Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2025 (254) i The Paris Review

I fell in once, enough for anyone,more than for those responsible on deck.There’s nothing on earth like an accidentto put you in touch with time—time then speaksin all but words, your mother tongue, it croonsyou are desired to be one with itno matter what it takes away. The things I take away just add to youit says, your very corporate consultant.And: you always were going to get wet.By this it means that even if this Francehadn’t had to pull me out all drippingI’d be involved with currents. Did you notin fact jump, it says. Did those who fled with infants or without their guardiansin small boats, odd phrase, from end to endthe Channel not leap inside the dinghy?That’s how time rolls, obscenity givenas prior so we need to work backwardsif…

We moved in with my grandmother when I was six. My mother took her old childhood bedroom, at the front of the house. She told my grandmother, too, that she wanted the front room downstairs, which was never used, to be her private, “own” living room. My grandmother agreed. They bought a second television. When my mother was in her living room, she was not to be disturbed, she used to say, unless it was “an emergency.” She would stand in the doorway and call out, “Right, that’s it. I’m shutting up shop now. I don’t want to hear from anybody unless it’s an absolute emergency.” She did a lot of shouting up those stairs. If she was going to go to Asda after work: “Anyone need anything? Now is…

Cover: © Adebunmi Gbadebo, courtesy of the artist and Nicola Vassell; photograph by Lance Brewer. Page 16, courtesy of the Estate of Pippa Garner, photograph by Jason Mandella; page 32, courtesy of Ali Banisadr; pages 46–72, interview transcripts translated by Gabriel Bonté, Pauline Cochran, James Langan, and Alice McCrum; page 42, courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Hélène Cixous; pages 48, 52, 57, courtesy of Hélène Cixous and Olivier Morel; page 63, © Getty Images, Michel Laurent / Gamma-Rapho; page 68, courtesy of Olivier Morel and Hélène Cixous; page 70, photograph by Olivier Morel, courtesy of Hélène Cixous; page 77, courtesy of the Estate of Eve Babitz and the Eve Babitz Papers at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens; pages 95–108, © Mieko Meguro, courtesy of…

Paul was reluctant to leave Miami for the quiet of Fort Myers. True, Miami wasn’t his type of city, far too glitzy and vain. “Sure thing, let me just run up to the room and grab my abs,” he’d said when his colleague Evan suggested skipping the Seventeenth Annual Florida Real Estate Conference’s pre-keynote networking break for a trip to South Beach. But the conference had been enjoyable in its way, including a rooftop party with cigars and cognac, swapping stories about failed licensing exams and narrow closings, and even a short swim at midnight with a surprisingly free-spirited former plaintiff’s lawyer who’d gone into realty for fun. Though Paul had a habit of using his dry wit simply to put himself above the other realtors, in this instance he’d…

It’s been many years since Rosaline and Peter first rented a house on Cabot Lake, and Rosaline, swimming, lifted her head up from the water to see Eleu staring down at her from his dock. “You’re Dr. Engels’s wife,” he said. She recognized Eleu immediately. He was Peter’s supervisor, the reason Peter had wanted to vacation on this lake. Or, really, the many neurosurgeons from Peter’s department who had their second homes here were the reason. Rosaline sat with Eleu. He gave her a drink and then, when he saw her shivering, a towel. “How did you and Peter meet?” he asked her. He was now entirely bald, she noticed. His eyebrows were gray, almost invisible, his eyes pale blue. He wasn’t handsome. It was as if his face’s line…

They are like women because you can sleepnear them, with them, in your truck,close to Tank 10 when you are hungover. They are like men because they are isolatedyet stand in the rain, surrounded by moundsof dirt and asphalt to catch spillover— “You can be fired for walking on the dikes.”They have floating roofs and a stairway upthe side, like desert lizards, they are jungle gods of the refinery because they weather oil spillsand bad tank-level readings. They lead the layinto battle and hide bar fights from the foreman, never let fuel go to flare, or move you overto a bad order in the southwest corner.The good tank farms are at Gate 7 and the Slab. They don’t have proportional bands to protectthe level controller or show how far you…

from “SPEAKER RESPONSE: A-Strophic Quartet” II. Two Answers to What It Takes the I’m sorry punchlineabout punching the button that blows upeverything for not paying attention might be on the tipof your tonguerecalling the leader the joke was supposed to be about but isn’treally there were manyfingers on your tongue ah playing the language to its endthe culture has of its tendencyalso to lie you may denyall of this and singlike peter could preach — he said when Lomax asked the Parchman Farmchain-gang song leader what it takes to make a good leader. preach—but you has to been done experience III. the reasoning of season we are all good leaders nowthat we’ve said nothing or ledothers to fill the silence of for us. and listening to the echo-timed hills as…

Hélène Cixous has never called herself a critic. She tends to shrug off, too, the other appellations she might be given: philosopher, theorist, novelist, memoirist, feminist. In her most famous work, the 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” however, she combined aspects of all these personae, exhorting women to harness their libidinal forces, the body’s rhythms and pleasures, simply by writing: “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies … Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.” Today, Cixous sighs at questions about the essay that propelled her to a level of international fame unusual for a young academic, but “Medusa” called into…

for Nu‘man Kanafani, Omar Abd al-Salam,and Abd al-Latif Awad In the latter half of my student daysI chose for myselfthree Arab friends:a Palestinian, a Sudanese, and the third was a Moroccan.For two years we sharedeverything:food, araq, beds, girls, everythingexcept our political opinionssince each of us was also obliged—in order to square the circle—to be different from the others. Omar Abd al-Salamwas a dark stalk of sugarcanein the black-and-white checkered suithe wore all summer and all winter.He was silent and unsociableexcept when we teased himor, better,when we made him forget himselfand he became a volcano of curse words and blasphemies.At some point I lost his addressand now can hardly remember his facethough I should mention what I do rememberwhich is the time he argued with the examinersduring his thesis defenseand the…

Most of my conversations with Alice Oswald took place at her home, Adelaide, a ramshackle cottage with a red door in Devon, southwest England. This past January, when I made my first visit, Oswald came to the station to collect me and her octogenarian aunt, who’d taken the same train from London and who lives mostly in the house across from hers. On the drive, the two women discussed whether a flock of birds that had risen from a clearing we’d passed were fieldfares or starlings. Oswald has known Adelaide all her life, having spent holidays there as a child. Her paternal grandmother first lived in the house for a few months with her family at the end of World War I; in 1940, when she was traversing the area…

MILLICENT BORGES ACCARDI is the author of four poetry collections, including Only More So. RACHAEL ALLEN is the author of two collections of poetry, God Complex and Kingdomland. She is an editor at Fitzcarraldo Editions and a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. EVE BABITZ (1943–2021) was the author of Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company, and Sex and Rage, among other books. Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were), edited by Lili Anolik, is forthcoming from New York Review Books in spring 2026. ALI BANISADR is a painter and printmaker. A solo exhibition of his work will appear at Buffalo AKG Art Museum in summer 2026. ROBYN CRESWELL’s most recent translation is Iman Mersal’s The Threshold. He is a professor of comparative literature at Yale. PIPPA GARNER (1942–2024) was…