Indholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2023 (245) 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…

Lynn Nottage is one of the most successful playwrights in American theater. She is the only woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice—in 2009, for Ruined (2008), a portrait of a group of women living through civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in 2017, for Sweat (2015), about the aftermath of a steel-mill closure in Reading, Pennsylvania—and is among the most-produced dramatists in the country. Last year, her fans celebrated a “Nottage trifecta”: for four days in January, three of the playwright’s works were staged concurrently in New York City. The opera Intimate Apparel (2020), adapted from her 2003 play of the same name about a Black seamstress in turn-of-the-century Manhattan, was at the Lincoln Center Theater; her feel-good comedy Clyde’s (2019, originally…

In October, transmissions paused temporarily in certain regions ofthe planet. No marks made it to the page then, hence the retroactive declaratives. If you looked up at the yellow dwarf star at the right time in the right place, you’d see the culprits, sunspots, sitting there available to the naked eye and readily confused with muscae volitantes, a.k.a. floaters, where loops of magnetic field in the sun’s photosphere find their footpoints and launch themselves out to its atmosphere—its corona—tracing arcs of light so beauteous their optimization as screen savers is likely a fait accompli. Set them to Vangelis and they make for even better ambience. The sun’s on its twenty-fifth eleven-year cycle, manifesting as alternating bouts of languor and hyperactivity visible in the number of blemishes. News has it that…

When Nick didn’t arrive at the café on time, I was relieved. I thought he’d gotten cold feet. The waitress came to take my plate. “Was there something wrong with it?” she asked, smiling. I assured her the problem was me. Then my phone dinged. “I’m in the waiting room,” read Nick’s text. When I replied, he apologized elaborately; he’d forgotten where we’d said we’d meet. “It’s fine,” I wrote, “I’m leaving now.” “Stay there,” he commanded. “Two minutes.” When he arrived, the first thing I noticed was his hair. No more floppy, boyish bangs, just a film of dark fuzz. He was tall and tan, sunken-cheeked, with dark-rimmed glasses. If anything, a shaved head made him handsomer. A day earlier, he’d turned thirty-four. I remembered turning thirty-four. It was…

1. it’s not a rambling speech mine’s mutepelted by tip-offs and low-life thieveswhile you go on singing of blueberries and myrtle rambling speech to rambling speechthis year ranting is better than fuckingespecially holding on to the end of a noose soakedin orange blossom water 2. if you say twill twill it will bethe best word is the one saidto avoid acting like a cowthat has a big tongue and doesn’t talk 3. and if you don’t want to sing (you have all the reason not to)count the seven ears and the three lambsthe cabbages and the joyful mysteries I dreamed it was the other dream 4. a fly can’t enter a closed mouthgnats aren’t excited where there isn’t wine 5. rhymes and rhythms changeinflections and expirations poems and structuresbut the…

Robert Glück’s best-known work, Margery Kempe (1994), is an entirely original novel that juxtaposes apparently autobiographical episodes from the life of “Bob,” a man who has an all-consuming passion for his younger lover, L., with the travails of the titular mystic as she pursues a very hot, very psychedelic, and not particularly saintly romance with the only son of God. The book’s republication in 2020, by NYRB Classics, confirms the old chestnut that great writing will find its readers. Glück was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1947. When he was ten or eleven, his father, a traveling salesman, moved the family to Los Angeles. In 1964, Glück began college at UCLA, and during a junior year abroad in Edinburgh, he explored his interests in medieval and Renaissance painting and discovered…

JOEUN KIM AATCHIM received her B.F.A. in studio art from New York University and her M.F.A. in visual arts from Columbia University. CHRISTINA ANDERSON is a playwright and the winner of the 2022 Horton Foote Prize for Excellence in American Theatre. BEI DAO is a poet, essayist, painter, and photographer. Sidetracks will be published by New Directions in spring 2024. ROSALIND BROWN’s debut novel, Practice, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in spring 2024. MÓNICA DE LA TORRE’s most recent book of poems is Repetition Nineteen. She coedited Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959–1979 with Alex Balgiu and teaches at Brooklyn College. ALENA GRAEDON is the author of The Word Exchange. She is at work on a story collection. MUNIR HACHEMI is a translator, novelist, and poet. Living Things will…

