provoking ideas exploredin its pages. Now more than ever we believe literature has thepower to nurture meaningful connections, nourishweary minds and give voice to those whose wordshave, for too long, been kept in the margins—so, here’sto the next chapter. Aesop Chelsea 74 9th Ave, New York, NY 10011…

Driving from Santa Fe’s center to its outskirts, you pass through a wide expanse made vibrant by that particular slant of light Georgia O’Keeffe coveted. Somehow, the sky is more immense here. Hawks circle over dusty fields strewn with yellow-flowering rabbitbrush. Beyond this plain is the quiet suburb where N. Scott Momaday lives, in a square adobe house. The walls of the living room are lined with prints of Native Americans by Leonard Baskin, which Momaday, a painter and printmaker himself, has collected for decades. On the coffee table sits a bronze sculpture of the Wyoming rock formation known as Devils Tower, with a bear at its base; as an infant, Momaday was taken to this sacred site and given his Kiowa name, Tsoai-talee, or “Rock-Tree Boy,” after the story…

Two actors—Diane, a white woman in her mid-to late sixties, and Erin, a Black woman in her late thirties—stand on a bare stage with two chairs: one comfy, one less so. There’s a music stand in front of the comfier chair and an end table with tea things laid out. A loud sharp clack from a wood clacker [*] abruptly starts the scene— ERIN I was so happy when I got your voicemail DIANE I was so happy you said yes ERIN I’d been meaning to write but DIANE so sorry it was such short notice it felt rude but ERIN not at all! DIANE don’t want you to think I don’t think of you unless there’s something I need ERIN I’m so honored really so honored that you’d even…

The reason they’d settled on that apartment with its large, open-plan kitchen and windows with sizable balconies to both the south and east sides wasn’t any particular passion for cooking on Natsumi’s part, let alone any special pride she took in her culinary abilities, but because it looked like the interiors she often saw and admired in the glossy pages of women’s magazines, and it had a kitchen island with a breakfast bar, as was now all the rage, or in vogue, or whatever you wanted to call it, which seemed like a pretty convenient feature, and above anything else, the front door of the two-bedroom apartment they’d been living in until that point opened directly into the kitchen, so when you walked in you were immediately confronted by the…

I eat in the rain, under the river willows. I lean on the railing. I write poems about what I see, for things pass so quickly. This morning the clouds are thin.Last night the moon was yellow. Peach blossoms in the river current; ducks below the dock.A single seagull, tossed around in the wind. It is beneath you never to forget petty slights. When birds call they call to their own kind.Gibbons hang from the branches and imitate each other.Gulls stand in a line side by side and think only of themselves. Thirty years since I’ve seen you and I still see you getting on theboat.Ashes smolder in a heart that’s died. They sell their children to pay the taxes.They hope their counterfeit coins will work. The army has taken…

Often, during the course of my interview sessions with Colm Tóibín, which numbered more than a dozen and took place across time zones—he was in Los Angeles, in the Catalan Pyrenees, on the Ballyconnigar coast of his native County Wexford—a disposable fountain pen would dart into view, held in his hand and used to emphasize a point about process or method or about the novel he had been working on before our conversation began and to which, after it had ended, he would return. Tóibín’s friends know that these pens are part of the deal. See Tóibín, see a Pilot V, or more than one—tucked into a jacket pocket, waiting on a desk, scattered like cigarette butts across the kitchen countertop at one of the parties for which his Georgian…

The Roseville Hotel had closed many years ago, and the rooms upstairs had been converted to apartments, but the bar on the ground floor was still called the Roseville Hotel, because everyone was used to the name. One Saturday in January, John James and two of his friends were sitting at the bar drinking small golden glasses of beer. It was very cold outside but sunlight came through the red curtains, giving the bar the look of a painting, one left unfinished, as if the painter had forgotten it and never returned to the room where it waited. On the wall above the liquor bottles there were two hockey sticks with taped blades and a pair of scarred leather skates that hung by cotton laces on a nail. The sticks…

POLLY BARTON is a translator and writer. Her nonfiction debut, Fifty Sounds, won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. VICTORIA CHANG is the author of The Trees Witness Everything, Obit, and Dear Memory. She is the poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine. ADDIE E. CITCHENS is a New Orleans–based, Mississippi Delta–born writer of blues fiction. CYNTHIA CRUZ is the author of seven collections of poems and two nonfiction books. Becoming Nothing will be published by Repeater in 2023. LUIS ALBERTO DE CUENCA is a writer and scholar. SOPHIE MADELINE DESS is a teaching fellow at Columbia University. TOM DRURY is the author of five novels. HANNAH EMERSON is the author of The Kissing of Kissing. C. S. GISCOMBE is the Robert Hass Chair in English at the University of California at Berkeley. Negro Mountain will be published…

