Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2025 (251) 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…

Lady Shalamar Montague, born Frances Montague in 1905, began making art in her seventies at Surf Manor, a group living facility for seniors in Coney Island, as part of New York’s Healing Arts Initiative. The illustrations collected here—made between 1986 and 1987, using ballpoint pens, watercolor paints, and glitter—depict some of the unverifiable experiences that Montague later catalogued in a handwritten autobiography, which recounts an adventurous life as a world-touring belly dancer, animal tamer, and cabaret singer. Her self-portraits take us to the Imperial Russian Ballet in Saint Petersburg; to Berlin with the Barnum and Bailey Circus; and to Paris, where, she claimed, she was born in her mother’s opera-theater dressing room.…

I was the poolboy but it was billiardsI got up on the table with a feather dusterand did a little dance like the honeybeeto get the green felt felt green againI felt it in my stinger. I felt it in my pocketsthe god of light shined his light on meand all around. and later it was his scopebecause also the god of medicine alsothe god who killed every boy he lovedwhich may have only been one. one good one.then I appeared in ads for pools or adsfor poolboys. I appeared in a theaternear you like The Hustler, a movie abouta fast boy who plays pool. Paul Newmanplayed Fast Eddie Felson and appearedin a theater near me and also wetdaydreams. I used to splash myselfwith his dressing. undressing on the billiardtable…

Verba The bimonthly meeting was scheduled for three o’clock. The attendees included: my colleagues, depressed after a long day of work; two mothers, eager to represent fifty parents who couldn’t care less about being represented; and two precocious students—Stefano D’Ovidio and Liliana Meneghini—who were easily corrupted by the discovery that, as class representatives, they could say things they never could otherwise. When I walked into the room, everyone was staring at a caricature that someone had drawn on the chalkboard: me as a bumbling giant with a hunchback and the neck of a giraffe, embracing a voluptuous student and planting a kiss on her cheek. Below the girl they’d written “Giusy Solofra, teacher’s pet.” As soon as they saw me, the two mothers, the two students, and my colleagues all…

CONTRIBUTORS HILTON ALS is a staff writer at The New Yorker and an advisory editor of The Paris Review. AMIE BARRODALE is the author of You Are Having a Good Time. In 2012, she was awarded The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction for her story “William Wei.” Her debut novel, Trip, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in fall 2025. ABIGAIL DEMBO’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Five Points, and EPOCH. WIAM EL-TAMAMI is a Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize–winning writer, translator, and editor whose work has been featured in Granta and The Common. NORA FULTON is the author of three books of poetry. Cuckoo’s Low Reel is forthcoming from Hiding Press this spring. A. M. HOMES’s books include the memoir The Mistress’s Daughter, the novel…

The talk of trying them, of there being nothing else to do, of the possibility, however small, of finding a new kind of purpose—thinking outside the box—was mitigated by concern about epic bad trips or just plain death after what had happened to Amy, though that was more of a broken-leg issue. The AI medical wellness suite being not quite state-of-the-art, and there being the possibility that no one really wanted to explore of some kind of mismanagement of medication. Its being unclear, none of them having trained in medicine, what exactly it was that had caused Amy’s passing. John seemed to argue that death might not be so bad under the circumstances, though it was of course difficult to understand him, as he spoke through tears. Still. There was…

1.The war is over.I examine my body—my head, fingers, arms—it’s all there.As though it all slipped back,just now,into place. 2.The war is over.I gaze up at the sky.I’ve missed the birds,the clouds—anything but airplanes. 3.The war is over.The broom sweeps awaythe dust, shards of glass, the screwsof the broken door.It sweeps away the stonesof the smashed walls, splinters ofgold-rimmed tea glasses, the framesof family photographs.Children’s toys; the dinner plates.All swept away, and heaped up somewherein my heart. 4.The war is over.My mother arrives, apologetic.There’s nowhere to receive you, she says—The graves are filled to the brim. 5.The war is over.I shield my head with my hands and run.It’s not raining, or too sunny—and I’m not afraid—I’ve just become used torunning this way. 6.The war is over.I take bread, a lot…

Widows and Pariahs 2 We were readers each in our Separatist groups. Mine had discovered dreamers and secret seducers of souls wrapped in gender patterned penitence. The way a particular grain of paper speaks without our knowing to a leader in another sect scattering stars across a field running parallel with eternity the truth of quietness before birth of the world we need to run across to ask if nomen has other omens when each lost letter speaks for itself Dear Health Care Provider, I remember not remembering “bat, banana, apple” twice in the fifteen minutes allotted for my once-a-year Medicare Wellness Check. I didn’t see a memory test for octogenarian pariahs coming and yes I admit the fact that I failed this first one is a bad sign but…

