Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2017 från The Paris Review

Like many of you, we at the Review spend more and more time listening to podcasts. (We take longer doing the dishes, we do extra laps around the block, we keep one earbud in at the drugstore …) So when the audio company Stitcher proposed that we make a podcast of our own, we threw on our headphones and got to work. We wanted The Paris Review Podcast to distill everything we love about the magazine—our six decades of fiction and poetry and interviews, of course, but also true stories from The Paris Review Daily, rare tape from our archives, and a snippet of the free-flowing conversation and music that are a constant thread in the history of the Review. In our first season, available now, you’ll hear a number…

BLUEBERRIES FOR CAL Watching little Henry, six, scoop up blueberriesand shovel them into his mouth, possessed. I’m so glad I brought blueberries—wish my kidscould/would eat them. Cal can’t; Simone won’t. Henry’s sisters, Lucy & Jane, took turns feeding eachother goldfish crackers and sips of juice. Arms around each other’s neck and back. Tiny things.I wish my daughter had a sister like that and my son a nervous system that let him walkand munch berries. Sometimes I can’t bear all the things Cal doesn’t get to do. I want to curseeverything I can’t give him. Admire/compare/despair—that’s not the most realfeeling I’m feeling, is it? I feel joy in Henry’s joy. Blueberries for the child who wants them.There’s all this energetic sweetness, enough to go around, to give and taste and trust.…

MASTERY The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?If I remember my own name, then I can egomy way through this crowd of shadowsthat cross the bridge of my back mid bow. I slept in the Fifth House of Modernism,beneath stars that offered no light—dustfull of fear, my own dead skin encrustingroom corners and my mind in a schismbetween image and luck. When I awoke,the empire rose in me and I was risenfrom its dead letters to the letter, chiseledby my own invisibility, this war between smoke and reflection, between self versus self connivingin the longest hall of my…

A house is a three-dimensional answer to the question of how someone can be together with someone and something in something. —Peter Sloterdijk Each society expects architecture to reflect its ideals and domesticate its deepest fears. —Bernard Tschumi I Being in the dark is like being on the inside of one’s own body I woke to several different noises, something being picked up and put down, a tap being turned on and off. What time is it? I said. It’s four a.m., said Mim. For a moment she was silhouetted in the bathroom door before the light went off and she was reabsorbed into the dark. Outside, the sky was so black that when I looked at it I was looking at nothing but my memory of the sky. Were…

The party was a failure. I can’t even tell you what a failure it was. There are no words. Only a great pain in my chest when I wake up. On the veranda. It’s better when I sit in the chair. Oh, but then I can see around. The gauzy curtains, pushed by the breeze! The glasses on the floor. Little ghosts! Last night the American walked around sniffing at them like a dog. He said, Who would leave all these dead soldiers behind? I couldn’t say. I am American as well, of course, but lately I haven’t been feeling quite myself. It isn’t the sort of thing I do, host parties. The last time I hosted anyone but Ann? It must have been months and months ago. It would…

ON PRIDE after Apollinaire I lived in a rooming house thenand tried to be good but was a realdisappointment. A man without cunningis like an empty matchbox. I can’t remembernow the sad, slow procession of wordsbetween us. Only the hurt. Plug the holeif the patient is bleeding, I thought.If you do the right thing in the first three minutes,you’ll survive. So we put ice cubes on our napes.My pride was like a giant, oblongpumpkin. My words like farting on stone.Then I kissed you until your face became red.I can’t remember now where the words flew off to,but what an awful hurt. KAYAKING ON THE CHARLES I don’t really like the ferries that make the water a scary vortex,or the blurry white sun that blinds me, or the adorable small familiesof…

1919 Investment Counsel • David M. Adler • A?sop • Alfred A. Knopf • Theresa Gavin & Mark Almeida • Peggy & Keith Anderson • The Anna-Maria & Stephen Kellen Foundation • Jeff Antebi • Gale Arnold • R. Scott Asen • Debbie & Mark Attanasio • Amanda Urban & Ken Auletta • Ijeoma A. Azodo • Jessica Yager & Robert P. Baird • André Balazs • Kyra Tirana Barry • Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos & Adam Bartos • Alexandra Styron & Edward Beason • In Recognition of A. William J. Becker III • Helen & William Beekman • Charlotte Beers • Mr. & Mrs. Alexandre Behring • Jessica Marshall & Peter N. Belhumeur • Robert Bell • Amy Bennett • Liz & Rod Berens • Kathryn & David Berg •…

