Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2017 från The Paris Review

Hostage Guy Delisle “Guy Delisle conveys great, slow-burning tension in this sublime account of what Christophe Andre endured as a hostage in Chechnya.” —Joe Sacco, cartoonist of Palestine “Hostage explores the psychological effects of solitary confinement, the repercussions of negotiating with kidnappers and the nature of freedom.” —The Guardian Boundless Jillian Tamaki “Jillian Tamaki’s finely hewn tales read like transmissions from a parallel universe just as lonely as our own, but in a more beautifully felt, hilariously ephemeral way.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine “Jillian Tamaki seems capable of drawing anything, in any style, and making it appear effortless. Her writing could be described in the same way, and it’s thrilling to see those twin skills of hers united in service of these…

How many white women you been with?” The room was filled with good smoke and we drifted off behind it. “What’s your number?” Dub looked at Rye real serious like he was asking about his mom’s health. I leaned forward from the couch and took the burning nub of joint from his outstretched hand. We called him Dub because his name was Lazarus Livingston—Double L. His parents named him to be a football star. He could play once upon a time, but not like Rye. Rolls, who was too high, chimed in: “Stop it, bruh, that shit’s not important.” “Of course it is. I’m finna touch every continent,” Dub said. “White’s not a continent,” Rolls said. “You know what I mean.” “I know you never won a geography bee,” Rolls…

Our children do not mean Their numbers are up, the fireflies To kill them when they cup Around the soft bodies, light Music softens features The way a mild solvent Softens the acrylic, yellowing in time The old habit of sentience After a storm, the light I’ve come to feel okay ascribing Features, the Camperdown elm Because it was celebrated in a poem They’ve put a gate around Cupped it, as a friend Is cupped, heated glass along The meridians of her body, slow Release of energy, she is in Sustainable agony most of the time I place a firefly in each cup I place them in the branches of And ask it to watch over her The grafted elm, its weeping habit Even though the light is cold The…

Too serious no longer, we have learned to love our restlessness whose tussles left us short of breath. We wrestled with the reckless flesh that both of us would test and test then half refresh and half forget to use what’s left in each of us: vitality we live to spend— to roll, unroll & revel in our toothed excess of wildness— would in the wild be what it took to nose fresh eggs past lips of nests or drag mole rats from burrows. Where we live determines what we do, how frivolous or violent we have to be. Captivity thus keeps us fresh. Our arguments are circular: we love to writhe, to form a wreath or flare and tie ourselves in knots like ropewalks’ nets. Come play with us,…

Hurvin Anderson is an artist living between two landscapes: the one he was born into, in Birmingham, England, in 1965, and the one his parents and older siblings left behind years earlier, on the island of Jamaica. Anderson has described his paintings of Jamaica and Trinidad as an effort “to get to know these places in a secondhand, hard way”—the way of imagination. He has a lifelong interest in islands and parks as “utopias,” he says: “It is their supposed perfection that I find intriguing.” In many of his Jamaican paintings, a decorative security grille cuts through the scene, parallel to the plane of the canvas, its abstracted pattern serving both to interrupt the illusion—to “destroy” the view—and to seal it in. During an artist’s residency in Trinidad, Anderson became…

I breathed on the glass of my other lives so I could write in the fog. Replied yes to all, baked cakes, swore off certain unproductive behaviors, such as this. I gave myself obscene permission, then ran thudding back to safety, as if zombie-chased. Frequently, I used the tent, the ear of corn. Never, if possible, irradiated cats or vicious laughter or any of the shocked humans. When I first heard my child echo my voice— No, no, no!—when speaking to my other child: face with no good gesture. All this I did while metabolizing flame retardant on the side. These were busy years. For every fruit that sprang a furry white coat, two were frozen diligently or cut, served, scraped and every day I wanted to start a compost,…

