Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2022 (240) från 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…

The pack of boys had released their first album in Seoul two years ago, and now they were selling out corporate arenas and Olympic stadiums all over the world. I was familiar with the story of their explosive ascent, how the premiere of their latest music video had triggered a power outage across an entire Pacific island. I knew they were performers of supernatural charisma whose concerts could leave a fan permanently destabilized, unable to return to the spiritual attenuation of her daily life. I also knew about the boys’ exceptional profundity in matters of the heart, how they offered that same fan her only chance of survival in a world they’d exposed for the risible fraud that it was. At least this was what I’d derived from hours of…

All that is left to one who grievesIs convalescence. No change of heart or spiritualConversion, for the heart has changedAnd the soul has been convertedTo a thing that seesHow much it costs to lose a friend it loved.—Gilgamesh, translated by Herbert Mason Had the king of Uruk never wrestled Enkidu,the wild man of the steppe, and just barely defeated himon points, he never would have fallen in love with himwith a love that was greater than that for a woman,nor asked him to go hunting with him in the Sacred Forestfor the monster guardian, Humbaba, the beginningof history as an ageless story would never have happened. Had the king never suffered the loss of himselfin another, he never would have known himselfas someone less than himself without his beloved,nor hurt…

My grandfather came to live with me. There was nowhere else for him to go. What had happened to all his children? Death, decay, exile—I hardly know. My own parents died of pain. But I must not be too gloomy, at the beginning, or you will leave me, and that, I suppose, is what I dread most. Who would begin a story if he knew it were to end with a climbing chariot or a cross? The landlady discovered an extra bed somewhere and put it in my room. She raised the rent from nine to eleven dollars. After all, she said, it’s another person using the bathroom. She was right. The poor old man had a weak bladder and he also had to spit frequently. I was surprised at…

Zero your scales to the burden of a lash, DearJustice, but let Tituba clumsy the Magistrates’minds with a wag of her wizened index. A flightrisk near forests of the Wampanoag where Christianssavaged Queen Weetamoo’s corpse, what else mightTituba, nonwhite and woman, haunt but a marginof error? She’s a catbird’s song trapped in the chimney.She’s egg whites in water, she is the tumescenceof smoke. Dear Mami Wata, let Tituba proveto be the stone that splits the stream of their vision.Let her renounce sight and be unseen. Let hercough ground coral in the shedding of a pewtermoon, that she, of all the innocents, should live.Dear Three-Headed Hecate, replace her, the unthoughtthought, with wax, twigs, horsehair, and straw. Let herappear neither as a witness nor as evidence. As withthe talking dog, let her…

I walk into the orchid show with Ed. As soon as I see the tumultuous hall I know he won’t last long. Ed walks like an old man though he is forty. After ten minutes on his feet, he vomits on some purple phalaenopsis. I get him outside through a fire exit and he vomits into the Bay. I find him a chair and he goes right to sleep, body caved in. Once Ed understood that he would not have a long life, he began working on himself, guided by banal authorities. He inhabits them like an eccentric tenant, his innocence repurposing them: Louise Hay, The AIDS Book: Creating a Positive Approach. Magazine articles: “Positive Thinking as a Cure.” A culture too stupid to know what it is asking directs…

In the Gold Creek basina ponderosa trunk’socher plates of barkconverge with blackfault lines we decidesmell like cinnamon.I shoulder a blanket,you the flask wheregin swishes. Rustinghistorically, chassisfrom settler wagonsare ragged beds forMontana wheatgrass.Sickle-shadow moonspock the ground viaan off-center eclipse.The valley otherwisecharred, this glade isold-growth miracle.Behind an iron fenceof pointy fleurs-de-lis,sun-dappled pioneerheadstones could bemy ancestor’sultimate colony.Leaving, we passedan SUV’s worth ofdudes spraying treeswith semiautomatics.It’s national forest landnow. A citizen can dowhatever he likes there.…

