Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2018 från The Paris Review

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IN THE TEMPLE BASEMENT Standing in the ladies’ room line, in the temple basement, the woman in front of me said, “I’ve been sitting behind you, admiring your hair.” “Thank you! White for Rosh Hashanah!” I say, and then, “It was a gift from my mother.” I love to say  my mother to someone I imagine as a normal person—though who knows. And I love to see cut flowers age—we are cut flowers, when they sever the cord, we beginour dying. She lived to be eighty-five, I needed every hour of it.Each time I made her laugh on the phone, that warm gurgle—and she couldn’t reach out with her long curved polished nails, to stroke me— we were making something together, like a girl-made mountain stream amongSierra onion, and lupine,…

1. A Travel Diary I had left my passport at an inn we stayed at for a night or so whose name I couldn’t remember. This is how it began. The next hotel would not receive me. A beautiful hotel, in an orange grove, with a view of the sea. How casually you accepted the room that would have been ours, and, later, how merrily you stood on the balcony, pelting me with foil-wrapped chocolates. The next day you resumed the journey we would have taken together. The concierge procured an old blanket for me. By day, I sat outside the kitchen. By night, I spread my blanket among the orange trees. Every day was the same, except for the weather. After a time, the staff took pity on me.…

from “LETTERS FROM SPAIN” for Eric Friesen CUARESMA The bishop named his turtle Tortuga.An austere choice, but the bishop is austere:he wears old stained trousers and lives in the darkto save on electric. Tortuga begins to search—he wants touch the way we all want touch.Who knows his age or sex? The bishop in a capeenters the office to light wax pots with a flourish.With his ring we time when to press on the wax.Then I send letters to the archbishop, his Grace,but I’m fairly sure they get misplaced. I possessa peculiar, dumb, and unidentified loneliness.In the front door, a peephole to view guests.A Brit knocked and was ignored. Spaniards!They are gregarious; they are unreachable. My bishop brays, chortles, scolds. It’s not dull.All day I am the matador and he’s the bull.Every…

SUITCASE Krakow was overcast that morning, the hills steamed.It was raining in Munich, in valleys the Alpslay hidden and heavy as stones. Only in Athens did I glimpse the sun, itturned the air, the whole air,the whole immense flotilla of the airto trembling gold. As the religious writers say, I suddenlybecame a new man. I’m just a tourist in the visible world,one of a thousand shadowsdrifting through airports’ vast halls— and my green suitcase, like a faithful dog, follows meon little wheels. I’m just an absentminded tourist,but I love the light. MY FAVORITE POETS My favorite poetsnever metThey lived in different countriesand different agessurrounded by ordinarinessby good people and badthey lived modestlylike an apple in an orchardThey loved cloudsthey lifted their headsa great armadaof light and shadesailed above thema film…

Waiting for a deceased friend’s cat to dieis almost unbearable. “This is where you live now,”I explain. “Please stop crying.” But he is like a widowerin some kind of holding pattern around a difficult truth.His head, his bearing, his movements are handsome to me,a kind of permanent elsewhere devoted to separation and death.“Please, let’s try to forget, dear. We need each other.”I feel I want to tell him something, but I don’t know what.So much that happens doesn’t make sense. Each night,I do the corpse pose, and he ponders me, with his corpse face,while licking his coat. The Egyptians first tamed his kind.Their dead were buried in galleries closed up with stone slabs.When my friend and I were young,we tramped through woods of black oaks.…

The solitary animal walks alone. She has no uterus. She has no bone.She slithers around dark bars and libraries. She carvesa beautiful girl on the cave wall. She dances with Aurora Borealis,but goes home alone. We are 7.5 billion. Thrust onto Earth together, we are not alone.We shout at the stars, perhaps a Martian is listening, she/he/theywith ten thousand antennae, transversal labia quivering, searching for love. Your half-drawn monolid eyes are most tantalizing, may I take you home?Slime you with a green kiss? Breathe magma into your bones? Claw rainbowsonto your lips? Redecorate your home? Our vertebrae are vibrating, signally: we are not alone. Sacrificed by a greedyadmiralty, we shall live forlornly, and be devoured, headfirst, by reptilian clones. Inch back into your fern pods, why don’t ya! Baby, I…

