Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2020 från The Paris Review

CLARE SESTANOVICH Her son and his future wife took Suzanne out to lunch and asked her to do the wedding invitations. Not so long ago, she had been a successful graphic designer. Her own boss. They were anxious to make her feel useful. When the food arrived, it was vegetables sliced in long, nearly see-through strips, a pile of ribbons in orange and green and red. Suzanne saw her son’s ulterior motive clearly. Being unemployed, she had told several friends, was sharpening her perception. But Spencer took pride in being subtle—probably someone had led him to believe this was the same as being adult. Suzanne’s aesthetic was elegant and inoffensive. Occasionally a little too austere. “As you may recall,” she told the future wife, piling carrot shavings onto her fork,…

BLACK CURTAIN after an oil painting by Peter Doig As is always the case with Doig, we are on the inside.Outside, this time, is a coast we all know.The view is ideal: the day has reached an end,the water is mostly still, and the moisture in the airmakes every light into a star. In the distance, another landmass—likely just as calm, as long as the curtain stays where it is. It hides the riptides, renders the outside an anesthetizing blue. And yet, at the horizon, where the curtain is threadbare,there are hints of something beginningto break through: pointillist splotches,possibly storms, threatento upset the scene. The longer we look, the more salientdecay becomes. It first showsat the top of the frame: the nightturns wan, ashen, as if renegingits depth. Then we…

CANCER (PRAYER FOR MY FATHER) Far into fever, attached by cords to the soft-clicking machines, he sleepsin a bed in a room not his own.People enter and pass like ghost-blownfogs. He is a slow walkwith limbs that recently gave way.He is part of the blue snowfall.He is very small, sitting on a curbwith skinny legs next to an elegantaunt. He is not yet born.He travels to meet the relativesin Maulbronn and feels the lifting darknesssunk in his chair at night, thinking.He is intensely wrong, obstinate and generous,the one who never seems to grieve,sweaters and wine and violas locked inair. You say: He, too, cannot be found again,he, too, asks only for more alivenessand time. The room is like every roomin that house, sterile and never quiet,but sometimes birds drop into…

RARE BIRD While we were waiting for the movie to begin,my wife caught up with her old friend Maryann,and because I could only make out everythird or fourth word, my attention fluttered offin search of something else and landed onthe thirty-five-ish couple sitting three rowsin front of us—the backs of their headsand then the bare left arm and handof the young woman, who kept gatheringlocks of her long, straight auburn hairbetween her middle and index fingers, pullingeach tress away from her head and throughher extended fingers with a dexterous twistthen letting it fall and gathering another,over and over seemingly without thinkingas she chatted with her husband or companion.There was something about that movement—graceful but ordinary, not erotic—that made me look harder, until, entranced,I watched as those two slender fingerstransformed into…

AFTER THE DEATH OF A FRIEND Over, the kite’s flight; and of a suddenis the realization of the morning overcomeby the echo of dark nights, silent witnessto the colorlessness crouching down before us.Stealing time is what’s been happening all the time.Is it because you’ve heard only your own cries,fifty years earlier, too, as they went by, adulterated with death?Or some shy, crumpled laughter carrying with itthe air of an unspoken but certain defeat?Somewhere in my mind, I lose the abilityto disappear, as the morning air moves listlessly about,indifferent to looks, or history, or roots. And hereif I died, like this, dying for the person I was,or for the one I see coming in and out of your death,would that be a way out to save mefrom the solitude I’ve believed…

PASTURE WEBWORM AND PASTORAL ALARMISM Not frequent, the monitors of doomed pastoraladmit these native moths their autumn rising after a sleepy eviscerated summer, stubblesuddenly alive with beakiness, and then and then … emergence from pupae and the flutter the matingand egg-laying that diagram of cycle leading to larvae emergence—all these emergencesto dine on grass on young cereal crops on green blades then setting shafts down into moist ground beneaththe succulent shadows under under to emerge emerge at night in shadow in darkness under crescent moonunder moon in full bloom in raw starlight and to feed to chew blades to feel the cold heat of dawn and retreatinto tunnels into shafts into burrows to seal to block till next called on by night’s growth-tricks the breath-ploysand then emerge in a total…

REBECCA MAKKAI The war had closed much of the city, cut off many of the smaller towns. Unable to trace his usual routes, the hat merchant headed into the mountains to try his luck. His father, before he died, had circled a small mountain village on his map, had noted that the trading was good but the trip took two difficult days. Indeed, the snaking road narrowed fast, and the bridge was down to splinters so his horse had to wade to the knees. Near sunset of the first day, long after the road had turned to an overgrown path, the merchant passed a plain young woman milking a cow. She asked him into her farmhouse for bread and brandy but never turned her back on him. She didn’t turn…

