Indholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2024 (249) 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…

Topos When I was regionalthey let me have handsdelicately they let me out of the factory I was freeto draw lines with borrowed handsfailing to reproducethe one treegrowing sideways out of the one coffee shopsuch were the nutritional demandsof the national imaginationnobody noticed the detached roofsthe triangular eyes moving downtownaway from crime I had been decreasingfor a long timewithout media fanfarefrom the five skylights in heaven I heard a voice sayYou’ll never win the prize for architecturewith a mouth like yours The Answer Is Beef When I ride into town the song playsWhen I’m a child the sun blocks my shotThe sun gives me a hatThrough diligent footwork I will learnThe names of every county in AmericaI have to climb overThree hundred thirty-three point three million fencesWhen I’m a buckThe…

Ron Veasey was born in 1957 in Las Vegas, Nevada. He began drawing and painting in 1981, as an early participant in the studio program at Creative Growth, a nonprofit organization founded in 1974 in Oakland, California, that supports artists with developmental disabilities, providing mentorship, materials, and gallery space. Portraiture has been Veasey’s primary mode for the past four decades. The vibrant figures of his paintings draw upon images he selects, sometimes after hours or days of searching, from photography books, fashion magazines, or National Geographic. His slow, meticulous process continues with outlines in pencil and black marker. Veasey then selects his colors, typically deviating from the source photographs. A bright yellow often animates his figures’ teeth and eyes.…

At first, they talked only of Sanfilippo. “I said, you know, thank goodness it’s not autism,” Jenny said, so exuberantly that it took Marion a moment to register the joke. “We thought Danny might have autism,” Marion said. They sat in Jenny’s living room, an untouched fruit plate on the coffee table. “When you think about the chances,” Jenny said. Then they were both silent. “Tell me how you’ve been doing with all this,” Jenny said. “It depends on the day. And the hour.” This was the vague response Marion had learned to use. “I had an actual panic attack after we first found out. I really did. I was out in the parking lot, and I just couldn’t breathe. Justin took me to the emergency room,” Jenny said. “Can…

The building, a brick row house, was only a few blocks from the subway, and Amy got there first. A rose had been left on the stoop, laid vertically on the slanting top of one of the stubby walls that descended on either side of the steps. Against the soft old auburn sandstone, the velvet petals almost glared. Maybe the person who had bought the flower had reconsidered, Amy thought. Or maybe the person the flower was given to had. The woman from the university’s real estate office was wearing a tight skirt, which kept her steps shallow. “You said you don’t mind a first-floor unit?” she asked as she walked up. This was their third try. “It doesn’t face the street?” “It’s very quiet. It faces away.” Classes started…

On the fourth day, my housemate’s ex left radishes and kale on our stoop. They shouted up at our second-floor porch until my housemate came out. They told her she could have the garden plot they’d sown together. It’s too far from my place, they yelled. I can’t keep it up. Okay, she yelled. I’ll think about it, she yelled. After they left, we walked to the community garden. She showed me the chives and the calendula and the bolted kale. This all seemed to be tremendous good luck. The grocery stores were newly to be avoided. This was the time, if ever there was a time, to have a vegetable garden. They never had the stomach for salting slugs, she said as she plucked one from a strawberry plant.…

The Netherlands What I like about success, Monsieur Sauvage, is the love that goes into it—not so much the surprise or the wonder, and certainly not the admiration. So, being a curiosity was a very tough job for me. Yes, what a thankless job. I can show you the contracts from my European tour: each time, after the theater and music hall shows, I had to go and dance in the cabarets, doing my own special numbers and entertaining people like I did in my cabaret in Montmartre. It was written in the contracts: “Entertain people” … Tweaking the beards of good old gentlemen, flattering the fat ladies, making them dance in their fancy coats and stiff outfits—you know the sort of thing. People really need their fun these days.…

The co-op boardconducts its monthly meeting. Should they buy a golden luggage cartto help with heavy packages? No, no golden cart. It sendsthe wrong message. Can residents who paint or drawdisplay art in the lobby? No, their art might be ugly.And now comes Martin Adler to explain he shouldn’t payfor the garage, the regulations only mention rent from tenantswho use parking spots for cars. What he parks is a trike.He met his wife in the laundry room, used too much detergent, sudspuffed up from the machine beside hers. The new tenants resent the oldwho paid so little all their lives and now their only assets are apartmentsthey can’t afford to leave. It creates all sorts of problems says Dolores Reed.The doormen have to check on them and bring them medicine.Skinny…