As a filmmaker, sound engineer, editor, and producer, Frederick Wiseman is tireless in his pursuits and relentless in his exploration. He has made approximately one documentary film a year for the past fifty years, some with run times as long as six hours. His works are often meditations on the subject of power within American institutions, in places such as an asylum for the criminally insane, a public high school, a meatpacking plant, a Miami zoo, a juvenile court, and a Neiman Marcus department store in Texas. He’s also made subjects of the ballet in France, boxing, London’s National Gallery, and geographic locations from Aspen, Colorado, to Jackson Heights. Wiseman, who has made forty-three films to date, has received the Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and…

Enter,” she says, and is obeyed. He’s taller than before, or perhaps he only seems taller now that he’s here, in the house. She walks behind him, moving toward the living room, and wonders if he might be too tall for her house. It soon dawns on her that she’ll have to teach him the necessary rooms and objects. The best part about having one at home, her friend Claire once said, is you stop thinking; just imagine, with them walking around and taking up so much space, you can’t spend the day turning things over in your head. They make you pay attention. She teaches him the living room furniture. “Table,” she says. “Chairs. Dinner table.” He studies each one, surely memorizing. “Kitchen. Stove top. Dishes.” He follows her…

My husband, who loved festivals, who was a great fan of festivals, wanted to get to the square in time for the first band at eleven o’clock. From bed, the dog and I watched him dress. He tried on various T-shirts, declaring some of them too tight and others too loose, before finding the perfect one. We watched him smear sunscreen on his face and neck and ears. “Don’t forget your ears,” he said. “I won’t forget them.” “And don’t wear a gray shirt. You’re always copying me.” I had already planned my outfit and had every intention of wearing a gray shirt. I thought of the other shirts I might wear, shuffling through them in my head. When the door closed, I got out of bed to watch as…

DEAR READER: Welcome, or welcome back. I’m thrilled to share with you the Fall 2018 issue of The Paris Review. As the new editor, I’ve enjoyed spending my first months at the helm assembling this issue, and also getting to know the readers and writers who care so deeply for this institution. Turns out you can make a lot of friends in sixty-five years, and I’m very thankful for the warm reception. Michael S. Harper, an early mentor of mine, liked to remind me of Ralph Ellison’s maxim, “Geography is fate.” I had recently moved across the country for the first time, and he saw I was at once homesick and hungry for the new, looking back toward one horizon and forward to the next. I’ve crossed the country, and…

People desired things they didn’t know they wanted. Angry voices, heat,emergencies. That was a summer. Isn’t there anything you can take? she said.She meant, I’m tired of your suffering. The rustle of the pigeons;a woman doing laundry, unfurling the white rippling sheet. Thick windmade a timpani of an empty can bouncing down the street,until it was silenced beneath the wheel of a bus. We made love,if you want to call it that, once that month.I had a dream in which a voice said, Make a mountain of this work, something that can be climbed. It devolvedinto strangeness—owly skies, fiddling hands, small firesburning against a vastness. The man with the red tin boxI passed each day going to the office: I never caught his eye,though I tried. Los Angeles, I thought, lost…

Nothing in the nothing before dawnbut the bent screak of a crow,hedges long naked of birds. Rough low fields with sugar sprinkledover them swell past their sell-by date.At noon the faint sun barely skims the horizon. Snow spots the furrows,then a field blindingly white,a fence running brokenly through it. The copse etched in the distancemight have been some useto Rembrandt, mottled currents of powder running under clouds barely clouds.A ragged tree tilts north, the altarpiecein darkened fanes of empty fields.…

