Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2023 (244) i The Paris Review

Sunday evening About the roof repair, I have nothing new to report. The tiles were supposed to arrive yesterday; they did not. I rang that young man at the store to give him a piece of my mind, but he’s always so nice that I forget I called to quarrel. He told me the news about his mother (new boyfriend). We chatted for fifteen minutes, and it wasn’t until I hung up the phone that I realized I’d once again neglected to give him an earful. Meanwhile, the roof is still in shambles. It continues to leak, and of course now the walls are following suit—they’re covered in great big stains. Once the roof is done, I’ll need to fix the walls. One thing at a time. I can’t complain,…

The first that Riley saw of the letter was a picture of it in an email from the post office, the morning of the day it arrived. Riley had signed up for the notification service a few years earlier, when packages were being stolen out of the lobby of the building where he and his husband lived. The thief was eventually caught, but Riley never unsubscribed. He found that he liked having a little foreshadowing of the day, at least in the case of something as innocent as the day’s mail. The picture appeared beneath the picture of a seed catalogue, also to be delivered that afternoon. (It was going to be spring soon.) The letter seemed to be in a no. 10 envelope, and the image made an impression…

The end of autumn lowers its leaves in the wealthy residential neighborhoods. Paintings in galleries and private foundations hold some short-lived way of seeing into misery or love. Those artists believed in power. I should, too. Strangers unman me in a rented studio. And each time, something empties out of me, disquieting, delicate. My heart is sulfur, my body pasty in daylight, the dead my only readers now. The bathroom: the tub, sink, and toilet are empty. We should lock ourselves in here for a whole weekend and not eat or drink. I’m not actually a trapped animal, I could leave, I don’t want to. Let’s play that game where I’m the dead bird from The Hours. A quail chick a hunter puts to sleep to train the dogs. The…

Sharon Olds published her first book, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven. The book is organized into four sections, “Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother,” and “Journey,” and it begins with its title poem, whose speaker is locked in a box she can open only by repeating after Satan: “Say shit, say death, say fuck the father.” At the time, Olds—who was born in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford, and received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia—was married to a psychiatrist, and she spent her days on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, caring for their two young children. Not long after the book’s publication, she told me last year, someone who had invited her to give a reading picked her up at the airport and said, “I thought you would look…

Tree, the sun’s brainchild. The caterpillars are crawling to heaven. The porcupine ate the delectable car tire. Wind bends the tree. I couldn’t do that. The black raspberry’s passion for a drop of sunlight. While I wrote, a butterfly, that critic, rode my wrist. Brown velvet gown trimmed in yellow with blue polka dots. A bird squeezed itself through the air. A bird swallowed space and then exhaled it. Rain. The saplings. It skins them alive. A shotgun echoes despairingly from the valley. Choral mushrooms. Queen Anne’s lace sweetens wild carrot breath. The earth’s rigid plates drift below the daisy. Backgammon on grass, losing every game to ants. The sun and clouds playing honeymoon bridge. Creams and lotion. Brushes to apply the lesson. Like the black lily that comes up…

At first it seems like nothing. Headaches. Slight loss of appetite. An overall weariness Emma tries to ignore as she goes to work, yoga, Whole Foods. She’s forty-two and has always taken good care of her body. She stretches daily. Avoids fried foods and sugar. Every morning, no matter the weather, she jogs on the bike path. The leaves are changing color and this year she’s really trying to appreciate them. She sees the yellows as godly, optimistic. The reds are blood, beauty, vanity, luxury. The purples are her favorite—a secret revelation. It’s like art-slash-therapy, she thinks, strolling across campus. College kids weave around her in tight jeans and sweatshirts. They look stressed, fiddling with their AirPods, vaping like it’s life support. But she envies them a little. It’s Friday.…

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 Arnold • Debbie & Mark Attanasio • Helen & William Beekman • Clara Bingham & Joseph Finnerty • Bloomberg Philanthropies • Noora Raj Brown & Ryan Brown • Giovanni Colavita • Bernard F. Conners • Boykin Curry • Gayatri Devi • Farrar, Straus & Giroux • Minnie Mortimer & Stephen Gaghan • Larry Gagosian • Mala Gaonkar • Toni K. & James C. Goodale • Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks, P.C. • Lucy & Lawrence H. Guffey • Gabriela & Austin Hearst • Margaret & Will Hearst • Alexander Hecker • The Drue &…

