Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2024 (247) från The Paris Review

I’ve always loved salmon. Not to eat, as I don’t eat fish, but I’ve always loved salmon in general because salmon jump and no one knows why. They jump all over the place—out of rivers, up waterfalls. Some say they jump to clean their gills. Others say they jump for joy, because they love the smell of fresh rainwater. Still others say they jump to view their territory. It is certain that the salmon are jumping, but there is no absolute certainty as to why they jump. You could say that this is true of many things. We are certain we are alive, but we are uncertain why. We are certain we are conscious, but we are uncertain why. Almost all “why” questions draw you into a realm of uncertainty,…

1. As a toddler she had caused a sensation in her family when she announced she wanted to live in a little hole like the ant. Not an ant, the ant. This might have been misheard. She was an easygoing child, not particularly thoughtful and stubbornly inartistic. Her temperament was not in the least unruly or mystical. But when she was fourteen she was struck in the head by a surfboard and almost drowned. In a matter of moments she became an NDE-er, a member of that serene and suspect tribe of tinselly-like persuasion. Attempting to articulate her near-death experience, she found it differed scarcely at all from thousands of other accounts. There was the light, the empty road, the endless shore, the light, the tunnel, the ascent, the view…

is a stone some sayhelps put a feverish childto sleep and othersclaim it wakes actorsfrom the necessarytrance of illusion to become themselves again it comes in many colorslike the strange redstone set into the Russian imperial crowneveryone thoughtwas the second-largest ruby in the worldand maybe it isbut might be tourmalinewhich would explain certain dreamsof Catherine the Great I love greentourmaline the most to look at itis to become a leaf fallinginto a bottomless mirror you look inand see not yourselfbut the final pure lake you are falling toward and the sun refuses to setso you forget your face and lie downin the street with everyoneand stop everything its green glow warm in your right hand your ear pressed to the asphaltlistening for further instructions…

On the cold night of November 24, 1997, before Shahid disappeared forever, I thought I was his closest friend, his only confidant. We had known each other since we were children, attended primary and high school together, even gone to the same college in Lahore, but he was bewildering from the start. He was fortunate enough to be the son of a wealthy feudal lord and not of an ordinary civil servant like me, but when I think back to his childhood, it seems unlikely that he should have gone on to take the remotest interest in philosophy. His three brothers all dropped out of school, and everyone knew that his father, Malik Aslam, was barely literate. Malik Sahib liked to brag that he’d read just one book in his…

I’m a Keats botso are youour living handsheld toward each otheron the internetsolution sweetI stood on a peakin Darien, googledmy errorI am so colonialI am tubercularmy alveoli a-swellmy actual bloodyour actual bloodwe made loveI planted basilI planted your headin my basil potI cut it offin my headand in my headplanted your headin a basil potWe call thisimaginationor fancydebate whichYou want a draughtof vintage blushfulbut the fountain’s drythe spring the well’s gone drythe inkwell this AIcan’t use but knowsalgorithmicallyThis living living handthat livesand lo! the death maskof publication a scholarsays at a conferencein Germany.Düsseldorfor BiarritzI clearly made the wrongchoice I went to Romeand died. You lived onand married someoneelse you whore Fanny.That’s what I saygravely. I’m John Keats.Men do whatever they canover and over and overand we try to restrain themby…

1. Bzzzzzzzzzzzz … the humming the soughing the ceaseless the droning the sizzling the moaning the whirring the hissing the whizzing “murmuring of innumerable bees” “They forage with wit and dexterity”“they take the best from every flower”“they read the weather skillfully”“they watch for the coming of showers”“they think carefully about what they do”“they have no desires”“they care only about the future of the hive”“they excel mankind in rationality, in thatthey only recognize the common interest”“their dwelling and diet are common to all alike”“they are graven in their manners and studious of peace”“theirs is a kindness born of benevolence”“they have a system of manners that outstrips thatof all the other animals”“they live in an atmosphere pervaded thoroughly by love”“every working bee is not only an artisan;he is likewise a soldier, always…

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My first conversations with Jhumpa Lahiri took place in Rome this past July, in her apartment near the Janiculum, above Trastevere. It was an extremely hot summer—one of our meetings was on the hottest day in Rome’s history, 110 degrees—and we sat with a large fan whirring in the living room, which, as in a scene from Henry James, looks out on the rolling hills over the suburra, until it was safe to step out to the terrace in the late afternoon. Among the bric-a-brac around the apartment were bits of vintage Sicilian-orange packaging, a plaque featuring the logo of the Italian Communist Party, and, framed in a glass case, a jersey signed by the soccer player Daniele De Rossi. Lahiri was born in London in 1967 to Bengali parents…

What a sad day,full of black, blue,red, and yellow umbrellas.Everyone in the world,whatever their disposition,seemed to be crying at once,while I hit upon readingTrollope, and so remained a weekamong the grouse. That was mydisposition. Sometimes Iwould get up and move about—tea, Kleenex, cigarette,a phone call—but alwaysI returned to my lifeamong the grouse. Can youforgive me? I was aboutto ask, but like some rosethat never opened.Because I wish I werea quiet voiceless planttoo full of love and joyto move about and utterwords. Besides, there aretears which happen in a daythat it would takea lifetime to explain.…

My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s Carmen,” or “I’m calling from the post office,” or “I’d like to confirm your appointment.” But at night, if the phone rings and my father picks up, nobody answers. He waits with the receiver to his ear until he gets tired of standing there doing nothing, or asking questions into the void, or sometimes even cursing. He lowers the receiver onto its base, and though the mechanical click puts an end to the silence, he knows there is something more. It’s a time when few…