Sissy Spacek Star JonesSun RaMan RayFreddie MercuryVenus WilliamsBruno MarsWarren MoonEartha KittChris RockLauryn HillRandy MossGünter GrassCarson DalyKeira KnightleySally FieldScott McCloudRobert FrostVanilla IceEdward SnowdenClaude RainsRainn WilsonRiver PhoenixOcean VuongIsla FisherRicki LakeChris PineHart CraneTaylor SwiftSheryl CrowAdam AntNewt GingrichRobin WilliamsJohn Cougar MellencampDick WolfSamantha BeeTony HawkJamie FoxxTiger WoodsWolf BlitzerMel BrooksSharon StoneJeremy IronsTracey GoldDustin DiamondJack RubyPhilip GlassEmily BluntShannon SharpeWilliam HurtAlexander PayneNeil YoungOlivia WildeSharon OldsJulia Child Business Plan Open a shopon the beach and name itthe phonetic translationin English of the sound waves makewhen they crash on the shoreso you get free advertisingall day and night until the end of time.…

HANNAH ARENDT (1906–1975) was a German-born political scientist and philosopher. What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt is forthcoming from Liveright this winter. AYÉ ATON (1940–2017) was a painter and musician. His work will be included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now this fall. JOSEPHINE BAKER (1906–1975) was a dancer, a singer, and a spy for the French Resistance. The first English-language edition of her memoir, Fearless and Free, is forthcoming from Tiny Reparations and Vintage Classics UK in winter 2025. ANDRÉS BARBA is a writer and translator. His most recent novel in English translation is A Luminous Republic. BRIAN BERGSTROM’s translations have appeared in Granta and The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. His book-length translations include Erika Kobayashi’s…

I first heard Rosmarie Waldrop read when I was seventeen, visiting my elder brother at Brown. She was reading from what would become Reluctant Gravities (1999), the third book in the trilogy of prose poems later collected as Curves to the Apple (2006). I was utterly transfixed and utterly baffled. The sentences had familiar shapes—many had the arc and feel of logical propositions—and yet something strange and unaccountably beautiful had happened to them. Their vocabularies had shifted, often toward a more lyrical register, producing new arrays of music and significance while also somehow heightening my experience of grammar itself. In the nearly three decades since that first encounter, I have come to see that Waldrop’s experiments with found grammar—with taking sentences from, say, Wittgenstein, and then retrofitting them with new…

Mad as only an angel can be Mad as only an angel can bethe angel’s lip curls like a dog’smad to make an angel curlof their angel lip, mad to dogmad to the third rail the angelrides beside on the stupid angeltrain, spreading their angel kneesso you can’t sit down. That angelis mad. The angel knocks at thedoor, wait, the angel rings thedoorbell with its angel knucklesactually the angel’s already insidewith the groceries, carried them inin one stupid angel trip nowthe chips busted by the angelthe grape juice spilled by the angelthe dog laps up the angel’sjuice and whimpers in the angel’slap, boy the angel’s mad thepossibilities for anger in the angelare a candelabra I angel lightthe candles point by point, angellight chips off the angel’s tooth, andrising tired, the…

pray for paris pray for somewhere else, I decided,since the city was takenbut in the phrase I found real devastationnot about citieswhere I’ve never beenor people – I meanabout excession itselfthe thing simeon turns from in the bookwhat berlin and marseille promisedmolly blues, fucking mimesisthe superheroic version of sufferingthe finest edge of club drug mystificationand not being run down by bigotsfrom middle school, if the mistof creative life is fine enoughand robust …excession cuz the brutal mix of neglect and disciplinethat threw me overhand into airlessness – etc.they didn’t have a cure for all my pain,said the reference track, butnow I’m saying itI’m saying what I’m living without judgmentI’m full of itrage, blotted out by the sun of mediareal devastationthat cities like this one live to rob sovereigntyspace, oxygen, dewtheir…

Javier Cercas rose to literary stardom in Spain with Soldiers of Salamis (2001, translation 2003), a novel about a forgotten incident in the Spanish Civil War. The book is narrated by a struggling novelist and cultural reporter also named Javier Cercas, a grandchild of the war who becomes obsessed with piecing together the story of how Rafael Sánchez Mazas, a Fascist poet and intellectual and one of the founders of the Falange Española, escaped certain death by firing squad and was then spared again by an unknown Republican militiaman. Mario Vargas Llosa praised the book as a return to a “committed literature,” a work that was no less “novelistic, fanciful, and creative” for being about real events; it was an immediate bestseller in Spain and, to date, has sold nearly…

Cover: © Sterling Ruby, photograph by Robert Wedemeyer, courtesy of Sterling Ruby Studio. Page 12, photograph by Jean Vong, courtesy of Simone Leigh and Burnet Editions; pages 36, 41, courtesy of Rosmarie Waldrop; page 44, photograph by Heinz Puppe, courtesy of Rosmarie Waldrop; page 47, photograph by Walt Odets, courtesy of Rosmarie Waldrop; pages 48, 53, 54, 57, 61, 63, 64, courtesy of Rosmarie Waldrop; page 67, photograph by Walt Odets, courtesy of Rosmarie Waldrop; pages 94–107, courtesy of Ron Veasey and Creative Growth Art Center; page 114, photograph by John Button; page 118, courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, UC San Diego Library; page 125, courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive and Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University; page 128, courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, UC San Diego Library;…