Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2021 i The Paris Review

Dear reader, This past summer, I kept turning to a certain kind of prose: the diaries in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, the biomythography of Audre Lorde, Elias Canetti’s journals, the field notes of the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner. It seemed to promise me something, but what? The writing sometimes felt unpolished, as if the authors were allowing me to watch them work through a problem. It dealt with obsession, disappointment, depression. It wasn’t an obvious choice for the subway. I had just started editing The Paris Review, a literary quarterly with a formidable sixty-eight-year record of publishing the best writing, and of hosting glamorous parties. Every morning, in the office, I made coffee under the gaze of a bronze George Plimpton, one of the founding editors. The space was…

All day I think about what to do with the day.I walk down the street for a coffee and to thinkAbout what to do after that. On the tableSomeone before me has left a littleSaucer of salt, with a wooden spoonLike a tiny oar in white sand. Eventually I walkBack to my apartment. When I turn the keyIn the front gate, at the bottom of the steep staircaseLeading up to our door, my left eyelid twitches twice.Inside I know there are things I want to doWith Monday: they levitate in the field of viewMy mind makes, opening, like fireflies,Or those old yellow lanterns along the perimeter of a yard.My mother calls from New York: tomorrow isThe last day of Ramadan and I should be sureTo call her, to say Eid…

“Concerning the universe, the city of God” Concerning the universe, the city of God,we know very little.It was cooked for a long timeover a low flame. Now, according to some idiots,things are speeding up,an acceleration that seems almosta prelude to total extinction. Perhaps thought itself will survivewithout the one doing the thinking.What’s left is sheer absurdity,the black hole, the Encyclopediaof zero. “People talk and talk more” People talk and talk moreabout black holes. I believe the blackest holeis the one we inhabit,and that maybe someone outside itwonders if in here there existbeasts with two legs or fouror no beasts at all, and that nobodyeven mentions plants or flowers. “When I enter the cemetery” When I enter the cemeteryof San Felice a EmaI have to go past many tombstonesand must actually…

The Facts The facts sit in an ordinary room. They resemble people:stubborn and without imagination. The facts begin to chatter: Better days coming, better dayscoming. They arrange themselves in the shape of a lie. They’re cheating: they only work in the past tense. They fake objectivity. They decide unanimously. For example, what do you call that white pointed cylindergenerated by the roof on freezing days? Hang-ice? I say. Facts say wrong. The facts await their moment. In my early years, I didn’t think meadows came at a cost. Thereare no turnstiles or box offices at the edges of a meadow. The facts told me different. They used the word property. And Iresented them! Handle them: they have an activating feel. The facts dispose like people. They can mute us. And…

because of a breach in the dam that was meant to keep themin. That was the idea, at least. Keeping is always the idea. Also, stockpiling.As the stockpiled coal ash is swept from its basins at the Duke Energy plant near Wilmington,fish start feeding on it by puncturing the surface of the river from below.Pinching the surface like a tissue and pulling down on morsels of coal ash containing the arsenicand boron, mercury and lead that are left after coal is burned. The ash looks edible,drifting there. It just has to fit between their lips for the fish to consider it food, absorb itinto their flesh like a vowel. What they don’t eat is carried off by the current. We all live downstream,though some live more downstream than others. That…

Climbing the stairs, slowly, on my palmsand soles, bent far forward, I seemy shins closer than usual—their indigo and red-violet fireworks,their royal-blue wormholes—how much difference is there, anymore,between me and a cadaver?I know I won’t come, after I’m dead,though it does seem a little strange, to me,and strange that what we learned in Seventh-Grade Healthis not a structural part of each of us like heartbeat and breath,though sometimes people die of a heart attack in bed.I think my mother’s father did, when he was with his mistress,then they said to his wife he had fallen down the cellarstairs that weren’t there. I told my son that—in his late forties, when he said I nevertold him anything about my family—and he said, What did they do then, throw him down the…

Fence Post These girls riding bareback on their palominos down the slopeswhat do they know, I thoughtthen I saw a train that collided with a convoyof trucks, each vehicle and each car interlocking at preciselythe right momentlike gears in a fine piece of machineryso they went through each other, the train and the convoy,it took some time for themto move through each other and then each went its own way A Banquet But having braked all the way to the floor of the valleyit dawned on us the slope we’d have to climband it was night, you on the back of my bikewe’d passed the place that burned down—the peoplerich enough to continue to produce some kindof banquet, placing candles and dishes, in the ashesbeyond roof—so you said let’s go…

Divorce 1 He wouldin case of divorcelay claim to halfof everythinghe said.Half a sofa,half a TV,half a summerhousehalf a pound of butterhalf a child. The apartment was hishe saidbecause it was in his name.The thing washe loved her. She loved anotherwhose wife wouldlay claim to halfof everything. So the marriage act stated.As clearly astwo and two makes four. The solicitorsaid so too.She broke half of everythingand ripped the tax bill apart.Then she left forthe women’s shelter on Jagtvejwith half a child. The child was teased at schoolbecause he only hadone ear.Other than that,this life toowas bearablesince things couldn’t beany different. Divorce 2 The day hepicked uphis furniturethe frost hadleft the groundso the buildersin the suburbscould pourfoundationsfor the prefab houses. It was a Thursday.Spring was on its waysaid the housekeeper.There were…