Quite a row of them sitting thereQuite a row of them sitting there Evangelical Sundays. Church hats,the feathered grace of women, their men in undertaker suits,hardened into dutiful Sundays. It scarcely rained, the sunabominable. Taxis shuttled them to Kingdom Halls, the woodenheaven, like my grandmother. The light in the Word. Every daythe light on the Word lengthens and I write into the earth,my forked-tongue peninsula, indifferent to the Pentecostalturn in the day, when hymns scrape brass from the collectionplate, rotating rust and few coins; at its rim, a gauze of holywater, Grandmother’s sweat or tears.…

The place where you came from ain’t there anymore, and where you had in mind to go is canceled out. —Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” A guy’s looking at you.” Lexy knew better than to turn around. The swings were twisted up to the steel frame, the soles of her flip-flops planted in the dust. “Use your phone.” They leaned together; a piece of Lexy’s hair fell over Bri’s shoulder. Her mother called it dirty blonde. They pouted. Lexy angled the phone and there he was behind them, arms resting on the low, chain-link fence. Across the playground were two toddlers in the sandbox, a girl and a boy, and two young mothers: Orthodox Jews with glossy wigs, ankle-length dark skirts, and long sleeves…

Seven Magic Mountains (2016), a landscape-scale sculpture by Ugo Rondinone, sits on the undeveloped end of Las Vegas Boulevard, miles south of any recognizable segment of the Strip. My family and I passed a shooting range, signs cautioning the presence of a buried petroleum pipeline. We passed a racetrack and, in a chain-linked lot, two forgotten freight trucks, their doors flung open. Murals had been painted on each. One read RUEN, the other SWOE—the mystic poetry of trespass. Soon, curious colors rose from the horizon. Boulders painted in vibrant neons and in black, blue, and silver were stacked in seven pillars, thirty, thirty-five feet high. Rondinone’s colors do not seem natural, but there is nothing on this earth that the earth did not give us, nothing technically unnatural under the…

What is Miss Treece’s trouble, according to a popular notion? The man A has failed to show up. Arousing herself at the restaurant, she fixes her lipstick when her solo supper concludes and takes herself down the stairs situated behind the bar. There, at her business in the restroom, the foamy hand soap is suggestive of fun, but there’s the wringing of her hands and the twitching of her fingers while she washes. “I never heard. I don’t know…” Another woman was speaking into her phone before clicking it off. And these two women might have briefly inspired one another had they smiled, because they were both disillusioned. But they might still build temples to themselves of volume and color, as a poet once said. HAPPILY, MISS TREECE’S HOME is…

HERO She never knew one of us from another, so my brothers and I grew up fightingOver our mother’s mindLike sun-colored suitors in a Greek myth. We were willingTo do evil. We kept chocolate around our mouths. The last of her mother’s lot,She cried at funerals, cried when she whipped me. She whipped meDaily. I am most interested in people who declare gratitudeFor their childhood beatings. None of them took what my mother gave,Waking us for school with sharp slaps to our bare thighs.That side of the family is darker. I should be grateful. So I will be—No one on earth knows how many abortions happenedBefore a woman risked her freedom by giving that risk a name,By taking it to breast. I don’t know why I am alive nowThat I…

—Like so many fine twigssnapped by the rainstormthat’s sweeping this city today,heavy. It lashes the pastel housesand the people walk by clutchingtheir jackets to their necks;it looks like everyone is crying. And I felt so bored and sadthat I dropped two threads of saffronin the bowl of Cheerios I had for lunch,and that was a failure, obviously,as I had been almost sure it would be,the threads unable to blush the milk,the oat flour turned soupy, the tastejust sharp enough to disgust me. I stood at the window, I pressedthe puff cactus to see if its fleshwas still stiff under the pallid fur.When I picked my fingernails,the thin crescents fell and were lostamong the angular pebbles in the pot,and all the older, curled-up parings. Outside, the no parking signand the bare…