Bob and I lived on a barge in Paris for about a year and a half. He appeared in my life in 1955, when George Plimpton jumped on the barge (there was no phone) and asked me if this wonderful, brilliant fellow who was about to run The Paris Review could possibly move onboard since I had a spare room. I met Bob, and we immediately hit it off. I was studying at the Sorbonne, and Bob clearly knew more than any of my teachers. He moved in and we had quite an unusual life. Musicians of all sorts would fall by to jam, girls from the nearby Crazy Horse would drop in on their breaks while Bob was interviewing some author or editing some piece for the Review. Nothing…

CHERNOBYL Each of us is also a ghost. Most you can see. They look like the person you are. Hers is a series of beautiful blurred action Images of an antelope attacking and killing And eating a fully grown alpha lion. The lion’s broken head Sticks out of his mane on the pillow, bloody red, almost dead, And then the reactor exploded, typical of love. Hello, hello, hello, hello. I’m here, it’s me, hello. I’m my ghost. I’m the heavenly piercing freshness of no pain after your pain. I’m the soft perfume of warm August rain. I’m the rope of distance that ties me to you That makes no sense, but I do, and it does. I want to be huge, And a deluge, and a refuge. I want to…

At the age of eighteen, my mother embarked on a movie career in her native city of Antwerp. Until then, she had worked for the gas company and taken some elocution courses, but when a studio was built on the Pyckestraat, at the initiative of a certain Jan Vanderheyden, she walked in the door and was hired. Before long , a team had formed around Vanderheyden, who always used the same actors and the same crew. He oversaw both production and direction, and he shot his films in record time. The Pyckestraat studio was such a hive of activity that journalists called it “de Antwerpsche Hollywood,” the Hollywood of Antwerp. My mother was the very young lead actress in four Vanderheyden pictures. He made the first two, This Man Is…

It’s quite possible that the existence of these eight short stories, taken word for word from a collection of 148 diaries found in a dumpster in 2001, would come as a surprise to the diarist, Laura Francis. All the sentences, events, perceptions, and fineness of writing belong to her, but the plots and narrative arcs have been manufactured by me. The discovery of these diaries and the four years I spent hunting down their author are the subject of my book A Life Discarded. Laura Francis was a live-in companion and domestic servant for an aged professor of IT—“like his wife in every respect except the sex (thank goodness).” She barely knew how to cook and had no time for tidiness. On several occasions, during her thirty years of service,…

I do not do well without my chattel. I do not do well without doing what I will with my chattel. My chattel my bodies my buildings my land. Do not touch my outermost layer. It will bite your fingers. That’s how it breathes. Do not touch my chattel. It is all fleshy. All of it counts as one body. It grows within. No part breaks off. Do not extract my chattel. I do not choose for my parts to be seen. Because I breed. Because I breed what I claim I breed what I do not understand.…

When had she begun to suspect that her second-floor tenant, Mr. Han, was building a bomb? The idea had come to her slowly, the way she’d intuited her husband’s illness in its early days, before the lapses and the wandering and the loss of language made it clear to everyone. One afternoon, maybe a month ago, a package from a company called Spectro had appeared in the entryway. Mrs. Virag recognized the name from her work. She’d been a chemist for the City of New York, one of the pioneers of a new water-purification system that had lowered dioxin levels by 60 percent. Spectro was a chemical supplier. She picked up the package, thinking it must be for her—she’d received a promotional desk clock from this company just a year…

Fresca’s got a new look but I’m not drinking that. My coke struck the ice and the ice cube cracked. I’m sitting by the little Buddha who is sitting in my yard. I imagine you walking in gasping at the same couch the same bed it’s almost the same town but this is what I meant and there’s so much pleasure, difference in this, that. I meant to be here. One sleeps on what they mean and arises on the decided side and that’s the hope. An entire room is opened by particular feelings that say you’re on the edge of the space and then you wait to watch it grow. Grow like a love or a feeling of distrust or a body grateful for sun & breeze and the…

