Spring 2018

The Paris Review

The world's preeminent literary magazine.

The Paris Review8 min read
Flour
The driver and I got a late start. I usually decide on these excursions the night before, but it was late in the morning when I informed the friend who was coming to visit me for the weekend that I had to cancel, it was absolutely necessary for me to
The Paris Review19 min read
Practicing
This would have been her favorite season in the Allegheny woods. The shadows of the trees were rickety, and the wind had sap in its scent. But last week, Ty had left; now one day decayed into the next. Their house was abandoned. Only their father, si
The Paris Review8 min read
Scapegoat Child
In the crucible of our family my sister burned like molten steel. Once I saw her arms outspread her legs hanging limp and useless wet saliva dripping from her tongue. I screamed they surrounded her lifted her onto the sheets where she convulsed for h
The Paris Review19 min read
The Art of Fiction No. 238
Elena Poniatowska is one of the few survivors of her generation of Mexican writers, which includes Carlos Fuentes, Jose Emilio Pacheco, and Carlos Monsivais. In Mexico, she is most often called “Elenita”—perhaps dismissively years ago, but now with a
The Paris Review3 min read
The Shape Of The Mountain
Once things leave my files,” Etel Adnan wrote to me, “I never know where they are, and don’t think about them anymore, otherwise you lose your mind.” Her method is sound: now ninety-three, she has made hundreds of works over seven decades and shows n
The Paris Review2 min read
In Memory Of Derek Alton Walcott
1 Island traffic slows to a haltas screeching gulls reluctantto lift heavenwardcongregate like mourners in saltcrustedkelp, as the repellentnews spreads to colder shores: Sir Derek is no more.Bandwidths, clogged by streamingtributes, carry the pitcho
The Paris Review22 min read
Justice
I had been told that the interviewer was waiting for me outside in the hotel garden. The muffled oceanic roar of traffic rose steadily from the nearby road. She was sitting alone on a bench amid the raw planted beds and network of gravel paths, gazin
The Paris Review4 min read
Sleepwalking In Venice
Two kinds of imagination: the strong, the promiscuous. —Leopardi Watching a boneless nymph’shalf-hearted resurrectionfrom a spout in the pavementover and over; catching a glimpseof the source of my exhaustion,as if my gaze all this time had lent musc
The Paris Review26 min read
The Art of Fiction No. 239
Charles Johnson’s historical slave narrative, Middle Passage, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in 1990, defies genre. Framed in part as a nautical epic with echoes of Conrad and Melville, there is also a Swiftian current running through
The Paris Review3 min read
The Wait
The moist cheese on his blue-and-white porcelain, the Pinot. Our entire marriage, I had been accepting those gifts, not waiting for the meal. My husband came into the living room and sniffed behind my ear. He moved my pretty hair. He told me I smelle
The Paris Review2 min read
from “A WINTERS TRAIL”
Drawing draws us in-volving us further and stretchingattention it sketches reachinginching in ink and graspinggraphite graphing drawingdraws us out of our cellsand selves extending thinkinginto seeing what wassensed or seen as somethingonce in hand a
The Paris Review55 min read
OK, Mr. Field Part 2 (Autumn)
Mr. Field, a concert pianist, splinters his wrist in a train crash and uses his compensation to buy a house he has seen only in photographs: a replica of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye on a stretch of coast outside Cape Town. He moves there with his wif
The Paris Review2 min read
Contributors
PETER COLE’s most recent book is Hymns & Zualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations. KATHLEEN COLLINS (1942–88) was a writer, filmmaker, and civil rights activist. Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary: Selected Works of Kathleen Collins is forthcomi
The Paris Review2 min read
The Case For Brexit
I dropped my new shoes in the stream, thinking perhapsThey would get there before me, like two drowned JewsTrundling along the seabed to Jerusalem. My immigrant parents lost patienceand thrashed me.The best thing that ever happened to me was on the b
The Paris Review5 min read
Somehow
Somehow, they were swimming in the canals. Later this part seemed hazy, but somehow they were all there: Lila, her little boy, and James, a former student. Whether James had arrived with Lila and her son or was simply also there enjoying the day is u
The Paris Review6 min read
Readings
Mon, Mar 19 PETER COLE AND LAURA KASISCHKE Thu, Mar 22 YOKO TAWADA AND TATYANA TOLSTAYA Thu, Mar 29 AMINATTA FORNA AND ALAN HOLLINGHURST Mon, Apr 9 ELIZABETH STROUT AND JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN Thu, Apr 12 JEREMY IRONS READS T. S. ELIOT’S “FOUR QUARTETS” T

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