Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2023 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…

At Patmos,sunk in dirty water, negroeslie full of hooks. What sails, what cliffs,stupendous with salt makesblue and green speechless, the black cargosold into being, neither subject nor res,neither object nor shadow. And what is this namethreaded with absences, weaving a caulwet with poison, gilt with loss? I am we: space the gift,a white sprit of motion— all night it goes in and outof my nothingness. That is why I am so tired out.Or rather why the day leaks in its mooring, pouring ash acrossthe cages, the image dropped to zero. Greek the unasked-for gift.The faraway sanctuary. A dwelling we lied to enter. And who we arenot even valuable as air. “Mistry” refers to a 1976 track, “Mistry Maker Dub,” by King Tubby; “Patmos” alludes to the 1808 hymnal by the…

I imagined the house Tom had moved into: long bungalow, white, green shrubbery, water feature. I imagined the kind of woman who would lend Tom her home to help him write. There were always women encouraging Tom. She was bright, I assumed, thigh gap, smart shoes, minimal jewelry—and before sleep I wondered, Did he fuck her or just pretend to want to. Tom’s sister, Sarah, had kept in touch with me after he and I parted. She rang me up in the summer to tell me he was coming west, and something about writing a book about a guy, the leader of an extreme hiking group. It felt a trespass—him coming here—because he’d always refused to visit my parents with me; even after Mother died, he’d refused to come. The…

I lived once in a burned-out Ford sedan.I knew only the make; its ornamentstood, bald and undaunted, on the hood,but its word, the block script of its model,had been pried off by the junkyard handsof a drunk vandal, or perhaps just lostto dirty weather and the rising hungerof a purifying flame. I knew thisas I myself had first been made and thenremade by the raw force of the elements,my name spoken and sung until it wasa claim broken and spun like the clear webof a spider hanging from the rearviewmirror of a burned-out Ford sedan.The doors were crippled in or soldered shut,but I could bend and lever my thin bonesover the windowless side panels.I slept in the back seat like a bad thought.Or tried, turned on my side and countingeach…

She’d been going by Julius since the previous October, when a man cornered her after AA to ask how she got a name like Juke. Before, she’d have explained that Juke was short for Jukebox, a nickname her daddy had given her, and when asked why Jukebox, she’d tell the usual lie—that it was because she was always singing as a little girl. Instead, she renamed herself on the spot. Actually, she said, I’d rather you called me Julius. It was interesting, lying less. Julius chalked up the change to a fight she’d had, a couple of weeks before the meeting, with a woman she’d been seeing, Ilyana. They’d broken up soon after—Julius had sent a text, Look, this isn’t working out and you deserve better—but that October they were…

John Wick is so tired, but he can still throw a hatchet and hit a guydead in the facehe can just split other people open with anything, with a pencilbecause he knows what it’s likebecause he’s tired and loves dogs and he’s cracked right open too andI want to tell you tolook at his feet when he runsthe way they turn so delicately inthe way they’re listing slightly, his black shoesthe heels of themtheir heartbreaking glissade hush-hushing across the hotel tilesjust look at the way he’s slippingeven before he soaks the floor with other people’s bloodI want to do push-ups like John Wick does in the morningso I won’t just be sad but sad and also ripped, likesad with muscles that stand out all obvious in desolate reliefsad where it…

I first encountered Rita Dove in Essence magazine, where I learned that she’d won the 1987 Pulitzer for her book Thomas and Beulah (1986)—the first Black poet to be so awarded since Gwendolyn Brooks nearly four decades before. As a Black high schooler in Kansas who wrote poetry, or tried to, I distinctly remember wondering why no one had come to my door to inform me personally of this achievement—though I suppose the magazine, which then published poetry in its pages, had in fact done as much. Thomas and Beulah was a revelation. Written in lines musical, freighted, and precise, Dove’s sequence of poems about her grandparents’ marriage is shadowed by the Great Migration, World War II, and the civil rights movement. That book’s grand theme—the intimacy of history—courses through…