In the spring they ripen and swarm the trees,the waxy little fruits that resemble bald heads. I collect their remains: piebald, sweetand sour. A syrup made of loquats is said to cure cough. Their woolly twigssplinter in pear blight. I am bereft when I eat them all. My throat and heartalways sore. Whenever I got sick my mother used to skin yellow loquats, but they tastedbetter with the skin on. This season, my cough grows and grows. There is a tree or a fungusin my chest. I once kissed a man in the hollow. His tattoo of a stump on his chest. I countedthe rings to a hundred. His memory broke against my cracked phone screen like wavesagainst the Sutro Baths. In different years of my life, 2012 and 2017,…

APPEARING HERE SOFI, forties, lives in Los Angeles, California EILEEN, seventies, lives in Wichita, Kansas ELAINE, sixties, lives in Dublin, New Hampshire GINNIE, sixties, lives in Rio Vista, California YVETTE, sixties to seventies, lives in Midland, Michigan SETTING The courtyard of a medical clinic two hours north of San Francisco. Two rows of outdoor chaise longues. May 2019. A “/” indicates that the next speaker’s dialogue has begun. SCENE 13 Everyone is onstage lying on their chairs. Elaine is holding a green juice and Ginnie is reading a Thich Nhat Hanh book. GINNIE Here’s a provocative question. YVETTE Ready. GINNIE I just finished a section of this book where the author tells a whole story about an Asian pirate/who— ELAINE An Asian pirate? GINNIE Yes, an Asian pirate who rapes…

It is murmuring toward you now from those who died young …—Rilke As a child, my hand closed over a centipede,There was a penny in my mouth, and becauseYou are everyone in the dream, evenNonpersons, I was the badly scarredFlowering cherry and the moving shadowsOf its branches on the brick façade behind it.Artificial lights came on among the birds and sirens.A large soap bubble floated above us as we playedSilver in the dark, the undulating ghost of an octopusIn which our street was reflected. In the ’80sYou could stop time and take it gently from the air,Turn it around in your hands and see the future.When it burst, you were in an airport in Toronto.I know because you called me and I talked you down,Talked you out of the gate…

Do not imagine you can abdicate.—W. H. Auden I know that feeling you have: wanting the world,at last, to yield something, the way liquor does—an angle, an idea, a color, a deepening. Know that you are a creature who waits and doesnot act. Forget that you are waiting for a minute;chew the last of the ice in your glass, and fill your dreams with the blunt, garish jumble of wine.Go to sleep in the middle of the day; entombyourself in blankets. And when you see them, the people in the park playing chess, envytheir gestures, their resolve, and all their lost time;the unequivocal wooden pieces in palms, decisive and warm from the game.…

Passing through the hallway on their way out, her sisters tipped their heads in the direction of the statue of the goddess Durga. They did it automatically, almost imperceptibly, and with wide, innocent eyes, like spies letting their handler know they had seen him and he should hold his position. Oma did the same, but with less conviction. It was one of many casual gestures of defiance on the part of the sisters. Their parents, aunts, and grandparents had offered unsatisfactory and conflicting answers to the question of why, since they did not believe in gods, their houses were filled with Hindu icons. Oma disliked it when her sisters interrogated their parents and shot glances at one another waiting for the elders to flounder, but she reluctantly played her part…

Leilah Babirye was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1985. As an undergraduate student of sculpture at Makerere University, she joined a community of queer and trans artists and activists. In 2013, Uganda’s parliament passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act, making gay sex—already grounds for prison time—and the “promotion” of homosexuality punishable by a life sentence. Even after that law was overturned in 2014, Kampala’s tabloid journalists continued to stalk underground parties, outing Babirye and other queer people. By 2015 she was facing death threats, and many of her friends had fled the country. That year, she applied for the Fire Island Artist Residency and, after a group of artists that included Mickalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley funded her flight to the U.S., Babirye arrived in New York. In 2018, she was granted…

Gary Indiana was in his late thirties by the time he began to publish fiction, which may account for his wide array of sidelines. For many years he wrote and performed for theater, cabaret, and arthouse cinema. From 1985 to 1988 he savaged the pretensions of the art world each week as the critic for the Village Voice, and he is now an artist himself: one of his video pieces, Stanley Park (2013), which appeared in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, was shot in the ruins of a prison in Cuba, a country Indiana has visited since the late nineties. The piece, which inflects left-wing politics with black comedy, includes a snippet of Josef von Sternberg’s 1941 melodrama The Shanghai Gesture. In 1951, a group of surrealists riffed on scenes from…