John Keene, an author of fiction, poetry, and criticism as well as a translator, once-prolific blogger, and skilled draftsman, was born in 1965. He grew up in St. Louis and then in Webster Groves, Missouri, a small suburb two miles out. His father was a postal worker and his mother was a medical technologist. They raised Keene and his brother, Jeffrey, in the Black Catholic tradition at a time when the agitational spirit of post–civil rights revolutions was still in the air. Throughout his life, and to varying degrees of proficiency, Keene has studied Latin, French, Sanskrit, ancient Greek, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, Arabic, Yoruba, and Esperanto. One gets the sense that he has learned languages not just for fun but to use them as tools for a communal…

1.Kings lie down to zip up their jeans,buy Cetaphil, candy, magazinesat Walgreens because they canwalk there unsupervised, describeblowjobs they’ve given to seniorsin cars, spend what they think of astheir own money. Home sick from school,they learn about G-strings from daytime TV.A Jerry Springer episode: “My DaughterDresses Like a Ho!” and a mom comes onwaving a finger at a whooping audiencethat quiets as she opens a variety-packBand-Aid box out of which she pulls herdaughter’s clothes. We named those thongs for this onebeautiful junior who, in the cafeteria,sat down within view. Why it waswe had to be in high schoolat the same time an extremely low-ridingjeans trend arose, we’ll never know. 2.Kristen went to Catholic schoolso everyone had already been kissed.As a girl, that’s how you made itto first base. You didn’t…

Essie T-e-e-e. Essie T. Where is that girl? Essie T., hurry up and come in here and fasten the back of this dress. Honestly, girl, are you always so slow? A big clumsy-looking girl pushed herself across the room. She walked as if she were afraid that putting one foot down on the floor too hard would make the boards crack. “I’m coming, ma’am.” “Well, hurry up, you move like dead leaves are falling off of you.” “Yes ma’am.” She reached down near the older woman’s belt and began pulling the zipper, watching the blue flowered cloth slowly come together and cover the whole of the woman’s back. She joined the top snap. “Well, don’t just stand there. Go, get my coat. And don’t forget chicken soup for Margaret and…

Flesh falls toward shiftless sleep It’s a faulty arrangement Most streams run concurrent Here here To a flaw In fact you may make it up A river branches And sea An example A mirror branches Off Open i A closed lid I could a being bee Eliding light Fog landing green A frame for feeling Readjustment to stream Constant and slight To bee blue-grey Green with grace I suppose The flight might fall To tide the stream’s address, to bring, to flex the weave, to long the frame and float, to rose, to bee, and having been, go, out, with sun, to song, wrung, out, to push, and land, coast, leave, after it’s gone It will continue to break, and soon, sing, elated by time, after the fact, and failure…

January Thought about how describing a dream immediately shows up its symbolic value—“I was ineptly taking part in a production of his and he did not give me any help …”—and realized (over again?) that that is what writing does: an incident, once it is described, has more than its own value, as the language refers symbolically to a great deal more. Plan: they talk about putting some old-growth forest in the back corner of the yard. “I did happen to notice the crescent moon and was charmed by it.” (father in letter) “(May we move to first names?)” (C.P. in letter) For lunch—a huge potato and a glass of milk. A hard piece of writing needs to be cushioned in among other pieces for me to work on it.…

MARGOT BERGMAN is a visual artist. In the mid-eighties, she began making paintings of cups on scrap paper, using each workday’s leftover paint. LEOPOLDINE CORE is the author of the poetry collection Veronica Bench and the story collection When Watched. CALEB CRAIN is the author of Necessary Errors and Overthrow. LYDIA DAVIS’s story collection Our Strangers will be published in fall 2023 by Bookshop Editions. RACHEL B. GLASER is the author of the story collection Pee On Water, the novel Paulina & Fran, and two books of poetry. EMILIE LOUISE GOSSIAUX received her B.F.A. from the Cooper Union and her M.F.A. in sculpture from Yale University. The cover art of issue no. 244, London with Ribbon, is a drawing of her guide dog, London. JAMESON GREEN is a visual artist. The…

