Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2023 (246) i The Paris Review

On a cold but sunny Thursday in March 2014, I set out from my girlfriend Rosie’s apartment in West Philly to walk across the country. I’d been going to school nearby at Swarthmore, but for reasons that aren’t worth belaboring, left in December 2013, the winter I would have graduated. I walked for ninety-six days, until I reached La Junta, Colorado, where Rosie picked me up three days before the summer solstice. While I walked, I kept a journal, dictating into a voice recorder, writing in a notebook, or typing on my laptop whenever I could stop to plug it in. Every spring since, I’ve gone over the written entries and the transcribed audio, expanding and trimming, sharpening anecdotes until they’ve taken on, for me, a heightened significance. The selections…

Dream old pay phone ringing in hospital I pick upreceiver voicesays“Theanswerisawe.”Still don’t know what to do with it last September rightbefore I was diagnosed and the dream is still irritatingI have a checkup Friday I’m working on The Old Languageagain. Does do if it is there nothing or any thingTake the laundry out of the machine—that proves zilch.If the answer were awe, I would be burdened with awe Infinity as a condition can’t be some feelingThe Old Language is written all over and in me, but I’m not it—it’s possible I do it—She brought her friends home with herthis morning at 6 A.M. hate her guts as we used to sayJumble I it the machine and question all but the canceris so available like so much isn’t—good air and tranquility,space…

The bird was blue and grayLying on the stairsThere was somethingMoving inside of itAnd still I knew it was deadI promised my motherI wouldn’t touch anythingThat had been long goneInside something turned and wiggledThere’s a kind of transformationThat can happen on any dayYou’d rather cut your head offBefore you see itYou’d rather ignoreThe holy body writhingKnowing that inside of itIt’s calling out your name“Mother”“Mother”It’s calling out to you“Mother!”You will save itJust like the others…

I accept the terms and conditions of our relationship as indicated by my continued use of this interface, designed with the indulgent architecture of a desert casino no one ever wants to leave, least of all the luckless gambler digging deeper to find Tut’s treasure. Scrolling down the text to reach the required checkbox, I affirm my devotion to your ingenious application, allowing you to track my whereabouts across all devices. You keep tabs as I access the entertaining user experience, losing myself in a perilous journey through the underworld before emerging forth into daylight. Our relationship is durable as Egypt’s ancient wonder, based on our mutual obligation to honor the language of this contractual agreement translated from the original papyrus scrolls. I consent to stipulations set forth in those…

In early March of 2021, Louise Glück visited Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, where I teach. Because of COVID, she was afraid to fly on a small plane to our regional airport, so I drove her myself from Berkeley, where, for some years, she rented a house during the winters. She packed pumpernickel bagels, apples, and cheese for our six-hour road trip, and she brought CDs of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and the songs of Jacques Brel, a Belgian master of the modern chanson. Long ago Glück and her former husband had listened to operas on road trips, but this was her first car trip in many years. She knew the musical works backward and forward, pointing out Maria Callas’s vocal strengths and clapping…

Mark My first job was at a frozen yogurt shop called TCBY. This was 1987, in Tucson. The shop was on Speedway Boulevard, in a strip mall between two car washes—the first TCBY franchise in the city, though within a year there would be two more, plus a Greg’s FroYo and a Yogurt King. In employee training we learned that TCBY used to stand for This Can’t Be Yogurt, until I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt sued. TCBY kept the acronym, claiming it now stood for The Country’s Best Yogurt, and carried on. My uniform was a beige apron tied over a green polo shirt tucked into a khaki skirt, and a green visor onto which I pinned my name tag like the bulb on a headlamp. After work, I hung…

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 • Kristen & Peter Becker • Helen & William Beekman • Kathleen Begala & Yves Istel • Clara Bingham & Joseph Finnerty • Bloomberg Philanthropies • Noora Raj Brown & Ryan Brown • Caryn & Rodney Cohen • 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 •…

The Concept of Immediacy I fell asleep with an idea, but when I woke up, I’d lost it,as when, approaching the rabbit on the trail,it took off into the brush.I followed, clearing the warblers,fixing their gaze.Ruining something felt like a reason to proceed.Looking out at the view—dense swaths of pine, the bay, all three bridgeshalf-submerged—I waited for a sign to go back, the mind saying enoughor what next or there’s nothing here.The rabbit had camouflaged itself with the undergrowth.I wondered if I figured in its sensory system.Two women came around the bend,one finishing a sentence: “… like, what I need.”I had been hearing that a lot lately.It wasn’t what I was thinking,but related, something about immediacy,how to experience it.In the moment of apprehension? Just before?Or in the lack thereof?I had…

Yu Hua was born in 1960. He grew up in Haiyan County in the Zhejiang province of eastern China, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. His parents were both in the medical profession—his father a surgeon, his mother a nurse—and Yu would often sneak into the hospital where they worked, sometimes napping on the nearby morgue’s cool concrete slabs on hot summer days. As a young man, he worked as a dentist for several years and began writing short fiction that drew upon his early exposure to sickness and violence. His landmark stories of the eighties, including “On the Road at Eighteen,” established him, alongside Mo Yan, Su Tong, Ge Fei, Ma Yuan, and Can Xue, as one of the leading voices of China’s avant-garde literary movement. In the…

Water becomes water’s shape in the water, inside the machine we becomethe image of the machine, the dusk becomes the machine’s dusk,in piercing we are pierced by the machine, we must usea defective good to prove we are defective goods, use movement to completethe machine’s deficient movement, use the reality of words and screwsto realize our own reality, become phantoms of order forms or profitto transcend defective goods, and the summer rolls up its black tongue: from inside the machinepeel away the machine as it revolves, from the assembly line separate outthe finger as it returns to my body, from the midst of pain returnto the womb as it gives birth, from dreaming return to the dream, the machine lives inthe sight of iron nails, as we face ourselves in…