The moon-made lake.The memory-made moodThat makes whatever it takesTo make a moon and lake and man who remembersTo compose a unity of selfFrom a fantasy of self. The hollow mulberry tree, which was not a tree,The sacred fig tree, and the spiky sugar palmAre not of Vietnam—but close enough. The man who most loved the moon, Li Po,Was not Rihaku, who was not Japanese.And Cathay was not China.And Vietnam was not ChinaNor made in China—but close enough. The Way is not Vietnamese (there are not 36 of them)—Nor is it the same moon—but close enough. Now the man is on fire.The lake is on fire.The palm at the lake and the bird in the palm are on fire.The moon.The memory is fire, and of fire.None of these things quite itself—but…

Olga Tokarczuk is young for a Nobel Prize winner. She received the award four years ago, at fifty-seven, for “a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Her painstakingly researched novels recover forgotten chapters of Eastern and Central Europe’s multilingual, multicultural history, drawing on Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Apocrypha, tarot, and pre-Christian paganism. Her insistence on tackling the long entwinement of Polish and Jewish cultures and the notion of gender as fluid—and as a social construct—has made her a controversial figure in her conservative home country of Poland. In 2019, the minister of culture, when asked for his thoughts on Tokarczuk’s work, said he’d never made it through any of her novels. Tokarczuk was born in Sulechów, in western Poland. When she was…

CONTRIBUTORS MICHAEL BAZZETT is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Echo Chamber. MALACHI BLACK is the author of Storm Toward Morning. ELAINE FEENEY’s next novel, How to Build a Boat, will be published by Biblioasis in fall 2023. MARTA FIGLEROWICZ is an associate professor of comparative literature and English at Yale University.  TRACY FUAD is the author of about:blank.  DOBBY GIBSON is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Little Glass Planet. ELISA GONZALEZ is the author of the poetry collection Grand Tour, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in fall 2023. LIDIJA HAAS is the deputy editor of The Paris Review. NAM LE’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem will be published by Knopf in spring 2024. JOYCE MANSOUR (1928–1986) was…

Mary Gaitskill lives in a white two-story brick house with dormer windows and a front door painted pale lilac, set back from a quiet avenue in a small town just across the bridge from Hudson, New York. It’s a place of refuge—as orderly and elegant as she is. An almost unnerving storybook beauty—long white-blond hair; large, clear eyes; high, fine brows and cheekbones; a dancer’s carriage—Gaitskill has the directness of an instinctive nonconformist, the learned reserve of someone naturally porous, and the seasoned grace and good humor necessary to a person on whom others routinely project all kinds of junk. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1954, she has lived all over the country and is the author of three novels—Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), the National Book Award finalist…

Life without God’s love is like a donut, ’cause there’s a hole in the middle of your heart! Maximilian and Emily insisted on listening to the Donut Man’s album Donut Hole 1 on repeat. Their parents didn’t object: accustomed to submission, Natalia suspected. Because right now she was just the babysitter, she focused on receding into the SUV’s capacious leather seat as the CD looped, looped, looped for the first four hours of the drive. If she angled her head to the right, she could watch the two hands—a right hand with knuckles that would not have been noticeably hairy had the skin not been so pale and the hair so dark; a left hand manicured so that little lines of white capped each nail—that adjusted the dials controlling air…

He was twenty-four when he first saw the psychologist, in his second year of medical school, in the midst of a darkness that had descended without warning and left him reeling and unmoored. It was the first time he had been to therapy: He could not conceive of how it would help him and had resisted the idea for months. Relief would come, he reasoned. It always had. But it didn’t come. And from beyond the devouring darkness came an awe at the velocity of his own unraveling, and the sense that when he looked inside himself, he found only a void. He had been given the psychologist’s name by his aunt, who had been to see him during her own crisis years before. The psychologist had a private practice…

Freezing rain had put the tram out of service when she went home that night. Had it been only the day before, feeling her shoes slip on the frozen pavement, her first thought would have been for Sharon. I hope she managed to get the tram in time, Maître Susane would have told herself, not liking to see her housekeeper ride off into the cold and the dark on her bicycle. But tonight she didn’t think of Sharon, absorbed as she was in recalling every detail of her new client’s visit, already feeling anxious on realizing that some of Gilles Principaux’s words hadn’t indelibly fixed themselves in her memory (had he said “my wife” or “my spouse,” had he used her first name or did Maître Susane only think she…