Grand Tour of Our Disintegration BERLIN We stay in the apartment of a Croatian couple, husband and wife,both in love with our friend M.,a professional flautist, long-fingered and heron-legged. They’vegone to Zagreb to witness a mother’s death.For the duration, my husband and I walk their mutt, Streetboy,in Tempelhof Field.My husband hates Streetboy. Streetboy retaliates. Streetboy peeson our pillows. I forgive Streetboywithout hesitation. I pity Streetboy like I pity anyone entrustedto my care. If I were virtuous,Streetboy’s bladder would have lasted the five flights and threeblocks to Tempelhof.My husband reminisces about when he lived here a decade ago.One winter darkso insistently that on the first day of real spring sun, he wept.Yet he maintains he was happy. He keeps describing happinessas Streetboy lunges for a bicycleand almost dies, which wouldn’t have…

Cover: © Stanley Whitney, courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York. Page 10, courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York; page 50, courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana; pages 55, 58, courtesy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o; page 61, courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University; page 62, courtesy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o; pages 65, 66, courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University; page 71, © Susan Greenhill, courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University; page 72, photograph by Frank Ward, courtesy of Amherst College Archives and Special Collections and the Lilly Library at Indiana University; page 74, © Annalisa Teuscher, courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University; page 77, courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University; page 81, courtesy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o;…

People got out in strange ways. No stranger, I suppose, than the ways they got in. One year an American military helicopter flew too low over an Italian ski village, killing two families headed up the lift. A woman at Hillcrest had Italian citizenship and, like that, release became a reparation. Just like that it could happen. “The ski-lift option,” my mother called it. “Who knew?” When a woman went free her friends and not-friends could watch from the north side of the mess hall to see her descent. But watching her was like watching that joke where a person stands behind a couch and pretends to walk down stairs that aren’t there by crouching lower and lower, then falling over. The women up top could watch the one woman…

Whoo, whoo. An owl in the tallest blue spruce. Before sunrise.Patches of icein the driveway. Facing each other, we held a single brush in the air with ourright hands.I, left-handed, felt awkward holding it, but, holding it higherup, hebeckoned me to start. A melody played on the piano with five black keys. I heard it,walking acrosspacked snow and ice with microspikes under my shoes. I tried to bring the brush down onto the white paper, but he kept it an inch above. Whiteout. Then we pressed it down and, lifting, completed a dot. Full moon. Dogs barking, racing up and down the glassed-inhallway. Xenon,krypton, argon, neon, helium. Inert gases. Blue bottles onbranches. Nothing’sinert. Where am I? Moving the brush in the air, we made another downwardstroke, then,releasing pressure, brought it…

It is dark in the whale and hot. The air is difficult to breathe. Ira is coated in gunk, sweating in his black Speedo. The whale’s heartbeat booms and echoes like a giant drum. It’s intimidating. It sounds tribal, ritualistic, as Ira wades through the animal’s stomach in shock, up to his knees in liquid goop. He hears water gurgling and rushing. Mournful moos that go unanswered. Eventually his eyes grow accustomed to the dark. In murky gray scale he can make out the swaying surface of the goop, spotted with mounds of algae, dying shrimp, stray squid tentacles, and the occasional fish head. Surely, somewhere, there is a throat that presumably leads to the mouth, but Ira can’t find it. It must be a magical whale or the biggest…

Tightness in the chest—here’s your Golgothaunder the cross,a hill that riseswith each breath and falls when you exhale.Tightness squeezes the ocean of fish-words,and there’s no home for the pigeon to fly back to.Your place is gone, your land,everything’s occupied, frozen, dead.Nowhere to go back to—says the clock.Nowhere to go back to—says the guard at the checkpoint.Nowhere to go back to—says the doorman.There’s nowhere to go back to—sings an a cappella choir of falsecherubs.And Lily and I sense incense in the air and how an empty pocketvibrates.Here the white fish-phone in my hand curls and stays mum,and I turn on the screen, and answer the call:Nowhere to go back to—they say—but there is somewhere to go.Here’s your yellow brick road across the ocean of the living andthe dead.Just go. Translated from…

