Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2024 (250) i The Paris Review

Translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss We have nothing to do with what’s happening. Under the heavy downpour the dirt can no longer evade its destiny of becoming mud. The surface of the soil shimmers as the rain kicks up brown droplets that are spit out in all directions each time the tires inch toward the side of the road, making way for other cars to pass. Some of these droplets splat on the windshield, flecking small ovoid splotches onto the glass that last only until the windshield wipers swish over and remove most of them. But the wipers aren’t able to erase the condensation left on the inside of the glass by the breath of two passengers, which has turned the besieged, muddy plots of land on either…

State of Georgia v. Jeffery Lamar Williams a.k.a. Young Thug et al. one of the Williams motionsin liminerecounts the hand-to-hand passof a percocet pillwhich brings to mindthe word for activities i doroughly groupedby the goalof my son’sthriving: caregiving.this misnamingcontributesto a disgusting fictionregarding the activity of motherswho live outside the couple form the white couple. the hand-to-hand passbetween the accusedand the agent of the policefriendassociatecodefendantWilliams cannot helpbut touchsince normally there would be such casualtouchingscrubbedof any trace of the improper—that isopen touchingbetween the accusedthat would not be ascribedto perverse forms of economic or sexual play they, theymimicthe handshakethat has no name while the palms touch and digits suggestively linkso movement of the hands of eachdoes occuralso the chest or trunk can be perceived to shakeor vibratebut this tremor is calibrated to the…

“This is my husband, Desmond,” Gemma tells the driving instructor. “He wants to sit in the back.” “Des!” Desmond jousts forward with his pale hand. The driving instructor—a man in his late seventies, of a chimney sweeper’s build that makes Gemma envious—accepts the hand as he might a cup of milky tea when he’d asked for it black, and waits for the situation to explain itself. It’s a Sunday, at 8 A.M., and the three of them are stood around a white line in the almost-empty Lidl car park in Newbridge beside the replacement vehicle. Before it was totaled, their car had been a baby blue second-generation Fiat Panda with an Italian registration and a bumper sticker of Michelangelo’s David gesturing “Ma che cazzo?!” When they repatriated to Ireland after…

He took two days off to go to Auschwitz. The problem was that he didn’t know what anything was called. Names and names and names—streets, neighborhoods, trains, all made of syllables that passed through him like elements of a dream. Directions were the death of understanding: links at this incoherent set of sounds, rechts at this one, and through all of it his mind whirring with impotence. Thankfully he had his friend with him, Adam, who knew German. Meanwhile A. was a baby, pointing and wishing for things, but a baby who never learned, never grew. They took a rideshare with a long-haired Polish man. Afterward A. would remember the rutted roads, the scarred tar across the border, how bumpy it was. His friend sat in the front and talked…

In March, Gibson flew to Chicago. His girlfriend was in a graduate program there studying literature, and one night the two of them went to dinner at her professor’s house. Gibson was a professor too. Most of his students were poor. So was Gibson. He suspected that he wouldn’t have liked teaching at the school his girlfriend attended, but he knew it wasn’t anything he would ever have to worry about. During dinner, the professor asked questions about Gibson’s school, saying that he imagined his experience was different from Gibson’s, because his students were privileged and Gibson’s were less so. For a few minutes, the conversation sputtered. The professor opened up another bottle of wine, and then he, his wife, and Gibson’s girlfriend—all poets—argued about poetry. Gibson didn’t drink. He…

Translated from the Bosnian by Ena Selimović OUR HOME HAD NO PAST Our home had no past. I recall no family get-togethers, no dinners, lunches, holidays, no walks on Trebević, no trips to Faletići to see my aunt Rabija—not a single moment when someone brought up the past, when anything was so much as mentioned about the past. In the home of Mehmed Sidran, the past didn’t exist. It was as though there was something in my father’s family history that called for shame, so dense were the sullen clouds of silence over everything. “Imagine, I went to school with nanule on my feet!” Dad would say on rare occasion, and only in those moments did the past, passing over his tongue, flick its own. I imagined him, his feet…