CINNA THE POET I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood,and like any of the others of my kind would have done,I graffitied it. In the past, I might have gone for a peace signor a smiley face or an ejaculating penis,but today I scrawled my name in itand my vocation,leaving my fingertip ferrous with desert. It felt like stroking suede against the nap,half illicit, the particulates milled by windand sieved by the distanceto the softness of ash or brick dust. I had been adding and subtractingsounds from my…

Vivian spends most of the afternoon naked and strapped to the giant ottoman in the interior decorator’s office in Bethesda. When he finally unties her, the sun is low and she’s shaky and exhausted. He paddled her hard at some point, and that hot stinging is what hurts the most as they clutch each other on his cool leather sofa and slowly return to themselves. The final hour of their session, she struggled to remain present, despite the pain, because she’d remembered that she needs to ask for a refund from Silver Stars, her youngest son’s gymnastics camp. They have a draconian refund policy, which she’s dealt with before. Staring at his burgundy pants puddled around his ankles as he stood over her, she’d contemplated what she might say to…

At first, the TV light is silver. Then it goes to black and white. A moment passes and we see the Columbia Pictures lady. She’s a figure in Adrienne Kennedy’s 1976 play, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, where she speaks the author’s thoughts, but at present I don’t know Kennedy’s play. My own fan notes about the Columbia Pictures lady and the movies she introduces us to start now, in 1968 or 1969, when I’m eight or nine, somewhere in there. Dressed in Grecian robes and carrying a torch, the Columbia Pictures lady lights the way to a very real world we have no dates or production credits for, but what does any of that matter? Or the fact that the movies we watch on…

Born in London in 1945, Richard Holmes has written ten biographies and books of biographical essays. Even in his earliest works, Shelley (1974) and the two-volume Coleridge (1989, 1998), Holmes demonstrates a keen eye for place and a striking empathy for his subjects. In his pages, one has the chance, however fleeting, to imagine what it may have been like to ride on the Lido with Shelley and Byron, or roam the midnight streets of London with Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage, or take to the air over the Arctic with Salomon August Andrée. His books have warmth and intimacy combined with a knowing sense of their own incompleteness, an idea that Holmes sees as the very heart of biography. We met three times in the winter of 2017. Our…

OBSOLETE MACHINERY When equality feels like oppressionTo you, the keyboard a sword and cannonAnd the comfort of being everyoneOr no one, which you learned without learningIt, fools you into thinking that you’re brave.No, bored. It wasn’t quite football seasonYet, was it? And there was CharlottesvilleFlickering like a pixel in Zelda.You dreamed the day before of being coolIn the crowd, your matching tiki torchesAlmost touching high in the tepid night,The old flag finally out and someoneTo drive the car. Wake up. We’ve sent somethingTo Saturn. It’s 2017. THE PEACOCK Music for when the music is overIs what a poem is. There’s no musicIn a poem, just the imaginaryComposer breathing beneath the deep wreck,The curves of that glorious alphabetResilient as bioluminescenceStuck in the seafloor. There’s something in it,How poems pretend to sing.…

One morning, almost fifteen years ago, I woke up from a dream that was so vivid and powerful that I knew it must be true. I still remember both what happened in the dream and the feelings it left me with. Now the fact is that listening to someone else’s dreams is nearly always tiresome; usually, if it goes on for more than a few seconds, unbearable. Dreams in literature are monstrosities: whenever I come across one, it takes a lot for me not to flip past it or shut the book altogether. It tells me that the writer has failed to understand his responsibility to reality, or else has not understood the role of the imagination in real life. Why is that? Everyone dreams—it is one of the basic…