There were less intimate places available, so it was odd when a woman took the seat directly facing mine across the subway aisle. I looked up from my book and right back down: a couple of months before, we’d gone home together. She had a Southern accent and a boy’s name she swore was given. Bobby. Probably spelled Bobbie or Bobbi but she didn’t say “Bobbi with an i,” which I thought cool of her. Good sex, great chemistry, and I promised but then failed to text; encountering her on the subway might have been awkward even if I weren’t reading What Were You Expecting?: A New Manual for New Parents by Drs. Laurie and Lawrence Shriver. No point hiding the cover now. Bobbi had seen it before she sat…

She shakes out the blanket, wraps it around her middle, and sits down. The room is cold and dim and full of quiet. She takes the top book from the stack, and her marker out of the book: Sonnet 49. Against that time (if ever that time come). Against that time do I insconce me here. That time being, for her, tomorrow afternoon when the essay is due. For basic sense you can read each of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in a minute or two. For a little more chewiness and analysis, five or six minutes. The trouble is keeping them apart. Each one seems to annul the previous one: no longer that, but this. They dissolve into a mass of little qualifications and turns and particularities and withholdings and accusations and…

The car was parked on the street where three out of the four of us lived. The trunk was open, and we were loading in our luggage while waiting for G. His being late surprised us less than the amount of stuff he had with him. He’d brought a flamenco guitar, a backpack full of books, and a bunch of random equipment that, if I’m remembering correctly, he’d found on his grandfather’s farm. We all laughed at the beekeeping gloves, the coveralls, the ridiculously high boots. That day, everything made us laugh. For example, we cracked up when we noticed we’d each packed at least one instrument. Keep in mind that Ernesto was a pretty serious guy, Alejandro wished he was, and G.—probably the smartest of us four—lived and breathed…

Peaches bought on Sunday won’t lasta week; Wednesday & I find one; beside the vase of flowers; so soft; my fingersinterrupt it; like a stream; to think this is all I wanted; the plastic bag;the peaches inside; getting moldy; sweetly going with death; away fromme; plastic bag extending into infinity; the pit of peach now in my hand;sterile; like nearly all produce now; once I buried a pit in the earth; &nothing happened; the pit is poisonous in my mouth; like other thingsburied inside me; & nothing happens;…

“They didn’t even choose an interesting battle to commemorate,” Víctor said. “My God, who cares about sinking some British merchant ships—it’s not like it helped them win the war.” He’d removed the lid from the jar of candies we offer to children who come into the shop, and he was sucking on one furiously while the TV in the corner played a segment from an Italian broadcast network about a demonstration in Rome that morning. It was August, and aside from the influx of tourists glutting the alleyways of the Gothic Quarter, nothing was happening in Barcelona. Even our newscasters appeared to be on vacation. “Listen,” he continued. “If they wanted to go out there and celebrate Mussolini’s birthday in the street, they could have it. That way we could…

I sit on a chair and the chair touches me back.According to my chair, I have two hipsand bones inside them hard as peach pits. The femurs connected to the pelvislead to the kneecaps. I have kneecaps.In the ancient past of my village, people used them as drinking cups: a boy sipping sakefrom the kneecap of grandfather,whose kneecap is bigger than grandmother’s. She helps her son detach the kneecap from the legand wash it in the stream. White of the kneecap,she thinks, is trembling like a moon. Funny it smells sweeter than the knee of the manshe remembers. When he was alive,he wasn’t much of a man—thin, boneless, his shoulder soft as a berry-bearing ivy.Funny he seems more alive now,this trembling bone under the cold water.…

