Innehållsförteckning för 217 (Summer 2016) från The Paris Review

I asked Dale whether he could try to get rid of the gray. It was growing dark outside, and the rain against the salon’s big windows looked like ink running down a page. The traffic crawled along the blackened road beyond. The cars all had their lights on. Dale was standing behind me in the mirror, lifting long, dry fistfuls of hair and then letting them fall. His eyes were moving all over my image with a devouring expression. His face was portentous, and I watched it in the glass. “There’s nothing wrong with a few sparkles,” he said reproachfully. The other stylist, who was standing behind a customer at the next chair, half closed her long sleepy lids and smiled. “I get mine done,” she said. “A lot of…

GREENACRE Annuit coeptis But what if a given surface is coaxed into fruitfulness wrongfully? For instance, this lushly verdant plain. Imagine it dialed back to featurelessness, each spiraling stalk retracted, each filigree rosette slow-blinking shut. Dialed back to promise, to smooth-napped expanse—the forehead of an alien princess might convey such tranquility: she surveys her ranks of suitors, shakes her exquisite green head in barely feigned regret. So thinks Cadmus—hand still outstretched in a nation-building gesture—as if to freeze in time this instant: scatter of seeds still aloft, arrayed like little dive-bombers in formation. Not yet puncturing the land. Not yet rooting, not yet sending up terribly thin, ambitious tendrils toward the light. Not yet trained onto wire-frame espaliers, not yet combed into bombastic pompadours, not yet extruding seedpods resembling pale…

When one of Pete’s fraternity brothers posted the video to a closed Greek Facebook group, people said that what happened in the video was rape. At first, Pete thought the commenters meant that he had raped the girl. But then he scrolled down and realized they considered him the victim. It hadn’t occurred to him to think of himself as having been raped any more than it had occurred to him to think of himself as a rapist. He rose from his swivel chair and looked in the mirror. His polo shirt still hugged his gut tighter than it hugged his pecs. His curls still looked like something gagged up by a cat. He still had abundant ear hair, was still soft where his chin subsided into neck. He took…

To maintain these depths of misery takes work given my buoyant disposition; for every sill of my flesh I must invent a new method to flay. Few people know inside your skin is a microscopic garden. With love I tuck in seeds of its destruction late each night, daily tend my dear ruin—knot distant, unsuspecting clovers at their root tips; stomata full of rodent bones, down they go, the pond lilies: I’m strict. Who could love you like you.…

His belt buckle clanks against the floor of the bedroom, sounds so far away that he waits for an echo. He steps out of his jeans, nudges them aside with a bare foot. He pulls off his dark uniform shirt, balls it up in his hand, but before he can toss it away, his wife grabs it. She shakes it out and wraps it around the digital clock. “Let’s fuck in the dark,” Janelle says. “It’ll be sexy.” “Let’s light the candle.” He looks for the candle that is usually on a copper-colored plate beside the bed, but the whole plate is gone. “Come on, Mikey. One time.” She’s wearing her bathrobe, a peach-colored thing, and fuzzy slippers. The bluish glow through the window comforts Michael Pazur until his wife…

1. Miswak al-Baghdadi picks his teeth with an archaic toothbrush. Salvadora persica from Babylon, a twig twisted green from the mustard tree. Anything twisted green from its stem involves malice. Among the Hadith, Mohammad is said to have said, “Verily when you pray, an angel places his mouth on yours and anything coming out of your mouth enters the mouth of the angel.” What in the world cost us sweetness? 2. Shirk “I know it may be shirk but sometimes I do miss Starbucks,” tweets Green Bird of Dabiq, an isis wife who also instagrams a photo of her picnic lunch. Green Bird, I is one with you. In badlands, she wants Starbucks, too. 3. Goodbye, Omar Wormwood grows on the one-eyed Mullah’s grave. The Talib boys fight blindly on,…

ADONIS is among the most influential poets and critics in the Arab world. His Selected Poems was published in 2010. ALEXIA ARTHURS was born in Jamaica and moved to New York with her family at the age of twelve. She is a graduate of Hunter College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. DANIELLE BLAU is the author of mere eye, which received a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Award, as well as the forthcoming Rhyme & Reason: Poets and Philosophers on Questions That Matter. BONNIE JO CAMPBELL is the author, most recently, of the story collection Mothers, Tell Your Daughters and the novel Once Upon a River. ROBYN CRESWELL is poetry editor of The Paris Review. RACHEL CUSK’s novel Transit will be published in September. Her previous novel, Outline, was serialized…

ONTARIO GOTHIC 1. The dwarf maple caught my attention in an ominous way, its purple, its deep purple leaves shredded gloves that gesture “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” among floating albino basketballs of hydrangea among other things the people landscaped like fake lashes round the top of the eye that then all summer takes in clouds and anything else passing over, including one has to assume the neutral look on a passenger’s face glancing down from a window seat. 2. Halfway there he squeezed between the shoulders of the seats to join his wife and me in back. I need hardly tell you what a stretch it was, wedging my arm between the driver’s seat and door to steer with the tips of my fingers, sidewalks in those parts just wide…

Since he published his first book of stories in 1965, Dag Solstad has been to Scandinavian literature what Philip Roth has been to American letters or Günter Grass to German writing: an unavoidable voice. Over the years, his stature has only grown. When he published a novel dealing with the war in Afghanistan, in 2006, it was reviewed by none other than Norway’s foreign minister. When he published a novel based on his family history, in 2013, it provoked a major critical debate on the borders between fiction and nonfiction. Solstad started his career as a journalist for a local newspaper, before joining the Maoist Arbeidernes Kommunistparti (marxist-leninistene) (AKP) in 1970. Combining political perspectives with existentialist concerns, Solstad has written eighteen novels as well as stories, plays, essays, and nonfiction,…