I used to be a lockgold-looking I used to be a dogpart malamutepart pointerpart bluetick hound Never what will beas banjo in hand Carefully tryingto stay awake The townheld a quiveringvoice. Sitting in the suncitrus trees fulllemons, oranges andlimes. Theearth smells I desire. Garlanded,hardened,I memorizedmy whole life in orderto release it And then I was your father.Folded time, a wrinkle The conditionwas slippery The cane wasall of Manhattan Lack of sunlight Brazenly imagining the airfresh outside I used to be a tubetremendous in size I used to be your dinnergot fiendishly ate. A sauntering uniform remains Preserving the distancearound thingsdoesn’t constitutefreedom or travel An egg cracks openIts code slipsout I dip the pen inthe blue inkwell. Tryingto regain my optimism Drawing an imaginaryanimal, a field and thesky.…

She was a friend of my family—the Carlins, as I have chosen to call them. She and my father met in the fifties through the editor of the architecture magazine where she began her career. My father had taken her out a few times. They were never lovers, but there had been some tenderness between them: enough that, years later, when she took to phoning our house in the middle of the night, my father would drag himself out of bed, and I would hear the low monosyllables of someone listening to another’s woes, patiently if without great interest, until I fell back to sleep. My mother, absolutely unthreatened by this sallow, angular woman with her hornrimmed glasses and staring eyes, who by then looked unwell much of the time,…

If one misses the startingpointone startsanywhere: even ifone losesthe catis won. And no one waits. Not eventhe cat waits for the cat. The cat’s aloneand that allows itto invent itselfits passions. Its riskis to knowand beforehandthat no one will want itlike it would want.And this:“Cat even asleep,not so deep,”its sentence. Being slight,the cat is. One dreamswith catswhen oneis outside oneself. The catrarelyfits in the cat. It isauthorized for equilibriumand condemnedas suchto relative sites:it climbsbut does not rise, it descendsbut does not sink. The cat’s only placeis wherethe cat was. Accordingto my friend,in Romeit’s always the samecat.They’re renewedhoweverthe cats in Paris. And there’salways more than one that’s snappyand quite happyhere, see. The hereis the cat’s conflict.Wherever it looks fromit seesthat the world turnsand it gets dazed. Dazed cat,tired cat. It’s lost…

On Monday nights our mother made popcorn and served it to us in mugs with milk poured over. My younger sister and I carried our mugs into the family room and ate the popcorn with spoons, like cereal. We were five and seven. Until we were allowed to see movies in the theater, we thought this was the way everyone ate popcorn. Little House came on at eight. The plaintive thrill of those four opening notes! Loneliness, isolation, single wagon in relief against an empty sky. Then the orchestra broke in, Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie came tumbling down the grassy hillside, Pa and Ma smiling at them from their wagon seat. No one isolated, no one lonely. While we watched, Claire and I took turns rubbing our mother’s…

Whenever I went on too long about AntwerpThe doctor would quietly descend the two steps To the kitchen and pour a cold French whiteInto a tumbler, so as not to incriminate himself. There was a growing sense of foreign matterIn my body, a sense that the divisions between Old friends and this new emptiness …That the daughter had lied to me about Antwerp. In the disquiet after the director’s burialNo one built a wall, Just a subtle tuning up of the collectiveFeeling of justice when preying On the visibly foreign.It would be noticeably felt for a few years Until fading into a newer baseline noisePeculiar to the city Like the taste of its tap water in the bread.“It wasn’t blindness exactly,” the doctor said. “The Governor’s eyes. Just the inabilityTo…

Cover: Courtesy of Emilie Louise Gossiaux and Mother Gallery. Page 12, photograph by Jean Vong, courtesy of Shara Hughes and Burnet Editions; pages 32, 36, 39, courtesy of John Keene; pages 40, 46, © Patrick Sylvain; page 50, courtesy of Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.; page 55, courtesy of John Keene; page 58, photograph by Rachel Eliza Griffiths; pages 117–132, photographs by Adam Reich, courtesy of Jameson Green and Derek Eller Gallery; pages 142, 146, 151, courtesy of Sharon Olds; page 156, photograph by Barbara K. Bristol, courtesy of Sharon Olds; page 163, courtesy of Sharon Olds and the Community of Writers; page 166, photograph by Tracy Hall, courtesy of Sharon Olds and the Community of Writers; page 171, photograph by Nicholas A. Nichols, courtesy of Sharon Olds and the Community…