ASHLEIGH BRYANT PHILLIPS Hal Parker runs out to his wife’s hydrangea bushes. He’s trying to scare away the neighbor’s black Lab, Major. Hal claps his hands in front of him and shouts, but Major’s already peeing on the bush. It seems to Hal that lately the dog just won’t stay in his pen. Hal has watched him dig holes under it and even seen him climb over it once or twice. Hal looks next door. His neighbor Corey Lane’s Camaro is in the yard. He decides to tell Corey about his dog. As he knocks on the door and waits, Hal looks over the front of the house and thinks he should have talked to Corey about Major weeks ago. He also thinks the bricks need to be washed and…

SOUNDBOARD When Archie told me the incredible storyof Lady Margaret’s piano, an Obermeier pluckedfrom a forgotten warehouse in bombed-out Berlin,then secretly carted off, scarfed up by the Alliesand loaded onto a plane, delivered to Irelandonly to end up the elaborate inlaid soundboardholding Peg’s ashtray, her snooker of gin, simply amazed, I couldn’t stop thinkingof Pasternak’s piano tossed from a window,workmen at his dacha deeming it worthlessdecades after his death, and the poem he wrotethat warned his lover, “The shivering pianowill discompose you … Death is in the air.One opens up one’s veins much like a window.”…

SUITE FOR A.W.N. PUGIN PUGIN I was reading a biography of Pugin. Architecturewas how Pugin avoided God.This much is evident. When he slipped out at nightto drift down to the water he was a smoke.He did not look up at the moon. We can be surethat any bargain he made was intentionalespecially those he bound in straps made of snow. PUGIN I was reading a biography of Pugin. Exileis something like a hearse is something, tungstenor zinc. You are born through it. Some fewemerge from that labor wearing somethingtheir lovers, later, will call a caul. “Look, a caul,”they will say. But they will be wrong about that.Later they will dream of the circus on fire. PUGIN I was reading a biography of Pugin. Funnythat at one point he should have…

HUM I am learning how to sleepagain, to lovethe descent, or is it, lying here, a rising upto summitwhere sleep wanders till waking. And whenI cannot, when the waterleaches into everything & capsizes me, I wonderwhere you are,father, if anywhere at all—Does sleepknow you? Does day? Such nights, dreams fill my waking& worry weathersthe dark, the light horribly leaking through the curtains—or, awake,early, I wait for it to seep in from the east. The landof dead in the west.The hum of sun— none, none, then suddenlyup—it, too,cannot be sated or slaked off, brother sun,mother moon,father you cannot find though somewhere still shines. SHADE It’s a strange placeto try & findGod—inside a building. Better offin a field whose owner,if any, has let the ivy overtake it, shotgun shackspulled down, abandonedbeneath the…

JESSE BALL THURSDAY, 10 DECEMBER. Giles shows us the sample mice and I am, as if for the first time, overcome with joy. Perhaps when I was a child I had feelings like this—but not in many years. I look, for instance, at a small gray mouse, smaller than the others, and it is as if I am seeing (anything) for the first time. He moves among his neighbors so swiftly and yet without error—as if on a track, as if held up by threads from above that prompt him. For reasons I cannot yet fathom, the edge of the enclosure is of great interest to the mice. I suppose there are no such edges in the so-called natural world. No one, not even we, are ready for them (though…

SILENT AUCTION Yes I helped decree it.In the white-walledroom of before withstrangers + veils.Don’t think I don’t thinkabout it daily. Up herefumigating my orielaccording to the NewerOrdering. I feel exactlyhow we got here. Wethought. Then we didas we thought. Thenanswered + when weanswered how we didas we thoughtwhat was wasno one could affordthe self-inducingcovenant. You’d besurprised what littlewe, the slighter figuresthere among the rest,could do in the room,strobing like sight linesin the jet bridge.Now we’ll never seethe men who appraise usthrough the one-waymirrors. Forevermore isbidding. Every timeI enter the hall, leavingmy liquid assets poolingin the center of myoriel, I feel less preparedfor the day—+ noI won’t know it’s coming—when they quit me hereentirely + poolingin the trespasses of mylast remaining asset. GESTURE ATLAS Here come the zeppelins their shapes shadowdistance.…

ON THE DEATHS OF FRIENDS Either they just dieor they get sick and die of the sicknessor they get sick, recover, then die of something else,or they get sick, appear to recover,then die of the same thing,the sickness coming backto take another bite out of youin the forest of your final hours. And there are other ways,which will not be considered here.In the evening, I closed my eyesby the water’s edge and I pretendedthis is what it will look likeor will not look like,this is where my friends keep going,a “place” only in quotation marks, where instead of oxygen, there is silenceunbroken by the bark of a fox in winteror the whine of an unattended kettle.With eyes still closed,I ran in the dark toward that silence,like a man running along…