They sayed she had gotted a white mans education. She had climbed the jet and flied across the ocean to read abroad. They sayed she had a big house in the big town of Meru. A big house and big car like a Prado that all the rich people driving in town. They sayed she had one children. A boy children that go to big school for rich people. They sayed she had a law degree but all she did was obey the orders of the wardens and pray. She prayed a lot. Some of the times she used to cry small small when she was praying. Some of the times she would kneel down but not that many times. The wardens would beat us when we showed funny behavior.…

As soon as Farley’s collar was unhooked, he took the nearest, steepest slope down into the dell. By the time he reached the bottom, he was fishtailing a little, his looser back legs having descended slightly faster than his front ones. He fetched up between a black Lab mix named Scout and Scout’s owner. To get between a rival dog and its owner was strategy. Cut off the opposing army from its supply. “Seen anything good?” Scout’s owner asked. Jacob was in the habit of bringing his camera to the park, and it was around his neck. “A wasp’s nest, but it’s too high. Did you start that job at the hospital?” “Yeah, you know, I don’t think I like working with people. Too much politics.” “Because you’re working on…

Annette Gordon-Reed will always be most famous for having confirmed, beyond a reasonable doubt, the centuries-old rumors about Thomas Jefferson having had multiple children with a mixed-race woman named Sally Hemings, whom he owned. In 1997, armed with only the analog tools of traditional historiography, she made a resounding case for the relationship in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. The book touched off a fierce debate followed a year later by the DNA testing of male descendants in Jefferson’s family, the results of which proved her theories. If that first book showed Gordon-Reed’s willingness to kick against consensus, the next revealed the scope of her historical thinking and writing. In The Hemingses of Monticello (2008), she reconstructs three generations of the Hemings family, whose lives and genealogies…

One Sunday in February my mom telephones at eight in the morning to remind me that the bishop of Maryland is coming to Saint James at Lafayette Square, the African American Episcopal church where I was baptized and confirmed. There will be a single service at nine thirty. I debate the shower and then don the uniform that hangs on the back of the chair: pants and a sweater with a shirt inside it. My boy Nathaniel rises easily, despite having even less reason to be keen than I had at his age. In my high school class there were a dozen regulars; younger children were taught in the basement of the church, and the upper grades were instructed in a row house on Lafayette Avenue, on the border of…

The Others Around me are fifty or so men, in whose company I will sit and be silent for ten days. I eye them discreetly, wondering who among them is going through a crisis. Who, like me, has a family. Who’s single, who’s been dumped, who’s poor or unhappy. Who’s emotionally fragile, who’s solid. Who risks being overwhelmed by the vertigo of silence. All ages are represented, from twenty to seventy, I’d say. As to what they might do for a living, it’s also varied. There are some readily identifiable types: the outdoorsy, vegetarian high school teacher, adept of the Eastern mystics; the young guy with dreadlocks and a Peruvian beanie; the physiotherapist or osteopath who’s into the martial arts; and others who could be anything from violinists to railway-ticketing…

The two or three times I saw Lil Waynehanging out at the Praline Connection in New Orleans he had a mouth full of blingcovered in forkfuls of greens or green beans or white rice & red beans on a tongueof strange lucrative grammar The answer will be that which allowsthe best possible future when the plaintiffs come before the judge or the farmersbefore the king it is not that which incurs unrest The photograph does not belongto the photographer it belongs to the camera God jury-rigs to the backs of a barn owl & a batWe get a bird’s-eye view via the camera attached to the bat under cover of fur & weatherstrange as the rules of grammar Like the branch of the forest industrytasked with trimming branches Strange as…

LEILAH BABIRYE is a painter and a sculptor. ANNIE BAKER’s plays include The Antipodes, John, and The Flick, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. MAYA BINYAM is a contributing editor of The Paris Review, a senior editor of Triple Canopy, and a writer based in Los Angeles. GEORGE BRADLEY’s collection of translations, Late Montale, is forthcoming from Waywiser in spring 2022. EMMANUEL CARRÈRE is a novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and film producer. SCOTT COVERT is a visual artist. CALEB CRAIN is the author of Necessary Errors and Overthrow. TADEUSZ DĄBROWSKI’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Boston Review. TOVE DITLEVSEN (1917–1976) was a Danish poet, fiction writer, and essayist. TOBI HASLETT has written about art, film, literature, and politics for n+1, The New Yorker, Harper’s…

Cover: Courtesy of the artist, Choi&Lager, and David Zwirner, photograph by Soon-Hak Kwon. Page 30, image courtesy the Fales Library & Special Collections, NYU; pages 36, 43, courtesy of Gary Indiana; page 48, courtesy of Larry Johnson; page 55, copyright © Sylvia Plachy; page 58, copyright © Laura Owens; pages 72–74, © Mondadori Libri S.p.A., Milan; pages 106–119, courtesy of Scott Covert and Off Paradise, New York, photography by Kevin Brady and Guillaume Ziccarelli; pages 124, 129, 134, 141, 146, 149, 150, courtesy of Annette Gordon-Reed; pages 218–221, 223–227, 229–231, copyright © Leilah Babirye, courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York, and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, photography by Mark Blower; pages 239, 269, 277, illustrations by Na Kim.…