It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone goes around saying, “It’s just too hot.” “Muy caliente,” say the men mowing the lawns. “Slishkom zharko,” says the valet parking cars. “Hot as F,” says the woman working the drive-through window at El Pollo Loco. Walter is up high in the hills, lying on a chair, looking at the sky. He is thinking about the view from an airplane descending over the mountains, across Big Bear and Arrowhead and through the clouds to the high-rises of downtown, the Hollywood sign, In-N-Out Burger, houses big and small, and then the pools, so many pools. The topography of the LA Basin keeps the dirt in, warm air on top of cool. By midafternoon the sky will be tinged with a haze that…

Margo Jefferson was born in Chicago in 1947, to Irma and Ronald Jefferson, two members of what W. E. B. Du Bois once described as the Talented Tenth, or the Black leadership class. Irma, a graduate of the University of Chicago and a Delta Sigma Theta, had trained as a social worker but left the workforce for society life after she married Ronald, who became the head of pediatrics at Provident, the first Black-run hospital in the United States. The Jefferson girls—Margo, a pianist, and her elder sister, Denise, a dancer—attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools from elementary school through twelfth grade and were sent to arts programs in the summers. Denise went to Wheaton and Margo to Brandeis, where she graduated cum laude in English and American literature.…

I like it when I’m lookingAt a woman’s wristsI like it when a woman likes to look at my wristsNot all the timeBut they look goodAnd we both like to lookSo it’s all goodAnd more or less I like it when I look I like it when I walk into my tombOr my tombsI like it when a woman with small wrists surrounds them with linenI’m serious, I doOn a day temperate in humidity and warmthWhen the linen’s fern green, cream, when there’s a little windI like it when women with big wrists wear linen tooIt may be that what I like is linenI don’t have any at all I like seeing the outline of a woman’s waist through linenI like making a donationOf my waist to women tooIt’s the…

After the last century—what a century!such a rough, long century, we often said,longer than most, and so tall—a giant of a century,it laid itself downin so many enduring stone steps. Such bones in that century.(What do we do with it now?)A strong nose on that century (almost beautiful),a tank of a nose, a fortress of a smile,a stone explosion of a face. A penny for the man who would dare kiss it.A penny for the man who would walk back downits southern steps. A steep cemetery of a smile,the last century—what a century! What a large cemetery. What a long cemetery.What a large, green cemetery.…

When my daughters turned twelve I initiated them into the mysterious powers with which women of my family line have since time immemorial been endowed. Mysterious not so much in that they didn’t know those powers existed, that I’d kept them secret (I hid nothing from my daughters, since we were of the same sex), but rather in that, having grown up dimly and apathetically aware of the powers’ reality, they no more understood the need to care or to suddenly somehow master them than they had any interest in learning to cook the dishes I served, the products of a domain just as remote and unenticing. Nonetheless, they never thought of rebelling against that tedious instruction. Not once, some sunny afternoon, did they invent a pretext to get out…

It must have been the summer of 2000 or maybe 2001 when I saw Ensign Wang guide a hedgehog across the road. The location, which I’m sure of, was the Y-shaped junction of Second and Third Avenues and Eleventh Street. The hedgehog was covered in short grayish-white bristles, and its tiny feet stuck to the newly laid tarmac. Ensign Wang loomed over it, legs firmly planted to block its way, blowing a tin whistle and waving the little yellow flag of a volunteer traffic officer. The hedgehog was too low to the ground to see any of this, but it seemed to grasp the message. Slowly turning its pointy face, it scurried eastward, hopped up onto the curb, and vanished into the undergrowth, abandoning Ensign Wang and the gridlocked streets.…

As I fell from the sky, I smelled fish.The fish was in my mouth.My eyes were fish eyes, bulging, bugged out. I fell like this for years,in the fishy air. I stopped panicking.I could think as I fell. I missed spaghetti.I was a model, hair blown backin the wind. I was thirty-five. I was fifty-three. The sunwinked at me like bar lightthrough a shot of whiskey. Nights were easier. I actuallyfell, harhar, asleep. Five minuteshere, ten minutes there. Open sky, open darkness.I drank. I pissed myself.I stripped my clothes off in the sky. I was very cold. I hugged myselfand it changed my aerodynamics.I began spinning out of control. I vomited clear rain.I refused water.Refused breath. I missed my daughter.I missed my wife. I missed our home.I missed smoking. I…

Agosto Machado grew up as an orphan on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. After moving to Greenwich Village in the late fifties, he became a fixture of the queer theater, art, and activist movements then emerging in downtown New York. Downtown (Altar), like many recent works Machado has made in memory of his peers lost to the AIDS crisis, is an arrangement of keepsakes and the art and ephemera of friends selected from his personal archive.…

Last night I had that dream again, the one about being shot in the face at close range and my mouth flying off down some white corridor, and I’m so angry with myself for not getting out of the way in time. My partner, E., said last evening: I know you people (meaning my family) don’t talk about your pain, you just kill yourselves. My daughter and I were impressed with the genuine comic worth of that statement. Another impressive moment from E.: Once, when speaking about my exes, he referred to them as my backlist. And what is the white corridor in my dream? A narrow spit of land? A thing between life and death? A sort of ledge? A high-up ledge, just wide enough for a smallish foot…