PILAR FRAILE AMADOR has written a collection of short stories and four books of poetry in Spanish. Her first novel, Las ventajas de la vida en el campo, was published in 2018. ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911–1979) was an American poet. VENITA BLACKBURN is the author of the award-winning short-story collection Black Jesus and Other Superheroes. She will join the creative writing faculty of California State University, Fresno this fall. LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO (1956–2018) was the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Stay, Illusion. JERICHO BROWN is the author of The Tradition, forthcoming in 2019. CLARE CAVANAGH is the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Her most recent translations are Ryszard Krynicki’s Magnetic Point: Selected Poems and Adam Zagajewski’s Asymmetry. GRADY CHAMBERS is the author of North…

My cashier’s black hair was beautiful. Though not unlike mine, it was shinier and thicker, and hung glamorously down to her waist. It looked strong, too, like Christopher Reeve’s in the Superman movies. A strand of Superman’s silvery hair could hold up a thousand-pound weight. As a child, I watched them over and over; they were my favorite. Superman’s hair, holding up the weight, looks as thick as a wire; a whole head of his hairs must have been heavy. But Superman’s neck was so strong, I figured, the weight of his head didn’t matter. “Enjoy your last evening,” my cashier said, adding “last” to distinguish this day, the same blithe way somebody might add “Happy holidays” to an email in December. With one hand, she flipped her lustrous hair…

Penelope Lively was born to British parents in Cairo in 1933, where her father was assistant to the director of the National Bank of Egypt. She spent the first twelve years of her life in the Egyptian capital, a childhood “no more—or less—interesting than anyone else’s,” she writes in her 1994 memoir, Oleander, Jacaranda, though it was marked by the notable characteristic of being British in Egypt and “learning how to perceive the world in the ambience of a quite different culture.” That childhood came to what Lively calls “an abrupt and traumatic end” in 1945, when she was taken to England and enrolled in boarding school, “a grim rite of passage.” Lively has never written extensively about her adolescence. “Ah yes, that extraordinary business of the malevolence of teenage…

My exodus occurred after years wandering the wilderness of my hometown. For bread to live, for bread to leave, I worked a part-time gig at the Oregonian’s downtown insert facility, stacking pallet after pallet of inky-ass newspapers. The day in question, I got a phone call from someone who, for love (and maybe his liberty), I’ll call Brother A. Brother A rang me to plead a ride to his apartment in the burbs; he had to sweep for dope after his dope-dealing roommate—a dude who’d already done a nickel in the pen on a drug charge (which, by the way, is no judgment, just context)—had got knocked by the feds. Brother A explained he needed the ride because his main squeeze had wrecked his Jeep, and he couldn’t think of…

In the summer of 1935, the young Elizabeth Bishop, only recently graduated from Vassar College, set out on one of her many voyages. This was a trip to France. After a homesick crossing by ship, she spent a month in the small port of Douarnenez, on the western tip of Brittany, while waiting for her friend Louise Crane. Douarnenez was a curious choice. It was, and still is, a hardworking fishing town, not a resort. The French poet Max Jacob often spent weeks at a time there, writing and painting, though he was absent that summer. Holed up in her hotel room and curious about the origins of surrealism, Bishop read and translated Rimbaud. That fall and winter, in Paris, she deepened her reading of the French surrealist poets, and…

On her way to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Sister Mary AloysiusDrove past many signs: Earthworms Here. Have Many Rabbit. CalicosIn Burlap Sacks for Free. There were wooden crosses, some upsided From a weird wind of such flaccid heatThrough miles of nothing much—until a shrewdOf cottonmouths braided in a knot so vastAcross the asphalt She had to stop the car.She waited as they wound and ragged and sieged their way acrossThe two-lane road, and then she traveled on. For Sale:Rafters of Slack Turkies. Nurse-Cow’s Pail. Push hoes, malt forks, unrustedMangleknifes. Here is the sheriff in his hammock on his clutter-landNot quite yet woken from his dream of herding All the Negroes out to anywhereBut here. Sister Mary Aloysius carried in her pocketbookA blue transistor radio (with hymns, which lived inside) to…