My sister called me the other day. She wanted to let me know that I had once more been merciless and cruel in my relations with our parents. “They say there’s a lot of anger in you,” she said. “It makes them mad. It hurts their feelings. They think you blame them for everything. They think you say rude things about them to your therapist. They think that’s the whole reason you see a therapist. They think an irrevocable rift has opened between you. It’s gaping, they say. It’s a valley. It’s a mountain gorge. They think it’s unfair. They think they did the best they could. You should tell them that you don’t really blame them. That would be a nice thing for you to do.” “Wow,” I said.…

I am William, who by nature needs to chant triste now, I’ll makethis song from it I’ll no more be a lover not in Poitiers,nor in Limoges. In the second verse, triste I depart in dangerous exile in greatperil I leave my son for the neighbors to cheat. It’s hard to depart the dear tenure of Poitiers I leave my hearttotally in the sage watch of Folque— Folque of Anjou, cousin, guard my boy and his lands! If my cousindoesn’t take care nor the king, to whom I owe my tenuremy pain is their pleasure. Those thieves. I, William, have world fatigue. They’ll take him down in hisgreenness. Triste I entreat you, companions pardon my blunders I prayalso to throned Jesus in Romance and in the Pope’s language: From mortal arts…

For more than thirty years, the Dutch artist Lily van der Stokker has made drawings, wall paintings, and sculptures that explore, often with a disarmingly mordant sense of humor, the mundane but nonetheless pressing realities of her everyday life, including personal finances, family problems, and the process of aging. During the first lockdown, and during a period of ill health, she began archiving her work, including the hundreds of drawings she made in the eighties and nineties while living in New York and Amsterdam, when she was questioning the ideals and ambitions of Modernism. The deceptively upbeat drawings in What Is It?, rendered in her signature saccharine colors, embrace what might be considered lowly or naive aesthetics while reveling in the taboo pleasures of the decorative. MH…

Kiss the motherthat needs to becomethat needs to needgroundingthat death helps us heave our thoughtsbecome the trying that is trying to becomethe yes that is trying to unify usinto the nothing that is the juttinghelpful greeting that is trying to yearn throughthe veil of trying that is death yes yes yes Making the juttingbecome the beauty that is getting us togetherbecoming the dead great yearning that is trying to make us becomethe beast that is trying to knead usinto the helpful being that is getting the beingthought that is getting free goingto the nothing beauty that is becomingthe very yearning that is the freedomthat is free of life yes yes…

Miriam stood at the bulletin board waiting for it to sprout news, delaying the dust mopping to which she had been unjustly assigned. The Men’s and Women’s Work Distributors allotted Saturday-morning chores to all in the community unblessed with offspring and so still at risk for idling. This was the sort of information available on the bulletin board in the Meeting Hall vestibule: “Peter Wyatt Maendel, 7 pounds 7 ounces, born to Adam and Siri in Gracefield, as yet unphotographed but represented here by a dear little blue-bootied illustration.” “Please return all emptied birthday baskets to Stores.” “Tom Kleiner seeks fellow rook enthusiasts to begin a weekly rook tally, for more information see Tom.” Alan Lefebvre, lately returned to the Brotherhood after three years in experimental apostasy, joined Miriam in…

Mary Manning was born in Alton, Illinois, in 1972 and lives in New York City. In 2006, they began sharing digital photographs of their everyday life on their blog, Unchanging Window, alongside scans of objects such as plastic bags, and links to the work of musicians, film-makers, writers, and other artists they admire. Today, their work is analog in process and materials: Manning arranges film photos and ephemera into rectilinear collages on tables and magnetic walls. Ciao! documents six weeks spent at a summer residency in the Italian village of Spoleto. In addition to a cantaloupe wrapper and a lunch receipt, the compositions include images of friends, a Nicola De Maria fresco, and a performance of a Trisha Brown dance. —OKS…

I was a woman in a prison camp, my job was to work in the yard. I walked away, drifted north, like I do, and came to Canada; but by then I was a man dressed in a long Soviet coat, wool with a red collar. Better I would have retreated to the mountains, I thought, or the interior. Why not just go on into Canada? someone said. It was how the border had appeared so quickly when my experiencewas that the roads that were the way over were always further north than I had figured when I’d set out. In my experience—waking life—nothing had readied me for such an arrival. Walking north, I was surely out of bounds, a city woman, then a man indistinguishable from his own prowess.…

Cover: Courtesy of Uman and Nicola Vassell Gallery; photograph by Joseph Perez. Page 16, courtesy of Jeremy Deller; page 32, courtesy of the Frances McCullough papers at Special Collections and University Archives, University of Maryland Libraries; pages 36, 40, 43, 46, 49, 51, 54, 56, courtesy of Jill Momaday and the Momaday family archive; page 62, courtesy of Mason Saltarrelli and Turn Gallery; pages 105–119, courtesy of Lily van der Stokker; pages 156, 169, courtesy of Mason Saltarrelli and Turn Gallery; pages 172, 176, 181, courtesy of Colm Tóibín; page 186, photograph by Tony O’Shea, courtesy of Colm Tóibín; pages 191, 194, 201, 204, courtesy of Colm Tóibín; pages 210–223, courtesy of Mary Manning and Canada Gallery.…