For three years we metat one or the other LES hovelchosen by Tony the Dealer,who, like all dealers,caught kicks by making you waitwhile he babied Janis, his French bulldog,or chose a new scorched parkafor the day,or breakfasted at ihop,followed by a last leisurely snortwith his girl, Jen, before he took the 7 into the city,or, reluctantly, a cab,while we waitedon the pitiful dopesick ledgeof panic.The sicker Rene got, the meaner his wit and cruel laughter,but never aimed at me,because I saw who he was,what it meant,the gift of knowing him.A year into our acquaintance, he suggested dinnerat Veselka, his favorite restaurant,a modest mealof Ukrainian pierogi and borschtat nine dollars apiece.We talked of Bonzo, how journalists were toldnot to look him in the eye“for your own safety.”Rene laughed, or cackled.He said,…

Take the Case of the Meadowlark Peak gust and west of July.Wind is full-song-singing wings,full-on whistling grass saturation. The aftercast (neither wet-bulb noroldfield lark, not dry punch, notdiablo wind) an atlas of starling- like neglect, flock-overlook. Emily Dickinson wrote:“Split the lark—and you’ll find the Music—” Sturnella neglecta … the sweet singer of the plains… An air parcel of western meadowlark.A sky of spreading yellow. Gape-jawed, famished,May lifts and drags dregsof April, aurora borealis, Corona Borealis… Accelerating notes,a melodious jumble.On the wing… singing,as if under pressure… These Birds and All Kindred Species That Roost in the Reeds Low-nesting below goldenrod.The jaundiced ones.The brood-parasitized.The brood parasites. The nest absconders.The misapprehended—for wormseed mustard,for late yellow locoweed. The ones who engender yellowumbrageamong drab Old Worlders. The wren antagonists,yellow beneath the meniscus(twayblade, tickseed, bog orchid).…

It’s 4:38 P.M., eight minutes after I usually go home, but now I’m rooting around under my chair cushion, double-checking my shirt pocket, hunting for an unmarked baggie of white bars, which I shouldn’t have left in my office, which I shouldn’t have forgotten to lock, which isn’t to demonize my clients but just to recognize that if you find yourself in a seventy-two-unit supportive housing facility for people living with HIV and with a history of homelessness, you are often in great need and without resources, and so it’s not inconceivable that you would look around an unlocked office for something to pawn at the QuickCash, especially if you’ve run out of luck doctor-shopping and are trying to buy your own benzos off your neighbor who price gouges, in…

This new lifestyle hadn’t been so bad, had it? Clean living! Or mostly clean. Carter had started drinking a smoothie in the mornings—two raw eggs cracked into a blender with a frozen banana and a scoop of wheat germ. It would have been vastly improved by a float of dark rum, but there was no more alcohol in the house: Jennifer had emptied the place out after the intervention, dumping even the vanilla extract and the Listerine. Carter drank the smoothie in three lusty gulps. Eight half-hearted pull-ups on the bar in his closet doorway. More like six, actually, but good enough. Twenty strokes of the boar-bristle hairbrush: he was a handsome man. He shot himself a toothpaste grin in the mirror. Ding, the grin said. Carter smiled wider. Michelle…

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Today we’re going to get to work on the detailsof your expression. And believe it or not,the only colors we’re going to use will be blacker than most blacks. We’ll use a black canvasand just a single finger instead of a brush.So let’s take and dab the tip of a pointer finger into the black like so. And now we’re going to covereverything between jawbone and temple,cheek and nostril, on both sides of the mouth, in black. You folks at home are welcome to use a thumb.Use a pinkie or a pinkie toe. I just want you to enjoyyourselves. Get the feel of the color until it suits you. And just gently tap, tap gently the colorinto the shape of a forehead. There we go.Maybe like we’re touching a tiny…