PAYMENT Durer’s fame meant he could sometimes pay withhis own woodcut prints and chalk drawings.This time, however, borax was partial payment forthe portrait of Luca Signorelli,azure pigment and a bed (not two). The man with the rings has cheated me by half— I do not understand it. The inventory of Gonzaga’sworldly goods, priceless gems and manuscripts is,it transpires, dazzling illusion, owing the Medici bankin Florence 3,500 ducats, piling up a financial crisisin which Ferdinand and Isabella in the 1480sestablished their worth largely by increased debt.Last night from the lawn, hanging in the azure air,a crescent moon. The price of magnificence is high. AGUES AND FUGUES Under the weather would put onejust about left of the cirrus and right ofthe objective correlative,would locate the aguein earlier centuries, beneaththe armpit, soaking in a hot…

UNBRIDLED To look at them, you might not think the two men, having spoken brieflyand now moving away from each other, as different goalsrequire, have much history, if any,between them. That, for a time that seems longer ago now than in factit’s been, they used to enter each other’s bodies so often, so routinely,yet without routine ever seeming the right way of putting it,that even they lost count—back then,who counted? It’s not as if they’ve forgotten, or at leastthe one hasn’t, looking long enough back at the otherto admire how outwardly unchanged he seems: still muscled, even ifeach muscle most brings to mind (why, though)an oracle done hiding at last, all the mystery madequantifiable, that it might more easily that way—like love, like the impulsetoward love—be disassembled. The other man…

My lil sister/niece/granddaughter/baby cousin doesn’t know she’s pretty, so she asks everybody, one post at a time. Her mom showed up at her high school graduation, no one had seen her in eight years. Mothers like that never know how to dress, too much fake jewelry, fake hair, and a big-ass fake leather purse still too small for all her shame and addictions to everything else. My lil sister/niece/granddaughter/baby cousin went to a costume party dressed as Selena or Madonna or Paula Abdul, just a thin layer of 1985 draped over her tits. She works out, a lot. A pic for the shoulder press: 78 likes. A pic for the dead lifts: 134 likes. Don’t get me started on the squats. She doesn’t like photos of her when she isn’t…

And what did you see, sequoia-quiet, looking out at blacknight. No islands, no kings or corridors of fury.But the districts where we were born, a few icy stars,the moon’s beaming chalk thirst. Above the painted desert,the air rustles at your wrists, pulls away from the longindustry on land, up into those far lights. A vast ordinance,unspoken, with no need to be spoken. Those whodid not have to die. Yourself, and all you loved. Dusk, electrical veil, a mist of light hanging overthe desert. On foot you are subdued, no less a formthan a fence, or that dry husk of pine. What hollownessyou live with flows out into dust and low gold-graystalks. As you walk, under nightrise, you will be the firstwhose eyes range across radio waves into the colorsof just…

Tue, Sep 25 KATE ATKINSON Thu, Sep 27 LAURA RESTREPO JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ Fri, Sep 28 KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD JAMES WOOD Mon, Oct 22 DEBORAH EISENBERG GARY SHTEYNGART Mon, Oct 29 A CELEBRATION OF ZORA NEALE HURSTON Mon, Nov 5 A CELEBRATION OF WILLIAM TREVOR Thu, Nov 8 NATASHA TRETHEWEY Mon, Nov 12 EMILY WILSON ON THE ODYSSEY Thu, Nov 15 JONATHAN FRANZEN Thu, Dec 6 LAUREN GROFF JONATHAN LETHEM Mon, Dec 10 THE TENTH MUSE WITH TYEHIMBA JESS Thu, Dec 13 CLAUDIA RANKINE JULIANA SPAHR Mon, Dec 17 ESMERALDA SANTIAGO WITH LATINO USA BOOKS & BAGELS Sun, Oct 21 ADAM GOPNIK ON JOHN UPDIKE Sun, Nov 4 HERMIONE LEE ON VIRGINIA WOOLF VISIT 92Y.ORG/POETRY TO SEE THE FULL LINEUP AND PURCHASE TICKETS 92|Y 92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center…