AMANDA AUERBACH is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard University. ADAM BEGLE Y ’s second biography, The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera, will be published in July. His first was Updike. STEPHEN BURT is professor of English at Harvard University and the author of several books of poetry and criticism, most recently Advice from the Lights. ANNE C A RSON’s honors include a MacArthur Fellowship and the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her most recent book is Float. CALEB C R A IN is the author of the novel Necessary Errors. PETER DUCHIN is a pianist and bandleader and the author of a memoir, Ghost of a Chance. JOHN FREEMAN is editor of the literary biannual Freeman’s. Maps, his debut collection of poems, is forthcoming this fall. DANA…

Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools, they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning. All the other Greeks who had survived the brutal sack of Troy sailed safely home to their own wives—except this man alone. Calypso, a great goddess, had trapped him in her cave; she wanted him to be her…

Percival Everett was born in 1956 and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. After graduating from the University of Miami, he began a philosophy degree at the University of Oregon, then transferred to a master’s program in fiction at Brown, where he wrote his first book, Suder (1983), a comic novel about a third baseman for the Seattle Mariners whose attempts to shake a slump lead him on an odyssey across the Pacific Northwest in the company of an elephant and a young runaway. Everett has earned a following as a master of many genres who has a taste for the absurd. His work includes crime novels (The Body of Martin Aguilera, Watershed), revisionist Westerns (God’s Country, Walk Me to the Distance), retellings of Greek myth (Zulus, For Her Dark…

You can hear me walking from your bed, where the blankets aren’t enough to keep you warm. It’s a long night of snow, and snowiness, and winter loneliness, and what else I don’t know, but I’m thinking if you can hear me walking you might want to visit, to knock on my door with a story you’d been waiting— days, months, maybe years—to tell. Tell me something that can’t be told, and I’ll be in my worn pajamas, or brushing my teeth, my hair, putting away magazines. I have tea and crackers, a bottle of wine—come up, we won’t swamp ourselves with anything like sex yet. I don’t want to talk about the past or work or politics, but yes, mercy will do. Come upstairs when the floor creaks, and…

Funny thing to worry about. Little hairs. Hairs on back of sweater as she goes out of the room. Little hairs, how you look from the back, girls worry about this. Or they used to. Now girls are free. Okay to be unpretty, ungirls. She thinks back, freedom, her first airplane to Europe. Scholarship girl. This term was used. Heady sense of a lightly exotic self chatting with older man as plane lifts, accepting a whiskey, feeling his hand on her knee. Cold yeast of that moment. Please remove your hand. Not exactly shame. What is shame. A matter of temperatures. Heat flooding her neck, ears. Cross your legs, don’t cross your legs, what is he thinking now, now you must stay awake, the long night a black window. His…

Where do you come from? Where did you grow? Your leaving brought you here To the nest at the center of your home Where have you flown? Your lowered gaze meets the angle of light its just made-ness awaits the songbird’s return circle of twigs and air shadow halo against the nothing mirror Does the charcoal branch still burn in the iron brazier beneath the moonfaced kettle embraced by the trivet? Little eyes of a fish rise up through the water heat leaves steep ink pools brushstroke memory On a square patch of earth breathes in emptiness between the pale yellow glow outside and the native house The garden path begins at the southeast corner behind the wooden fence that bends from the vertical edge nearer you into sunlight drawn…

As soon as I said I was thirty, I wondered why I had said it. “Thirty,” said the woman I was talking to, who had a tousled gamine haircut, dyed white as only a very young woman will risk. “I’m not thirty, I’m fifty,” I confessed. “I don’t know why I said thirty.” “You can’t be fifty, either,” the woman said. In fact, I wasn’t, but it seemed right to exaggerate slightly in the other direction now. How old was she? I studied the corners of her eyes. At one moment they were wizened and at another they were fresh, and it occurred to me that she might be of no age because she was the angel of death, who would have to come for me at some point. “You’re…