Anyone else might have easily written off a life of Véra Nabokov as impossible. In the two major biographies of her husband—both written during her lifetime, when she controlled access to his papers—she is a cipher. Her letters, either lost or destroyed, are unavailable. But where other biographers see red flags, Stacy Schiff sees opportunity. Working from a hunch—that Véra’s reticence concealed her spectacular influence behind the scenes—she produced Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), which forced a reconsideration of Nabokov’s career and won Schiff the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. The book brilliantly demonstrates that Véra was far more than her husband’s secretary and chauffeur. She was his creative partner, a dynamic mind who played a crucial role as his sounding board and muse while silently seeing to his every need,…

The last ones to work for dollars aroused hatred in the town, and some were subjected to regrettable acts of retribution. In our defense, it was an unusual time. We had built a beautiful system to replace wages and entertainment; people hanging on to the old currency—we saw red. But then again, there were probably those who were simply jealous. 2. Of all those benefiting from facial recognition, the least remarked upon were plastic surgeons. Clay implants were originally developed, after all, for patients who needed to deceive the cameras. The leap to fashion only happened later, when people began to mold their faces before dinner, just as they arranged their hair, and nose shapes changed with the seasons. 3. Acknowledging a calamitous decline in reproductive vigor, the town council…

THE HIGH PRIESTESS OF SOUL’S SUNDAY MORNING VISIT TO THE WALL OF RESPECT The Impressionism wing strikes me as toodainty for my mood, except for one oil paintingby Gustave Caillebotte, Calf ’s Head and Ox Tongue,which is described in the wall text as“visually unpleasant.” A bust of an African womanbums me out. This year, I criedat everyone’s kitchen table,I spit on the street and was late on purpose and steppedin glass and my dog died and I sawminuses over and over. I’ll figure it out.I let a man walk away and thenanother one. It has taken me exactly this longto realize I could have done something else.I’m being repetitive now but do you everhate yourself ? “NOW MORE THAN EVER” Phrase used by Whites to express their surprise and disapproval…

IN THE WAITING ROOM WITH LEONARD COHEN In the hospital waiting room, seated in my plastic chair,I think about Leonard Cohen and start quietly to cry.I’m glad no one is watching, because I can see the childish indulgence of it all—the displacement of my personal self-pityonto the cadaverous Canadian singerwhom one critic called “the world’s leading producerof songs advocating suicide.” Yet it comes from somewhere deep, this sobbingsympathy for Leonard Cohen,and I don’t care if it’s dishonest, there is nourishment in these wet tears. I senseI’m irrigating my own dirty lifewith something clean and fresh from far away, like rain. Still, crying is violent and weird and hard.It is like pulling something free from something elsethat doesn’t want to give it upand keeps on pulling back with a wheezing, ripping…

NYC September 1973. I can’t believe it. I’m on the 9th floor of One Fifth Avenue, facing south. Apartment 9H to be exact. It’s a plush hotel suite being used as a Parsons dorm. My new residence. I love it! I have three roommates, curly haired Tom Fox from Florida (who doesn’t yet know that he’s gay, but I do), and two Chinese brothers in the next room. The living room picture window looks out on Washington Square Park, and in the distance the World Trade Center looms like twin phosphorescent robots. I actually LIVE in Greenwich Village, the historic site of generations of madmen, jazz musicians, poets, painters, and revolutionaries. A dream come true. At night, in my bed, I can hear shots, screams, whoops, air-raid sirens. When I…

HILTON ALS is the author of The Women and White Girls. A theater critic at The New Yorker, he is the recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and an advisory editor of The Paris Review. HENRI COLE is the author of nine collections of poetry. His first prose work, Orphic Paris, will be published in the spring. RANA DASGUPTA is the author of two novels, Tokyo Cancelled and Solo, and Capital: The Eruption of Delhi. RUTH FRANKLIN is the author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. LAIA GARCIA is the senior fashion editor at Refinery29. DUNCAN HANNAH is a New York–based painter whose diaries from the 1970s, 20th Century Boy, will be published in the spring. KYLE HENDERSON is an illustrator and architect in London. TONY HOAGLAND’s…