I had an accident but lived in eleganceon methamphetamines and small stacksof Black Beauty paperbacksand plastic plates of breadand black cherry marmalade.Later, a career of killingtime. And wasting money.But I have always been extraordinarily giftedat being alone. At the age of fiveI thought I would never speak.It wasn’t until I was thirteenthat I knew it was true.In blond wig, old worn denim, and goldchain with plastic pink Saint Genet pendantI enter the terminal infirmary of music.And move the body as thoughengaged in infinite reenactmentsof the sacred. Murmuring, among my peoplein the ruins of the institutions of this cityawaiting dispersal of food stamps and low-cost medicines.But I always knew if I worked hard enoughI would never make it.…

It was hot that day, hot for the morning and hot for April and with a stickiness in the air that suggested something had to break. I was headed up the street to ask my neighbor Meech to give me a jump when I heard a scream come from the fourplex next door. Between there and Meech’s was this big-ass bright-blue bouncy house leaning like it was about to fall over. Not a soul was out on the block but me and the bouncy house and that scream, and so for a moment I was tripping, thinking the bouncy house had screamed. But then a girl rumbled out of the end unit; she was around twenty with cornrows that had been in too long, and she was both juicy and…

Having worn my camouflage for leisure, having fed upon a shale bed’s vapors, having licked my wounds with glacial pleasure, having found out what of a child’s I could own, having known what the child would buy back later, having lectured on gut health for industry leaders, having liked the energy I brought to the role, having fashioned a lean-to for my taxes, having toured the ward beds with compassion, having recorded my children on laughing gas, having shared this to make my senator laugh, having laughed myself and made the sloshing sound, having lapped at the sides of my poison jug, having thought myself universally beloved, having saved my skin cells from a Lifetouch comb, having managed the whole life cycle of my product, then grafted my face to…

My brother Eli and I are lying on the couch, both of us nearly asleep, Eli’s toenails gently kneading my neck. I’m raising my throat to their sharpness, wanting him to press in, when from the next room we hear chimes. Then two clangs. Then: “Hello?” It’s our Aunt Satchie busting through the back door. “Boys! Up!” She’s pretty and comes chest-first through everything, so Eli and I stare. “I mean it. Up, off the couch and into the car.” We don’t move. “Come.” She keeps her hands on her hips as her eyes take in the open bags of food, the canvas facedown on the floor. Then she points: “What’s this? And this? All this? Where’s your mother?” “Upstairs.” “Okay. Get in the car.” “We don’t want to go…

Oracle at Dog I told you the words to it oriole.Now when an ear come say it right. Give the true kiss and there isno more two faces but one stone. Meaning how to hold a thing one lovedand how describe custody. If incantation is nationalsay a nation is a plane of equivalencesgalloping one by one onto the blade,a blade in sunlight, far far offstage—there, grass and weeds,and what, cassette tape in the culvertsshimmering —the song,two dogs tethered inside— but the scale changes,then the key how to hold a thing one knewand how authority Brezhnev The globe sits on the spinet, next to the bent brass lampand astack of music, brackish Hanon, then Scarlatti, thebubblingidea shut up in its notation, a few fingerings penciled inand onthe title page a signature,…

Red Bird, 1964 I’ve only seen a dead bird up close once. It wasn’t red butblue. I named it Happiness before I buried it. My childfound a few sticks so we could make a cross. We dug a holeand dropped the bird in, along with a few flowers we hadplucked. We didn’t touch the bird with our bare hands,in case death was contagious. When I put the cross intothe ground, I felt that Nietzsche was wrong. Happinessisn’t the feeling when power increases. The lake isn’t amarketplace. The small pencil marks on the painting aren’tmeasuring anything. Seeing the dead bird up close only mademe want to cover it, not sell its feelings. I am far away fromit, in another house, but I still have the baby bird’s feelingsin a small box.…

“Who are you playing?” “Gertrude. But only today, I’m just helping—” “Oh, hi, Mama.” I laughed. “You’re Hamlet.” “Yeah.” Wael ran a hand through his hair. His cheeks were a little pink. On the drive with Mariam from Haifa into the West Bank, one of his songs had crescendoed from the car in front. Over the shuffles and chatting, Mariam called, “Sit your butts down, please, we don’t have all day. We’ll start by going round the room…” I knitted my fingers over my crossed knee. Mariam nodded at the bearded man in glasses to her right. “Majed,” he said. I recognized him from TV. “I’m Claudius, and the Ghost.” In an American show, or a film; I was pretty sure he’d played a Pakistani terrorist. “Amin, Horatio.” A younger,…