Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2025 (252) från The Paris Review

July 27, 1891 Edmund Bliss took three reluctant steps back from the stall Mrs. Simpson had asked him to erect. (This was no small commission—Mrs. Simpson sat on the fête committee the way stone lions sit on pediments.) The canvas was pink and yellow, and looked very smart against the grass, with the gleam of the vicar’s conservatory behind it, but there could be no question that the structure slouched on one side, like a man leaning against a bar, if that man were devastated by drink. Edmund went forward and pulled at the poles a bit. Then he retreated and looked about him with an amiable helplessness. The day was already hot and glaring. Everywhere stalls were assembled, canvases taut and angles correct. Edmund put his hands in his…

the future will we inherit everythingon the internet:miles of sand melted into windows, click let’s try a moredomestic framing, angle your handsin the shape of a rooftop, someone was waiting,look he standsat the kitchen sink watching trees seetheor maybe doubled over in private pain—I thinkit’s my sister?they wouldn’t give her an epidural, small risk of pushingink into the spine besides, things happen inside houses,facing away from the detonationon TV and whatever comes after, she hangs laundry and buriesa cat in the backyard—that retracted attitudeI don’t wanna scare you but it’s right there I hovered by Atlantic watching headlights comb pedestrians,the traffic’s choral plunge forward, everyone in the world headinghomeexcept me—a childhood feelingso in my mind I reached for you, the person I loved and we weren’t in the city we…

Anne Collier was born in Los Angeles in 1970. The images in Auras were taken between 2003 and 2004 at a downtown Oakland psychic shop, where Collier brought her friends and mentors to have their aura portraits taken. She would direct each shot and one of the store owners would press the shutter of a Polaroid camera attached to electrothermal sensors on which the subjects rested their hands. (Collier prefers not to share the printouts that the store supplied to explain each aura’s colors.) Despite having “doubts with regards to the genre’s claims for objectivity,” she wrote in her notes at the time, “I hold a sincere desire to ‘believe.’”…

Fanny Howe was born in 1940 in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in a family of intellectuals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the middle child of three girls. Her mother was the Irish playwright and novelist Mary Manning, who founded the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge and was a friend of Samuel Beckett and Edward Gorey; her father, Mark DeWolfe Howe, was a legal historian and Harvard professor descended from the Quincy family—an anchor of the Boston Brahmin class—who wrote the official biography of the Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and was an open critic of McCarthyism. In The Winter Sun, her 2009 work of autobiography, Howe describes a childhood torn between the force fields of her two parents. Her elder sister, Susan Howe, is another giant of American poetry.…

Outpost Then I went back & this time nothing stopped me.The same nurse received me but this time the not-stopping fades.We sit close on the stairwell & people walk between us. We seepthrough them like smoke. The same people I knewstill here, but partof the freedom.Your hand is feathered in stone & eats snow in the winter. Is ittime to go? Winterrises higher.Remembering, we head back to the frontier outpostto buy estrogen.Imperial soldiers receive us on the path. They are thick smokespinning outof a core of smoke. They blow toward us, sneakinto the mesh of our hair & we lose, lose the battle, only thebattle. Thenwe are there.I took the pill of estradiol. My feet hurt.Clumps of oak blew from the trees, fell in my way as I walked thestraight…

Cover: © Tyler Mitchell, courtesy of the artist and Gagosian. Page 14, © Celia Paul, courtesy of the artist, photographs by Dan Jackson; pages 34, 40, courtesy of Marie NDiaye; page 45, © Louis Monier, courtesy of Bridgeman Images; page 50, © Renaud Monfourny; page 57, © Reuters; pages 97, 99–112, © Anne Collier, courtesy of Anne Collier, Anton Kern Gallery (New York), Galerie Neu (Berlin), Gladstone Gallery (Brussels), and The Modern Institute / Toby Webster Ltd. (Glasgow); page 134, courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Fanny Howe papers; pages 138, 143, 146, 150, 153, 155, 156, 159, 162, 164, 167, courtesy of Fanny Howe; pages 171–183, © Alessandro Teoldi, courtesy of the artist and Marinaro Gallery, New York. The Plimpton Circle is a remarkable group…

its bottomsmysterious ocean mirrorsbeing that blazethat fail at spawned oxygen metersthat rivet as spectral gladiolinever by barren transmixture but by holographic mirrorsthat spiral & transmute by miraculous living patternthat forgo impasse by pure eventnot unlike hylic registration that abounds with deficitbeing amplification by windby exploded crystallography sans formational shelternever scaled by poisoned algae by summoned mythical beckoningnot riotous calligraphyor delimited doctrinal maze that tends to scramble its own mazesnot as deficitor by torrential afflictionbut code beyond reversalnot as philosophical expenditure being torrential by unknownemergence…

Navini had expected the visit to involve some kind of conflict or tension, which was what usually happened when they spent time together after a long separation, but the novelty of her mother’s presence in New York—the sheer strangeness of seeing her there in the apartment—seemed to bring about a suspension of their usual patterns, and their first few days together were pleasantly uneventful, peaceful even. They managed to leave the apartment by ten o’clock most mornings, and knowing that her mother would feel cheated if they didn’t visit the city’s more iconic landmarks, Navini took her to Times Square and Central Park on their first full day, to the Empire State Building the day after, and the World Trade Center memorial the day after that. It required considerable effort…

The dead are carried away in tote bags.Because they got carried away, they are borne away.Only some of those borne away got carried away.Some of the others borne away were newly born or else had bornethem.They got borne away from home. Or was it to home.What is home. Is it where they still bear with you when you get carried away.Or is it where they still bear you around when you getcarried away.What parts of speech become the dead in translation.Perhaps those about to be interred are interpreted. Alas, they aretranslated.They are not interpreted by the god of sleep. They are translatedby the bare power of the thunderbolt.They are newly borne. They are still borne in tote bags.What parts of speech may make the borne and the bearers bearablein tote…

Alessandro Teoldi was born in Milan, Italy, in 1987 and moved to New York City in 2011. His work falls between collage and painting, incorporating textiles, stitching, staining, and drawing. The compositions in Ingredienti, made for the Review, take inspiration from Conrad Marca-Relli and the Italian Modernists Giorgio Morandi, Felice Casorati, and Mario Sironi. Working in layers, Teoldi pasted dyed linen and cotton on canvas, adding texture with oil paint, charcoal, ink, soft pastels, color graphite, and acrylic gouache.…

The twins were strolling around the lake with their sage, Jimmy. This was a little joke they shared, for he was not their sage. He was the son of their croquet coach from long ago and had been with them now for many years as friend and indispensable companion. The twins were Camilla and Candida. Camilla’s name was precept, a concept, coming from a long tradition, Virgil’s warrior girl, beautiful, virginal, agile, strong, and valiant, who fights on the wrong side, performs prodigies of bravery, and though defeated inspires passionate regard in the opposing heroes. Candida, on the other hand, was a parasite, a fungus, was it not? Despite the grave differences their names suggested, they appeared identical and Jimmy could scarcely tell them apart. They were passing along a…

New Members Elizabeth Alexander Adam Gopnik Gish Jen Chang-rae Lee Daniel Mendelsohn Claire Messud Darryl Pinckney Jesmyn Ward New American Honorary Member Angela Davis Arts and Letters Awards Marie Howe Jenny McPhee Nell Painter Ed Park Rowan Ricardo Phillips Robert Sullivan Emily Wilson Paul Yoon Benjamin Hadley Danks Award Sylvia Khoury E. M. Forster Award Johny Pitts Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction Nora Lange for Us Fools Addison M. Metcalf Award Rita Bullwinkel Rosenthal Family Foundation Award Kaveh Akbar for Martyr! John Updike Award Spencer Reece Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award Jamel Brinkley E. B. White Award Ruta Sepetys Award of Merit Medal for the Short Story Charles D’Ambrosio Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts Wendy Lesser Gold Medal for Fiction Don DeLillo William Dean Howells Medal Louise…

Marie NDiaye’s books are often violent, but the violence takes highly particular forms. A person might find herself suddenly called a different name by everyone around her, like Fanny in Among Family (1990, translation 1997), or pregnant with a strange creature, as does Nadia in My Heart Hemmed In (2007, 2017). A lawyer might try to comprehend an act of infanticide; a woman working in a hotel might find herself in a sexual relationship with her boss, who has their encounters filmed. The shocking nature of such scenarios is offset by NDiaye’s prose, precise and formal, with a restraint that adds to her work’s unnerving quality: a placidity where one might expect horror. Claire Denis, with whom NDiaye wrote the screenplay for the film White Material (2009), has described her…

“He is prone. Smoke on the iced lake, freer …” He is prone. Smoke on the iced lake, freerthan Henry, hovers.Something is beingmade or is a something—Henry no seer—he may go into that line—unmade being?Now Henry too is drifting away black. Henry Incinerator danced all nightdestroying. God of many headswhose some were seeing,bother him with clamps & light,rear-mirrors. Mercy diedof infantile. This is the locked ward.An eye-y man to make teeth chatterwalks in & looks at the smoke & backs out.The only one here unafraid is keys.Call on Hell’s bardfor a paean mere. “Nothing ruffled or made glare or could dismay …” Nothing ruffled or made glare or could dismaywhatever the mental weatherHenry’s astonishing friend Proteus.His view of it all like a waltzing boatfound it well, whatever the sounding:he rode…

The air seemed like it might tip into spring at any moment. The girls were playing with Alexandra Lebedev, who went to Catholic school and always stripped off her uniform and ran around half nude as soon as she got to the playground. I peeled pith from orange segments and sat with Mrs. Lebedev as she wolfed down the remains of her daughter’s lunch box. She usually interrogated me nonstop about the Jessens (What do Jan and Sigrid feed the girls for dinner? How often do Sigrid’s parents visit? Does DiCaprio really collect Jan’s work?), but now that she had successfully ingratiated herself with my employers, the only thing she wanted to talk about was this sculpture she owned. It was ugly and weird, slender pieces of glass and porcelain…

Loosely inspired by the occupation of the Church of Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle in Paris by a group of more than two hundred “sanspapiers”—undocumented immigrants—led by a Senegalese woman named Madjiguène Cissé, from June 28 to August 23, 1996. THE UNDOCUMENTED Men, women. African men, African women. —My name is Ba … Bamba. —My name is Maré … Soumaré. —My name is Katé … Niakaté. —I’m Kara … Tounkara. —I’m Hadji … Alhadji. —My name is Madjiguène Cissé … and let me tell you, all of us are liars in one way or another. —Real liars … —We’re all identity thieves. —By which I mean, we go by names that aren’t ours. —(in unison) Identity thieves! —Or we don’t go by the names we should. —(in unison) Identity fraud! —It’s…

WILL ALEXANDER is a poet, aphorist, essayist, novelist, shortfiction writer, visual artist, and piano accompanist. ANUK ARUDPRAGASAM is the author of The Story of a Brief Marriage and A Passage North. His third novel will be published by Riverhead in 2027. JOHN BERRYMAN (1914–1972) was a poet and scholar. He won the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs in 1965. Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, edited by Shane McCrae, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this winter. YONGYU CHEN’s first book of poems, a winner of the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize, is forthcoming from Nightboat in spring 2026. ANNE COLLIER is a visual artist. TOM CREWE’s first novel, The New Life, won the Orwell Political Fiction Book Prize. He is a contributing editor of the London Review of…