NATHANIEL MACKEY In an era when poetry is increasingly compressed to fit our iPhone screens, Nathaniel Mackey has been writing two astonishing long poems—“Mu” and Song of the Andoumboulou—across multiple books for the past thirty-five years. “Mu” and Song of the Andoumboulou are two ongoing sequences beaded with his insights on cosmology, grief, ancestry, migration, and black life. The utterance mu suggests “mouth,” “myth,” but also “muse,” whereas Mackey defines Andoumboulou, taken from Dogon myth, as “a rough draft of human being, the work-in-progress we continue to be…. The song of the Andoumboulou is one of striving, strain, abrasion, an all but asthmatic song of aspiration.” Perhaps more than any other contemporary poet, Mackey is deeply inspired by jazz, especially Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Don Cherry, and John Coltrane, all…

FOREVER Once, in a room no bigger than the bed,I made love with a girl. Have you ever made love with a girl?Once I hadn’t, then I had. A girl was looking up at me.She was lying on the grass. Once, after a terrible fight, I made love with a girl.We were children again. Once, eating ice cream,I smelled her body on my hands. The first time I made love with a girl I was scared;I thought I would hurt her. Once in Italy and, on the same day,Once in France. Remember that week in the cabin?The time in front of the fire, when everyone else was asleep? Once, we made love to make a baby.Once, a baby was sleeping on the bed. I walked across the park.A girl pulled…

THE SECOND OLGA My grandmother had eight children,one of them twice. The first Olga liveda mere month, succeeded by my mother,the second Olga, dragged from childhoodeach Sunday to face her fate—a stone at Calvary Cemeterycarved with her name. She treated the maze of gravesas a game, a way of dealing with the worldthat ended only when she restednext to her sister. A lifetime of wishingthe rules clear: winners and losers apart,the dead and the living unmistakably dividedinto horizontal versus vertical shapes.And gender— a simple matterof pink or blue unlike the tangled impulsesthat sparked her fiery nature as a girlwhen she spun a viciouscat’s-eye marble off her thumb,and held her own in a knife-flinging gameof five-finger fillet. Street play gave wayto checkers, chess, crosswords, and acrostics,extending later to her irrepressible accountingas…

SENAA AHMAD’s fiction appears in Lightspeed, Uncanny Magazine, and Strange Horizons. She is a graduate of the Clarion Workshop. JESSE BALL is an author. His works have been published in many parts of the world and translated into seventeen languages. GRIFFIN BROWN is a poet and composer published in Prelude, The Yale Literary Magazine, and other journals. His latest record is Untitled/Live in the Virtual World. BILLY COLLINS is a former U.S. poet laureate and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent collection is The Rain in Portugal. EDWIDGE DANTICAT’s most recent book is the short story collection Everything Inside. She was a 2009 MacArthur Fellow. PETER FILKINS teaches at Bard College and has published four collections of poetry. His new book, Water/Music, will…

RACHEL CUSK Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 to British parents, who moved the family to Los Angeles, then to England, where Cusk lives to this day. She began publishing in her midtwenties—clever and assured novels featuring men and women attempting, with little success, to manage their anchorless lives in a bewildering, loveless world. Then, after having two daughters in quick succession, she began writing essayistically about her life. Her memoir A Life’s Work (2001) dealt directly with the existential, social, and intellectual struggles of early motherhood. The book received praise for its honesty and intelligence, and also assault for its perceived solipsism and negativity. A Life’s Work seemed to announce a new beginning for Cusk as an artist, yet it would be almost a decade before she…

BETH NGUYEN When my son Henry was a year old I took him to Boston to meet my mother. She didn’t show up. It turned out that she had gone to Foxwoods Casino instead, which sounds bad and maybe was, but it had been three years since I’d seen her or even spoken to her; we wouldn’t see each other for seven more. I couldn’t blame her for trying her luck elsewhere. “Birth mother” doesn’t seem the right term for her and neither does “biological mother,” which implies an adoption story. “Real mother” forgets my stepmother, who has been in my life since I was three. I never know how to refer to the woman who gave birth to me, who was my first mother, who did not leave me…