I met Jill in 1982. We were working the Sydney-to-LA route, and she looked exactly the way an air hostess was supposed to: like Marilyn Monroe on stilts, playing the part of a firm, friendly nurse with a naughty inner life. None of the passengers would have guessed she spent every flight half-fucked on champagne and orange juice, which she would down in the galley from takeoff to landing. By the time I rented a room from her—1986, in a remote beach town on the north coast of Western Australia—she had retired. Her hair was short and brown, she never wore makeup or shaved her armpits, and she looked better than ever. But she was nearing forty, and our airline encouraged its hostesses to make a graceful exit by the…

Even inside the plane the cold had registered, along with a deadening of all sound. But the glacial silence that awaits him outside is something else entirely. No attempt to imagine it could have prepared him. It occurs to him that he’s done well to have been born without imagination. (That’s the last modicum of irony he will indulge in before coming to know the cold.) Every centimeter of his skin revolts. Each part of him tries to pull back. He’s emerged from the twin-engine plane into a world so hostile as to feel unearthly. Nothing he’s previously known comes close to this sensation of every shred of heat being stolen out of these pores now pierced by burning needles of cold. His breath freezes as he tries to exhale.…

ANGELA BALL’s most recent book of poetry is Talking Pillow. MICHAEL BERRY is a writer and translator. He is the director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. AIMEE CHOR is a poet and translator. SARAH CHARLESWORTH (1947–2013) was a visual artist. HENRI COLE’s most recent book is Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994–2022. SEAN THOR CONROE is the author of Fuccboi. ANANDA DEVI’s books include Eve Out of Her Ruins, Indian Tango, and The Living Days. She is the winner of the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 2023 Prix de la langue française. MADELINE FFITCH is the author of the novel Stay and Fight and the story collection Valparaiso, Round the Horn. MARCIUS GALAN is a visual artist who works…

At the stop sign before the library, Emma saw Gallo painting his yellow line as he had painted it for thirty years. The line highlighted a ten-foot-long crack in the road, a rogue speed bump that, unpainted, might do some damage to your car or your neck or your teeth or your coffee. The crack had been there as long as Emma could remember. Gallo had too. Emma had watched Gallo from a young man to an old man painting his yellow line. She had watched him reletter his sign when it became tattered: DONATE TO UPKEEP THIS OUR ROAD. Gallo had a son Emma’s age, and Emma had watched Gallo teach him to paint the yellow line, to fly the sign, to approach each car’s window with his cashbox.…

Both the actual horse on fire and its event out of these words Folded back through loveTrying not to be with but of Creased into petals around the trace of that touch A crease in the outside’s infinite regress So when I’m dying Actual dying will be a fold about a flower fallen? I know everyone wanted Their stupid church high on a hill, but my favorite things— Happy things I thought drifting down into sleep and all the faces That afflict—laid low, I could be the paper They ravish or remember and the end of their script…

I It takes Kant a year to write the one-paragraph mass email, another three weeks to compile the Coming Out mailing list of friends, family, and colleagues, and three bourbons to actually send it. For his entire life he has so grotesquely imagined the consequences of public exposure that he’s only recently, at thirty-one, stopped hedging to himself that he is bi or “flexible.” He pictures his mother saying she never wants to speak to him again; he imagines dying alone in an unheated tenement, though he knows this is unlikely to happen to a video-game asset designer with two degrees. Part of him had believed that as long as his proclivities resided only in his head, and sometimes on his computer, they didn’t “count.” Now everyone will know; his…

Not mine but I’ll take some—not too much, just part. Not the best part—it could be best, though, no wayof knowing, I’ll take just the blue part,the part that includesa cantilever bridge, or maybe the brown part that includesa horse’s halter, I’ll take the part that is cream and gray, like the mushroomin my path, maybe the roughed-up part, teeth marks on it,dragged from a dank cellar,the part that has deliquesced, the part just paintedto resemble a mouse, the part vaccinatedby flood, the part that has rubbedagainst roses. The part with dropsy. The part that flusters some, that flusters no one.The part that brandishes endorphins, the part that returned to life, sorelyinconveniencing the staff, the part that knows whereof it speaks, the part that waits longestwith no coffee, no chips,…

feathers and planets sugar, folded into cream, a greetingin the ashtray, on the kitchen tablethe shopping bag, sticky coins where are the tennis balls hidingbehind a pile of shirts, napkinrings, the pelt of a fox, the batteries empty under the bed, the combthe briefs in the sleeve of a winter coatdry air melts away, a glacier between the wardrobe and laundry racksomeone is ironing feathers and planetsmorning at the latch, it begins. black laundry and then the pieces of laundry, alwaysblack and always laundry, andhedge and a view full of hedge, and also the path that ran along the hedge wasa black piece of laundry, a viewa piece of laundry that got so heavy and black in the rain andcould breathe again when the wind picked upand sunlight rose from…

Cover: © the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth, courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Page 12, photograph by Jean Vong, courtesy of John Currin and Burnet Editions; pages 62, 66, 69, 70, 73, 76, 79, 82, 86, 91, 92, courtesy of Yu Hua; pages 122–128, photographs by Edouard Fraipont, courtesy of Marcius Galan and Galeria Luisa Strina; pages 144, 148, 153, courtesy of the Louise Glück Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; page 156, courtesy of the estate of Louise Glück and Poetry magazine; page 159, courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; page 162, photograph by Lois Shelton, © Arizona Board of Regents, courtesy of the University of Arizona Poetry Center; page 164, courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript…