Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2015 från The Paris Review

There he goes!” Martha was standing at the kitchen door, looking into the backyard. The door is glass, with panes separated by wooden muntins. At four, she’s just tall enough to see past the deck, down the iron stairs to the paved yard we share with Gwen, the other tenant. Ben paved it himself, last year, to make the garden more manageable. Ben enjoys this kind of project—he is a pediatric dentist and likes to be outdoors during his free time. His current enthusiasm is pineapples, which he claims can be grown even in temperate climates. The backyard is ten feet by thirty and crowded with potted pineapple plants, which he and the children spend a great deal of time watering, feeding with seaweed and fish emulsion, and just generally…

The fog lies thick over the bay, above Mt. Tamalpais a fan of clouds half the zenith high centers its spread leaves and in the hills the fog lies over the high eucalyptus, strains down the gaps, the sky and fog are no different color, are windows into each other, mirrors The fog has risen by noon these days into such warm light it seems fall in another distant climate now into dusk to dark at such dark vegetation it slows along the shore into the updrafts, flows up the avenues into the hills again, the intricate levels and eddies of cool air and warm the Pacific High’s and the Sacramento Valley’s knitting in layers over these spread cities and to sea We live here, growing, almost oblivious, in such…

Every morning he takes his daughters to school, or, in the summer holidays, to their tennis lesson. It is usually the only time he sees them during the day, since he arrives home late, long after they are asleep. So he has promised to take them to school in the morning or to their tennis lesson. It is a promise he has kept so far. Their school is on his way to work anyway. The Dansk Tennisklub involves a detour. To drive there takes twenty minutes at least. The traffic is quite heavy at that time in the morning. He talks to them, his daughters, Tine and Vikki, while he drives— about television and pop music and famous people mostly. Tine is eleven. Vikki is eight. They like to talk…

NIGHT The defensive backfield was in room 212 (Vegas). The defensive line was in 256. The touchers were in 324. The offensive line was in 432 (the Sty). The receivers and tight ends were in 440. The linebackers were in 560 (the Fracture Compound). Gear exchange was a chaotic and inefficient and lengthy and primitive process. Over the years there had been several sensible, even elegant, proposals for a more orderly exchange, but each had been ignored. As they did every year after the lottery, the men now roamed hallways with helmets, shoulder pads, and uniforms, searching for the men who required their gear, as well as for the roaming men who had the gear that they required. The cumbersome burden of the equipment was essential to the rite, as…

FROM “ A NEW ENGLISH GRAMMAR” *The Haystack’s Painting The haystack’s painting hangs in the Met; the painting of the haystack, that is, the one by Monet, not by van Gogh, the rose-blue, snow-lit one with the haystack in it. The haystack has this deal with many painters, also Millet, appearing not for a fee, nor a stake, exactly, but for the sovereign right to have your eyes back whenever it wants. *By convention, an asterisk indicates an instance of improper usage. All titles are drawn from such examples of bad grammar in Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). *They Resemble Closely They resemble closely. Side by side, who could begin to tell them apart? Eye for eye,…

A storm system was lashing North Dakota and Minnesota with snow, snow measured in feet, and was heading southeast, so Kat made the plane reservations in the cab to her Lincoln Park apartment, worried that the airport in Cherry City might close. She asked the cab to wait for her and went inside to pack her overnight bag while Justin followed her from room to room wringing his hands. Who ever would have thought that she’d pray there wouldn’t be conversation? The dream of her life, growing up with a grandfather who might say three dozen words to her in a day, was to hear talk all the time—no haven’t had my coffee yet, no just let me relax—and now silence suited her at home. Silence was peace. There’s always…

New research suggests that butterflies and moths come with mental baggage . . . left over from their lives as larvae. —Science He’d like to be at one with his new self but memories sit in him like eyes. Sometimes scent implies an unheard-of idea and he’s off but it’s just another of the given forms. You’d think flight would be decent redress, the power to sift himself through air and leave each thought in its old place, where hard feelings also could be left. He shrugs and the wings quiver with great precision, nature will have to live with what it’s done, he cannot manage even resignation without a show of grace.…

1919 Investment Counsel • Alfred A. Knopf • Anita and Marc Abramowitz • Donna Jo and William R. Acquavella • Theresa Gavin and Mark Almeida • Keith and Peggy Anderson • Lisa Capozzi and Dave Anderson • The Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation • Jeff Antebi • Winsome Brown and Claude Arpels • R. Scott Asen • Debbie and Mark Attanasio • Amanda Urban and Ken Auletta • René-Pierre and Alexis Azria • André Balazs • Kyra Tirana Barry • Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos and Adam Bartos • Alexandra Styron and Edward Beason • Patricia Birch Becker and William Becker • Helen and William Beekman • Charlotte Beers • Mr. and Mrs. Alexandre Behring • Robert Bell • Kate Bellin • Liz and Rod Berens • Kathryn and David Berg •…

what shape should I file my nails I wonder follow shape of moon usually best once I did them square lean forward please big mistake in basin please ferocious practices going on next door I hear but you know now that I think of it I’ve met dry both hands on towel I’ve met I wave at those people their friend parks in my driveway left hand to soapsuds gently gently and the light the bluish hall light did they have that before soft for cuticle also fragrant I don’t like puns do you I don’t like tricky language ah the massage this is my favorite part brief massage thumbs first but to see what they’re like I was curious I admit lift up now lift up people used to…

On Christmas Eve I wandered around my mother’s house looking for things to wrap. For the last three days I’d been slamming doors and doing cocaine and forgetting that it was the season of giving, nominally because my girlfriend, Melanie, had left me hours before our trip north to visit our respective families. If I was being fair—which I wasn’t—Melanie’s decision made sense: Why wait until after the holiday disasters? It was one less thing to hold against each other forever. Downstairs, my sister Patricia hollered for scissors. I opened the game closet and tried to find something without too many pieces missing. First Down! NFL Challenge was unopened but twenty years old. Warren Moon was an Oiler. The Oilers existed. Was it nostalgic kitsch yet? It went in the…

Although approved by Beckett, these lost translations of “Mirlitonnades” (Doggerels) have never been published, until now. We are grateful to Grove Press for allowing us to reprint the originals here. DOGGERELS vive morte ma seule saison lis blancs chrysanthèmes nids vifs abandonnés boue des feuilles d’avril beaux jours gris de givre alive dead only season mine white lilies feverfews vivid nests forsaken silt of April leaves frost fair hoar grey days ce qu’ont les yeux mal vu de bien les doigts laissé de bien filer serre-les bien les doigts les yeux le bien revient en mieux what good the eyes have ill seen good the fingers have let escape close them tight the fingers the eyes good is back better still ce qu’a de pis le coeur connu la tête…

I am not all Heere —John Donne Tired of the eighties, and the ongoing crisis in masculinity—the compliment each generation pays itself—he stared a hole in his macchiato, fished with his spoon beneath the froth. The hiss and gurgle of steam heating milk, the grinding of beans he heard as souls departing; his own strained for glimpses of moonfaced babies, pink-jowled noble savages without —ha-ha—even a shoe size, unable to feed or to clean themselves, to interrupt their gulping and wailing. “I find your beauty unsettling . . . ”—had he really said that to the girl carrying a purple yoga mat? Why is it the healthy in body and mind discover each other—likewise the maimed? More or less at random dollops of unfairness are gathered, braided, and put to…

It’s the custom for editors to keep a low profile and to underplay any changes they may make to an author’s manuscript. Gordon Lish is a different animal. Not since Maxwell Perkins has an editor been so famous—or notorious—as a sculptor of other people’s prose. As fiction editor of Esquire from 1969 to 1977, then as an editor at Knopf and of The Quarterly until 1995, Lish worked closely with many of the most daring writers of the past fifty years, including Harold Brodkey, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Barry Hannah, and Joy Williams. In an interview with this magazine in 2004, Hannah said, “Gordon Lish was a genius editor. A deep friend and mentor. He taught me how to write short stories. He would cross out everything so there’d be…

SLOAN KETTERING ODE The hospital lobby was lined with short and long views of Audubon’s birds, the tallest ones’ necks curved, all the way down, to fit into the life-size space of the double octave. When I got upstairs to my love’s brother’s door, the curtain was partly open, he was sitting up on the raised bed, back in the corner of the room, as if almost outside the scene, at the edge of a clearing, his face nearly empty of expression, except for endurance and absence of hope. He was in pain all the time now. His eyes were wide-open, like the eyes of someone shocked—but not the emotion of shock, but the matter of it— and, with his round glasses and long neck, he looked a little like…

Last spring and summer, I was reading the stories of the Swiss writer Peter Bichsel. I began reading them in Vienna. The little book—a hardcover, but small and lightweight—was a gift from a German friend at the start of my trip, to provide me with something to read in German, since I wanted to improve my facility in the language. I had brought with me from home a paperback thriller by a very popular German writer, but I wasn’t enjoying it: the plot, so far, was tiresome, the main character unpleasant, and the tone sarcastic. My friend thought she could find something better for me, and she was right. I continued reading Bichsel’s stories on the train from Vienna to Salzburg, and then in Salzburg, and then on the train…

M Z N EVI L The problem of evil can be brought home in a classroom or a playground acquiring the shape of a casually crushed frog the boys laugh at. It is not a masculine problem It is a human problem And yet some persist in thinking the world good It’s not the world’s fault It’s you human Does the lion worry Does the ox laugh It is everywhere a dark spot secretly rotting the apple of the soul you gnaw on daily Autophage Autophage Ugolinoing your damned self so intense the baleful pleasures the little masturbations the squished life caught in the grip of the necessary thrust and thirst For what else Was it for this Who made the world Who made god Who made you What are…

Each November for the past sixteen years, a group of twenty-two men has convened at a hotel off Interstate 95 to reenact a gruesome milestone in football history: the 1985 play (known in the Washington Redskins playbook as the Throwback Special) in which New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor sacked Washington quarterback Joe Theismann, shattering his leg and ending his career. As always, Friday evening is devoted to the lottery, the elaborate process by which the men learn which players they will enact the following night. (This year the role of Theismann falls to the exquisitely fit “Fat” Michael.) Now, in the sleeping hotel, the men prepare for a ritual that—like them —has begun to show its age. The Paris Review is publishing The Throwback Special in its entirety over…

ANTON AND THE SOCIETY O F READERS I was always happy again when I encountered Anton. He frequented the same café as I, and he, like me, had other things to do between visits—the large garden, the family, he was a man of private means—and as a rule he chose to sit alone at a table and most often only for a short time. He made me happy because he was interested in many things, and one could talk with him about many things. Anton was a reader—he lived his life reading. Early in the morning at the train station, he would buy the tabloid called the Blick, and he would carry the newspaper in his jacket pocket all day long and handle it as carefully as others do expensive…

AT THE GRAVE OF ROBERT LOWELL On this tenth day of the year, I play Stravinsky and sip vodka from a paper cup, taking in the view. Tendrils twining, leaves rippling, guts absorbing nutrients, brains processing information—all of it is dust now. He, she, all of them lie under sod, men and women no longer rivals in love. Bodies grow old and fester. History is like an Impressionist painting, a variegated landscape of emotional colors. As night falls, owls, bats, and hedgehogs come out to hunt. I take joy in considering my generation. I rewrite to be read, though feel shame acknowledging it. Scattered among imposing trees, the ancient and the modern intersect, spreading germs of pain and happiness. I curl up in my fleece and drink. NO HOMECOMING Hansel…

Richard Diebenkorn (1922–93) kept artist sketchbooks throughout his career. He described the sketchbook as his “portable studio,” where he could privately observe and explore a wide range of subject matter in a variety of media. His late widow and longtime muse, Phyllis Diebenkorn, recently gave twenty- nine of these sketchbooks to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Diebenkorn’s alma mater. Flipping through them can feel akin to sneaking a peak at a loved one’s diary. Stray bits of personal text are often dashed off in faint graphite next to the sketches. One reads, simply, “The day of my father’s death,” beside contour drawings of an oxford shoe, a fedora hat, and an embroidered handkerchief. Another note is more introspective: “I think that all my problems with painting, my failures,…

CHRIS BACHELDER is the author of the novels Abbott Awaits, U.S.!, and Bear v. Shark. SAMUEL BECKETT (1906–89), the great Irish playwright, novelist, and poet, was first published in The Paris Review in 1954. PETER BICHSEL has published many story collections in his native Switzerland. His honors include the Kassel Literary Prize and the Grosser Schillerpreis. ANNE CARSON was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living, sometimes at New York University. HENRI COLE has published nine collections of poetry, most recently Nothing to Declare. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College. LYDIA DAVI S is the recipient of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. Her most recent story collection is Can’t and Won’t. JEFF DOLVEN teaches poetry and poetics at Princeton University and is the author of Speculative…