When I was little, I would paint water as a low blue stripe along the bottom of the paper. Not much different from the sky—a high blue stripe across the top. Maybe a darker blue. Then I learned how to swim and the waterline moved up, over my head. It became the whole page. Here’s how my father taught me to swim: He would hold me, facing him, in the shallow end, then let go. He’d back away slowly, laughing and teasing as I tried to grab him. I would panic, inhale and swallow water, and laugh. It was horrible, like being tickled: alarming and exhilarating. Water promises joy and fear. Looking at pictures of swimming is like looking at pictures of tenderness or violence—the body reacts, a sensibility beyond…

Few novels stand for a place and time the way Bright Lights, Big City stands for downtown Manhattan in the 1980s. Narrated in the second person, Jay McInerney’s first novel tells the story of a young fact-checker, at a magazine very much like The New Yorker, who loses his way in the cocaine-fueled nightclub scene. From the moment it appeared as a paperback original, in 1984, Bright Lights established McInerney as the chronicler of New York’s bright young things. In his six subsequent novels and numerous short stories, he has broadened his scope and his canvas, but he has never taken his eye off his adoptive city or the intersection of the literary world and the city’s flashier precincts. His recently completed novel, Bright, Precious Days, is the third in…

Exile’s trucks cross the borders through songs of exile and sighing flames. The wind is against us and the ash of war covers the earth. We see our spirit flash on a razor blade, a helmet’s curve. The brackish springs of autumn salt our wounds. Doom drags at history’s face—our history needled with terror, a meadow of wild thorns. In what salt rivers will we wash this story, stale with the smell of old maids and widows back from the hajj, our history stained with the sweat of dervishes’ loins, its springtime a feast for locusts? Night thickens and a new day crawls forth over dead sparrows. The door rattles but doesn’t open. We cry out and dream of weeping and the eyes have no tears. My country is a…

Pam and Curtis brought Stacy to Jamaica because they didn’t know what else to do with her. They believed that her old-time granny would straighten her out. In Brooklyn, Stacy cut her classes often, and she was caught giving a boy a blowjob in an empty classroom. They looked at the sweet little face on the body of a woman, and they were terrified of her and for her. It seemed that her breasts and ass were getting bigger every day. Often Pam would pull down Stacy’s shirt to give her ass better coverage, and Stacy would groan and laugh, tucking her shirt back into her jeans. Pam wondered aloud to Curtis whether Stacy’s curvy body was because of all the chicken wings she enjoyed eating from the Chinese food…

Suddenly I’m ready to eat the world, Starting with the food on my plate. The waiter asks if everything’s all right. Everything’s great. Everything looks the same but nothingness is night. Time to go back upstairs into more electric light. My jaunty step is oral, enjoying everything. This election year is the beginning. The national falling apart will amount to something. Suddenly I’m able to walk outside. Suddenly I’m able to walk away. Rain is falling on the other side of the street. Thank you for the delicious food. Thank you for my delicious mood. It’s time to get back upstairs and smirk and shirk work. Writing poems is like being in Sing Sing singing. It’s like being a prisoner of what you want to do And being imprisoned for…

In the deep end of the rec lane the old white woman is treading water and talking with the obese black man who should be eight feet tall. A judge has ruled that, according to the length of the man’s leg bones, he was meant to be eight feet tall, which is a disability as sure as any other. The old woman wears a white long-sleeved shirt and a straw sun hat and has an olive complexion gone splotchy under the strong sun. She straddles two pool noodles. The man, in his midthirties, wears a shower cap and a knee-length purple T-shirt and hangs onto the wall and wheels his legs under the water. He is about six foot five but his legs do not look out of proportion. His…

PRINCE The narrow cell contains a bunk, steel desk mounted on the wall, toilet, sink, and television; each cell the same and pervading all fluorescent light and the smell of bleach. A window slit admits the sun to cinderblock and concrete. A kennel, really, without the run. A new program gives any man who keeps a clean conduct sheet a rescue dog to house and train, along with collar, leash, and crate; though Prince sleeps on the bottom bunk (they call him Prince for his Jheri curl) and patiently awaits the brush, its soothing motion through his fur the only licit form of touch with any living thing beyond the ritual formality of bumping fists or shaking hands. Prince may have some bichon frise or chow in his heredity, with…

I began the day standing at a threshold of time—the beginning of something, the end of something. I had a method for standing that was called art, then writing. The way I stood allowed me to see how things could begin and end this way—simultaneously. It was hard to follow these opposing tendencies, especially when you were writing and couldn’t see anyway, see anything other than these words appearing on the laptop screen. You were writing about something you weren’t looking at. There had been a break. I was saying this on paper. I am not ready for school. I was typing this. Almost a summer had elapsed. I was looking at committee meetings ahead of me and Friday Night Lights behind. I was looking at the desires of my…

Although he is not well-known outside his native Australia, Gerald Murnane has proven, over four decades and some dozen books, to be one of that country’s most original and distinctive writers. According to Murnane, his recently completed work of fiction, Border Districts, will be his last. These are its opening pages. Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard my eyes, and I could not think of going on with this piece of writing unless I were to explain how I came by that odd expression. I got some of my schooling from a certain order of religious brothers, a band of men who dressed each in a black soutane with a bib of white celluloid at his throat.…

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