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 • Kyle Armbrester • Gale Arnold • Debbie & Mark Attanasio • Helen & William Beekman • Josh Black • Bloomberg Philanthropies • BNY Mellon • Noora Raj Brown & Ryan Brown • Caryn & Rodney Cohen • Matt Cohler • Giovanni Colavita • Creative Artists Agency • Boykin Curry • Gayatri Devi • Farrar, Straus and Giroux • The Fifth Avenue Hotel • Stephen Gaghan & Minnie Mortimer • Larry Gagosian • Mala Gaonkar • Toni K. & James C. Goodale • Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks, P.C. • Lucy & Lawrence H. Guffey •…

Translated from the Old Norse by Emily Osborne My tongue is slackwith sky-weight,too slow to movepoem-beams.It’s hard now,from mind’s haven,to drag the swagOdin swindled. My family standsat its end, stopsstorm-thrashedon a forest’s fringe.No man is hale whohefts his kinsman’s jointsoff his ground-sprawl,carries his corpse. First, still,father-deathI must speak ofand mother-loss.Lug praise-lumberout of word-templethen leaf itwith language. Brutal was that breachbroken openby the wave in myfather’s kin-wall.My son’s cleft goes ongaping, deserted.I see it—what the sea spawned. If I sewed up thatcrime with my sword,wasted I’d leave thewave-smith forever.I’d brawl withthe wind’s brother.I’d scuffle withthe sea-god’s girl. The sea has robbedme richly.It stings to speakof my kinsmen’s death,since the shieldof my family slippedaway from life,left the mind’s paths. In my son swelledthe promise ofa mighty thane.I know this in myself.If only…

A college friend of my father’s picked me up at the airport. It was my first time ever riding in a convertible and although Anne—that was her name—kept the top up, it still felt like an important milestone for me. I’d never met Anne before but I knew she was a lesbian. I knew Anne and her ex-wife, now estranged, had been among the first gay couples in the U.S. ever allowed to have their own baby, using fertility. Also, I knew Anne to be extremely affluent. In transit all these facts became somehow conflated, so by the time we finally reached the Castro, I genuinely believed Anne had gotten rich off being gay alone. This seemed possible. Hers was the same house she’d rented when she arrived in the…

A toenail clipping floating in a toilet bowllike a crescent moon reflected in water, beauty is quiet and self-conscious. A character in a novelsits on the toilet. Sometimes for forever. Speaking of which,where does the shit of a billion people go? Back into the countryside. In my country, where a man wheelsa cart of mud, and with his gray felt cap bends downto examine the small acorns. I squatted over a toiletuntil I shit a cloud out into a pure blue sky. One day, I hope it provides a little boyshade as he eatswild apples with his dog. A place to read. After all, the field where my father went at nightis now a university. And a toilet is a peaceful place to think of home to be alone with…

The Car I practiced driving stick on Ronnie’s car.Ronnie owned a shopand had a beater he loaned out.His wife could take it outwhen she was drinking. Or was itwhen she wasn’t. No— The first time we made a planfor me to drive the car,she’d driven it the night before, but drank too muchand left it at her friend’s,responsibly— There was no rule between them. I could drive, had driven stick in high school.I was practicingso I could drive in Italy. I could drive—it’s just that Chris was betterand he liked it more, so it was oftenChris who drove,but Chris wouldn’t be with mein Italy. Chris was better, I believed, than anyone,but couldn’t be with me,eventually. I want to takeresponsibility, to say I made it hard—I only made it hard for…

SETH BECKER is a visual artist. DAN BEVACQUA is the author of the novel Molly Bit. SARGON BOULUS (1944–2007) was an Assyrian Iraqi poet and a translator of world poetry into Arabic. His collections include Arrival in Where-City. MILES CAYMAN is a poet and a translator of Arabic. ANN CRAVEN is a visual artist. ALA EBTEKAR is a visual artist. EGILL SKALLAGRÍMSSON (ca. 910–990) was an Icelandic poet, farmer, warrior, and outlaw. His extant oeuvre includes verses about sailing, rune-writing, courtship, rivalry, sorcery, personal quarrels, and grief. CAOILINN HUGHES’s most recent novel is The Alternatives. She was recently a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. SILAS JONES is a writer with stories in The Drift, Joyland, and elsewhere. LOUIS KLEE is an Australian writer and philosopher. He…