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a revolutionary. Take nearly any pressing political topic: the horrors of incarceration, the erasure of indigeneity, the oppression of the poor, the rights of the working class, the corrosive effects of neoliberalism. You’ll find in Ngũgĩ’s oeuvre—his fiction, his criticism, his theory—an incisive, often prescient treatment of the issue, one that always attends to the conflicts that underlie it. This is because Ngũgĩ is a Marxist thinker. In our conversation in early 2021, we discussed his fascination with the idea of contraries: “I talk about struggle a lot, dialectical struggle, dialectics of Marx, dialectics of Hegel,” he said. Born James Ngũgĩ in 1938 in a village in Limuru, Kenya, he attended Alliance High School, a missionary boarding school in the nearby town of Kikuyu, and in…

Our Father, Big Chief in Heaven Our Father,big chief in heaven,I sent my assistant Calixtoto make an appointmentwith Her Highness, la licenciada,who has left for lunch before noon,gone for the day, was fired, or fled,who can tell; the third directorat this post in fifteen months. Deliver usfrom the bearded tenorwho schedules at said institution,busy today trimming his whiskers—“My will be done. Thy kingdom come…back tomorrow.” Forgive usour trespasses, aswe forgive el notario,who ought to be called el Notorious,for having us wait three monthsfor his return call, so Calixto and wifecan finally sign the deed on their firsthome, having given up on thecall from their own notario, evenslower than mine, and alreadywaiting weary. Everythingon earth is donewith papeles, signatures, patience,and the arrival of others, whosedestiny is out of our hands, especiallyif…

My understanding of my family’s religion was that we didn’t have to go to church if we didn’t want to and that our belief in God was tenuous at best. I grasped the seventh principle, “the interconnected web of all existence,” and I understood the humanist tradition in a vague sense, but the truth is I didn’t think about Unitarianism all that much. I hadn’t been to church in months. That Sunday, my brother and I went with our mother. We sat five rows back, near a woman named Tamsin Brodhead. Tamsin was tall like a basketball player, and very serious. It was an unspoken rule in the congregation that we should never mention her brother to her. David Brod was the lead singer in a once popular, now aging…

Sigrid Nunez makes a policy of not inviting interviewers into the studio apartment on West Thirteenth Street where she has lived for decades. But during the last of our sessions, on Zoom, she picked up her laptop and danced me in a circle: bed tucked behind the sofa and book-laden coffee table under a large, cheerful geometric abstract painting on long-term loan from the artist, Dan Walsh, an ex-boyfriend; dining table bearing tulips and framed by walls of books; Singer sewing-machine desk with holes in it; hydrangeas on the book-filled sideboard, below the vista of a courtyard’s reddish fire escapes—“like Rear Window!” Nunez had just heard that the film adaptation of her best seller The Friend (2018), due to start shooting soon, might be in jeopardy after losing Bill Murray,…

But I start with the great Sidney Poitier because his stardom was an established part of the Freedom movement in 1964, and he was to be the chaperone of my inner awakening that dramatic year. Indianapolis, my hometown, had some brave marches and two conservative white newspapers, and one historic black newspaper, the Indianapolis Recorder, which meant that images of the civil rights movement entered our home mostly via television. Riots, Fannie Lou Hamer. Reverend King won the Nobel Peace Prize in the autumn of 1964, and everybody we knew called him Dr. King, at least for a couple of years. One of my sisters was singing “Amen,” the rocking gospel tune that Poitier, as “Schmidt,” the drifter with lost dreams of being an architect, teaches to the East German…

DAN BEVACQUA is the author of the novel Molly Bit. SANDRA CISNEROS is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist. A new collection of her poetry, Woman Without Shame, is forthcoming from Knopf this fall. HARRIET CLARK is a writer and editor who has received support from the Wallace Stegner Fellowship. She is currently at work on her first novel. EMMA CLINE is the O. Henry and Plimpton Prize–award winning author of The Girls and the short story collection Daddy. LEONARD COHEN (1934–2016) was a poet, singer, and songwriter. CHARD DENIORD is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently In My Unknowing. NATE DUKE’s debut poetry collection, A Suit of Paper Feathers, is forthcoming from Free Verse Editions in fall 2022. RACHEL B. GLASER is the author of the story…