Cover: Courtesy of Joeun Kim Aatchim and François Ghebaly Gallery; photograph by Dario Lasagni. Page 12, courtesy of Sam McKinniss and Publicide Inc.; page 40, courtesy of Lynn Nottage and Granary Books; page 44, courtesy of Lynn Nottage; pages 47, 52, courtesy of Lynn Nottage and Granary Books; page 57, courtesy of Lynn Nottage; page 60, photographs by Tony Gerber, courtesy of Lynn Nottage and Granary Books; page 64, photograph by David Shankbone, public domain, licensed under CC0 1.0; page 67, courtesy of Lynn Nottage and Granary Books; page 98, photograph by Marten Elder, courtesy of Magdalena Suarez Frimkess and kaufmann repetto milano/new york; pages 99–112, photographs by Greg Carideo, courtesy of kaufmann repetto milano/new york; pages 170–172, photographs by Eric Nathaniel Mack, © Eric Nathaniel Mack and courtesy of…

I was born to be gigantic, said the violet flower that derailed me. this is a rumor, so there aren’t any rules to go with it. I built its shape of pegs, won’t take that lying down, my name is zero, my name is nonce, my name is nobody, who the hell are you. yesterday I tried to buy a joke. I brought it to my home, took it inside slowly like how you come out of a bath. there was nothing new to say about it. to make the violet speak to you, just go crazy, said my second-grade art teacher handing me construction paper, glue. just go crazy, I say now to the flower, engulfed as I was by her lesson. her lesson to say more plainly the…

Magdalena Suarez Frimkess was born in 1929 in Caracas, Venezuela. Her earliest works, made in the orphanage where she spent much of her childhood, were paintings on altar cloths of Bible scenes and flowers. As a teenager, she studied landscape painting, and in the fifties, she began taking courses in sculpture at the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago, Chile. In 1963, she was awarded a fellowship at the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, New York, where she met the ceramist Michael Frimkess, who became her longtime partner and collaborator. Their joint creations—Grecian vessels thrown by Michael and glazed with vibrant Aztec imagery and cartoon figures by Magdalena—have been shown widely. Since 2013, Suarez Frimkess has garnered attention for her distinctive handmade works, which draw from ancient myth, classical Japanese…

1. Gone is the sea the seafoam returnsGone is the river of springtime the empty riverbed returnsGone is the clear sky the whistling arrow returnsGone is the seed the running tally returnsGone is the tree the firewood returnsGone is the great fire the hoarfrost returnsGone is the old legend the rumors returnGone is the bird the lines of the poem returnGone is the feast of stars the tyranny of night returnsGone is the common folk the emperor returnsGone is the dream the song returnsGone is the song the road returnsGone is the road the foreign land returnsGone gone is the endless questioningand what returns has no sound I am an old fisherman who has come from the other shoredrawing in the story of the storm with a net of silenceI…

Eric Nathaniel Mack was born in Columbia, Maryland, in 1987. As a child, he often visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where his father was a plexiglass specialist and his mother an archivist. In his teenage years, he worked at his father’s brick-and-mortar-turned-mobile pop-up shop, Mack’s Discount Clothing, where he discovered an interest in fashion and textiles. His earliest works of sculpture and collage incorporated J.Crew catalogs, threadbare hoodies, and sketchbook paper dyed with soy sauce. Mack’s mixed-media installations have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The “sketches” in this portfolio include drawings and photographs of mock-ups and details from his finished larger compositions. Others capture works in progress or everyday encounters with what he calls outside affirmations—a…

all those Stingers Jaguars Tiguans Fiat 500sand San Remo Green Beemer i4s I love allthose model numbers numb-sexy like cashmerethrown over a dinosaur skeleton like a robot’skiss I fell asleep watching an Audi documentaryand dreamt of a low low R8 scorning the Viadel Corso like a bronze falcon but I love the preytoo the hatchbacks perched high on their hauncheslike cats with circular nervous energy I want to wrapmy face tight with a silk scarf and spiral down a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeothe color of my innerlip I want to slip deep as a splinterin a black Countach but that’s for when I graduate from Honda Girl don’t get me wrong though—I lovehauling my Ridgeline through the car wash lather-discolike a shy waltz partner while I blast…

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