HUNGER Weeks after her death I came to the garden windowto marvel at sudden pale feathers catching, scatteringpast the rainy glass. I looked for magic everywhere.Signs from the afterlife that I was, indeed, distinct.Beneath the talon of a red-tailed hawk a pigeonmoved briefly until it didn’t. The hawk strippedthe common bird, piercing its thick neck. Beak probing bodyuntil I could see the blood from where I stood inside.This could happen, naturally enough, even in Brooklyn.This could happen whether or not my mother was dead.I didn’t eat for weeks because it felt wrong to want bread & milk.The hawk’s face turning red, beautiful as it plucked & pickedits silver-white prey apart. It wasn’t magic, but hungrily, I watched.As if I didn’t know memory could devour corpsescaught alive in midair. I opened…

It was in The Black Book, edited by Toni Morrison, that I first learned that before Christopher Columbus ever thought of my part of the world, the Caribbean, as new, Africans had already been there. Not as enslaved people but as traders and warriors. Among the many things stolen by Columbus and his men from the Arawak, Taíno, and other populations of the Americas were spearheads made of guanín, an alloy of copper, silver, and gold. When asked about the origins of these rather beautiful and sophisticated weapons, the indigenous leaders told Columbus, according to his journals, that they had come from Negro people from the south and southeast. Later, when enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas to replace the worked-to-death, massacred indigenous population, many chose death over enslavement.…

SENAA AHMAD There was a man, let’s call him Henry VIII. There was his wife, let’s call her Anne B. Let’s give them a castle and make it nice. Let’s give her many boy babies but make them dead. Let’s give him a fussy way of being. Let’s make her smart and sneaky, because it’s such a mean thing to do. Let’s make it so she can’t escape. Let’s seal the bottle, and shake it, and shake until our hands fall off. IT TAKES TWO SWINGS to cut off her head. Everyone does their best to pretend that the first one didn’t happen. In the awkward silence afterward, the swordsman says something about mercy or justice, a strangely fervent soliloquy in French that might have made Anne herself emotional, but…

TRUST: VIEW OF PROPERTY I am named in my mother’s trustbut no one knows how to find her land. Bounded to the north by the Southern Pacific Railroad,east by the heirs of Dugas, Robichaux,west by a gravel road. How much of this do I own? View of: Property containing 25 arpents,more or less. Three above tractsforming one contiguous body. Put your mouth against the crust, try to soften it. Has it water, has it lights, cypress standsor tallow talons capped with froth,white wax invasive berriespoked from the seedpod? How far? Can I live there? Address: TBDSwitchgrass, bluestem, brownseed paspalum. Outside, oak limbs like meandering steamorgans hung with doves, breasts against bark.My father talks. You may not think money is important now, little girl, but you will. Who forgets to sign…

ORANGE TREE A ginkgo leaf like a splayed ass A begonia leaf is a pebbled surfacegreen and burgundy A long and narrow leaf curls down All the different methodsof extending yourself so the sunmight better touch you Serrated edges of the teardropnettle leaves sting your fingers The nursery labels everythingand so assigns appearancesto names I only know from fiction Old novels set in houses with gardenswhere the lovers meetor someone paces, thinking Jonquil and clematis Omniscient narratorconceived by a dead person From the limb of a sapling in a silver tubthe photo of a future flowerdangles by a plastic noose Years ago, you biked homewith a leaf tucked under your helmetand taped it by its stem up on the door I try to force my soul up to the surface…

ANDREW MARTIN They had finished reading War and Peace, and now they were celebrating their triumph at a Russian supper club in Brighton Beach. There were twelve of them seated at the long table (“Just like that painting of what’s-his-name’s dinner, minus what’s-his-name,” Kyla said brightly), and, well, Derek assumed that at least half had probably finished War and Peace. Or, fine: he imagined it was safe to say that, on the whole, the table had at least started reading War and Peace. Derek had made it to within a hundred pages of the end, though he had admittedly skimmed a little down the stretch. He knew that Pierre and Natasha got together, which had begun to seem structurally inevitable at some point—in approximately ten thousand pages there were only…

Cover: © Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, courtesy of Tiwani Contemporary. Pages 34–62, courtesy of Rachel Cusk; pages 104–21, © Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, courtesy of Tiwani Contemporary; pages 144, 153, 161, courtesy of Nathaniel Mackey; page 156, photo by Roia Ferragallo; page 167, photo by cris cheek. The Plimpton Circle is a remarkable group of individuals and organizations whose contributions of $2,500 or more help advance the work of The Paris Review Foundation. The Foundation gratefully acknowledges: 1919 Investment Counsel • David M. Adler • Aēsop • Alfred A. Knopf • The Anna-Maria & Stephen Kellen Foundation • Jeff Antebi • Gale Arnold • R. Scott Asen • Debbie & Mark Attanasio • Amanda Urban & Ken Auletta • Kyra Tirana Barry • Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos & Adam Bartos • Alexandra Styron…