1.That summer I learned Biblical Hebrewwith Christian women heaving themselvestoward ministry one brick building at a time.We got along well, they and I and our teacher,a religious studies graduate student who spenteight hours a day transmitting the grammarand syntactical rules of ancient languages,afternoons training one student in Ethiopic,mornings with the six of us.Biblical Hebrew conveys meaningthrough roots, he taught us. Each rootconsists of three consonants. OK.Some roots appear the same but differin meaning or pronunciation. Oh no,we groaned. Things were getting complicated.The meanings we’d have to look upin our Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicons;the pronunciations we’d learn to recognizethanks to a vowel system long ago standardizedfrom the Masoretic text. When will you teach ushow to look things up? one of us asked.The rest of us cooed. The teacher must have said lateror soon.…

I didn’t understand. If that boy couldn’t read, why was he up there? The girl they originally had hosting the ceremony didn’t show, but why they put that boy there? Just because he volunteer for everything? You can’t read off enthusiasm. It made the whole school look trash. All he had to do was basically read the name of someone he already knew or sound out the first part and guess. He looking down at the paper like it’s an awkward lift. If he mispronounced my name, I’d snatch the mic and say, “Say it correctly. De-ra-ja-nae, boy! I know you. We know each other. Sound it out. Guess better. Use what’s around you.” People wanted to hear they name said so they could leave. He was up there at…

GBENGA ADESINA is a poet and essayist. FARAH AL QASIMI is a visual artist. ELIJAH BAILEY is at work on a novel and a short-story collection. SANA R. CHAUDHRY’s Writing Trauma: The Politics of Mute Speech in the Urdu Short Story is forthcoming from Clemson University Press in spring 2025. JULIEN COLUMEAU’s novellas and short stories have been published in Pakistan and India. ELISA GABBERT’s Any Person Is the Only Self: Essays will be published in summer 2024 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. JOANNA KAVENNA’s novels include A Field Guide to Reality, Inglorious, and Zed. JESSICA LASER’s third collection of poems, The Goner School, will be published by the University of Iowa Press in fall 2024. MEGAN MCDOWELL is an award-winning translator of Spanishlanguage literature. MAUREEN N. MCLANE’s essay collection…

France won the World Cup.Our dark-goggled dictator died from eating a poisoned red applethough everyone knew it was the CIA. We lived miles from the Atlantic.We watched Dr. Dolittle, Titanic, The Mask of Zorro. Our grandfather, purblind and waitingfor the Kingdom of God, sat on a throne in his dark room, translating Dante.The Galileo space probe revealed there was an entire ocean hiding beneath a sheetof ice in Jupiter’s moon. The Yangtze River in China lost its nerveand wanted vengeance. Elsewhere a desert caught fire.We got a plastic green turtle and named it Sir Desmond Tutu.A snake entered our house through the drain and like any good son, I ranand hid under the bed. Google became a thing.Viagra became a thing. In July, it flooded at night and a wind…

hasten slowly and you shall soon arrivepriyanka said, quoting milarepa after all this timemy patience waned its wayinto the dipping sun with the pin-tailed onewhose knowledge was encyclopedic…. betelgeuse is turning on and offlike your love—everybody knowsit’s dying. the angels might get so sadknowing what I doas I mourn over youin this weird atonal interlude and then to knowwhat makes a pleasant musicwho played their fiddle knee-to-knee and whosewings beat in tawdry time cinch up your saddlewhat could be worsethan a home without a horse you may never know my mindand you may neverstroke its thighand that is how you’ll gounto the clotted breast of god…

Alice Notley lives in a studio apartment up a single flight of stairs, on the Right Bank in Paris. Her front door is labeled with her name, in looped handwriting on Scotch tape. The small kitchen, which I saw used only for the making of espresso, leads into Notley’s bedroom, the bed neatly made with gray sheets. Past that is the workspace jammed with countless books, many given to her or written by friends—among them Jim Carroll, Eileen Myles, Leslie Scalapino, Allen Ginsberg, and Anne Waldman. Several books on Latin prosody were gifts over the years from Al DiPippo, Notley’s high school Latin teacher in Needles, California—the dedicatee of Certain Magical Acts (2016). There are entire shelves occupied by the works of Ted Berrigan (1934–1983), her first husband and the…

Farah Al Qasimi’s first photographs were of the dreary New Haven winter: reflections in water, a dead cat, an angry dog. She was an undergraduate at the Yale School of Art, where in 2017 she also received her M.F.A. Since then, Al Qasimi has turned her lens to more vibrant urban environments, making sometimes staged, sometimes spontaneous photographs of daily life in the United Arab Emirates. The images in Miracle Garden were taken in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Ras al-Khaimah, where Al Qasimi’s family is from. Here, as elsewhere in her work, simulations of natural phenomena—floral and leopard-print fabrics, astroturf sold by the square meter, fake roses on the blinged-out dashboard of a truck whose driver proudly swung open his door for the camera—are juxtaposed with real plants and animals,…

Cover: Courtesy of Nicolas Party and the Modern Institute /Toby Webster Ltd. Page 12, courtesy of Alice Notley; pages 32, 36, 39, 42, 45, 48, 52, 55, 56, courtesy of Jhumpa Lahiri; page 59, photograph by Marco Delogu, courtesy of Jhumpa Lahiri; pages 60, 63, courtesy of Jhumpa Lahiri; pages 94–107, courtesy of Chris Oh and Fortnight Institute; pages 162, 166, 169, 171, 174, 177, courtesy of Alice Notley; page 180, photograph by Sheree Levin, courtesy of Alice Notley; page 183, photograph by Susan Cataldo, courtesy of Alice Notley; pages 184, courtesy of Alice Notley; page 189, photograph by Axel Dupeux, courtesy of Alice Notley; page 192, courtesy of Alice Notley; pages 214–227, courtesy of Farah Al Qasimi.…