The critic Fredric Jameson died at the age of ninety on September 22, 2024, a little more than a year after the first of the three conversations that form the basis of the text below. In spite of Jameson’s years, the news came as something of a shock, given the productivity he kept up into his tenth decade. This past March saw the publication of Mimesis, Expression, Construction, an edited transcript of a semester-long seminar on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory that Jameson gave at Duke, where for nearly forty years he taught classes on literature, Continental thought, and film. In May came Inventions of a Present, a collection of essays on the contemporary novel, from Norman Mailer in the sixties to Olga Tokarczuk just the other day. And in October, not…

Josh Smith was born in 1976 in Okinawa, Japan, where his father served in the U.S. military, and grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. His first major gallery shows, in the early aughts, featured abstract paintings that largely incorporated what he has called his “exaggerated American name.” His works often build upon his previous projects, sometimes literally: new paintings rendered directly on top of the old. In Dinosaurs, a series of digital artworks made for the Review, he collages intensely saturated lithographs and monotypes with photographs of small-scale resin sculptures—palm trees, felines, and extinct reptiles made of seashells, pine cones, toothpicks, wire, and wood. —AG…

Hanif Kureishi was born in 1954 and grew up in Bromley, in London’s commuter belt, spending his early years above the grocery shop run by his maternal grandparents. His parents, Audrey Buss and Rafiushan Kureishi, had something of an unusual relationship in postwar Britain, as a white working-class Englishwoman and an Indian civil servant at London’s Pakistani embassy. Kureishi started writing as a teenager and by his twenties had come to the notice of the Royal Court Theatre, which staged several of his plays, works that dealt with the British Asian experience, a subject barely represented at the time. In 1987, his debut screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), was nominated for an Academy Award and became one of the most celebrated British films of the decade; the story of a…

Translated from the Arabic by Miles Cayman I arrive in my country after crossinga river astrologers immerse themselves inwith their rusty instrumentssearching for the starsor I don’t arrive in my countryafter crossing a river no one sinks inthere are journeys I return fromthin as a needle’s shadowI meet the morning face-to-faceas if I’d left a tunnel behind a moment agosteam rises under my handfrom a lovely coffee cupcracked like the wall of an orphanageI meet a farmer who lost his mind in the faminesbegging in the big city eveningsand a woman walking by the light of her white hairthrough ruins I free my eyes and journey onlet obscure openings take melike a father who knows better than I my aimsthey hold out their terrible gifts to mewith sweaty attentive handslike…

Gerald Murnane lives in Goroke, a town of three hundred people in Australia’s West Wimmera plains. A five-hour drive from Melbourne, the West Wimmera is a sequestered, rural world, but it’s not really the outback. The bushland here has been cleared for wheat cultivation, and venerable gum trees stand alone in the grasslands, as if positioned to emphasize the landscape’s flatness and expanse. It’s a place that has striking affinities with Murnane’s fiction: his narrators always seem to be looking out on “an image-landscape comprising mostly level grassy countryside” with “scattered image-trees.” For a time, it seemed that Murnane’s career had begun late and ended early. His first novel, Tamarisk Row, was published in 1974, when he was thirty-five years old. Written in long, precise, and often extravagantly intricate sentences,…

Cover: Photograph by Zachary Fischman, courtesy of Seth Becker and Venus Over Manhattan, New York. Page 12, courtesy of Ala Ebtekar and the Third Line; page 30, courtesy of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley; page 34, courtesy of Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections; page 37, courtesy of Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San Diego; page 40, courtesy of Julie Diamond and SAADA; page 43, courtesy of Special Collections & Archives, University of California, Santa Cruz; page 46, courtesy of Duke University; page 50, courtesy of Nicholas Mercer; page 54, courtesy of Phillip Wegner; pages 78–84, photographs by Farzad Owrang, courtesy of Josh Smith; page 104, courtesy of the British Library; pages 109, 112, 115, courtesy of Hanif Kureishi; page 118, courtesy of…