Spring 2022

The Paris Review

The world's preeminent literary magazine.

The Paris Review1 min read
The Paris Review
EDITOR EMILYSTOKES SENIOR EDITOR LIDIJA HAAS MANAGING EDITOR AMANDA GERSTEN ASSISTANT EDITORS LAUREN KANE, OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING POETRY EDITOR VIJAY SESHADRI ART DIRECTOR NA KIM DESIGNER MATT WILLEY CONTRIBUTING EDITORS MAYA BINYAM, MATTHEW HIGGS, NIEL
The Paris Review26 min read
Tomorrows
The night, as most nights, was like a dream. At ten, once I’d fed the dog the last scraps off the stove. Once I’d cursed the cat for scratching up my mama’s antique furniture, then welcomed him back into my arms. Once I’d slicked my hair into a ponyt
The Paris Review11 min read
Corsicana
GINNY, thirty-four, a woman with Down syndrome, a volunteer, a choir singer CHRISTOPHER, thirty-three, Ginny’s half brother, teaches at the local community college JUSTICE, sixty-eight, Ginny and Christopher’s honorary aunt, a librarian, a writer Gin
The Paris Review1 min read
Second Sonnet
is about you: not about your father who mildly streams youdown your years. I pretend a knowing of your skin or,beneath it, the wells of yourself, over the time it tookyou here. Where and who do I go with withoutmyself? The long widths of you across a
The Paris Review21 min read
The Art of Fiction No. 251
I met Jane Gardam when she was ninety, at her home in the Kentish village of Sandwich, England. Haven House, where Gardam has lived since 1987, was originally a pilgrims’ hostel and is made up of several medieval structures, but has been modernized o
The Paris Review1 min read
From Couplets
Everyone had the same IKEA bed.She tied my wrists to hers, above my head. (She liked what she called “clean lines,” I would learn;her major had been architecture.) Sometimes when I lay there, waiting, bound or free,I’d envision its assembly: the tiny
The Paris Review2 min read
Three Poems
Green, how I want you green. —Lorca I am sorry I let you downI was writing this poemIn the middle of everythingThe way they wanted itSpring like a gun to the headGreen how I want youI’m so sorry flowerI let you downI was a pink warriorA violent conco
The Paris Review1 min read
We Sleep to Wake
Frida Orupabo was born in 1986 in Sarpsborg, Norway, and lives in Oslo. She studied sociology, with a focus on Black feminism, at the University of Oslo, Blindern, and then spent several years providing social services at a center for sex workers. Sh
The Paris Review2 min read
Diptych
Imagine an abandoned labyrinth, bisected, shimmering with lesions. Muddy. Imagine a photograph pressed into a wet wall. An image develops for about two seconds before someone throws it in the trash, mistaking it (the weak photograph) for packaging. T
The Paris Review19 min read
Trial Run
I pitched through the lobby door and then, as I caught my breath, stood looking back at the storm. It was bad out there. The city had been reduced to dim outlines and floating lights; snow moved down Nineteenth Street in waves. I beat it from my hat
The Paris Review1 min read
Two Poems
I remember when the lights cut out in Prek Engthe women kept cooking Three whole tomatoes fried in the dark But it was not so dark from where I lay in the hammock The trees helped me to discern shadow from night Knowing how to move without lightthe w
The Paris Review1 min read
The Other Love
It doesn’t smell here.I can be whoever I want to be.I can leave my dull citizen-life behind,but have you ever walked aroundlooking for what was alreadyin your hands? Standing upright,with arms down, staring straight ahead,I could be a statue or a pin
The Paris Review26 min read
Women Sweeping
The woman in Édouard Vuillard’s Woman Sweeping, painted between 1899 and 1900, is Marie Michaud Vuillard, the painter’s mother. She is tall and stocky, her posture—that slight give of the back to the broom, without bending—marking a nonchalant style
The Paris Review1 min read
Hole In The Sky
His mind kept the airspace but sold the sun.At night, he ordered his own sun, which wasSupposedly arriving soon, they said,In entourages of azures and clouds. A state had been charged with charging him,Then a state was charged for charging him.The ab
The Paris Review18 min read
Backsiders
We lived in a poor part of town but we had the greatest entertainment. We had the goldfish ponds, we had Motorcycle Hill, we had the dump and Bicycle Jenny. We made rafts for the creek. We lived off the land. Down the street was a family who’d moved
The Paris Review1 min read
Two Poems
a ghost is hangingfrom the doorpostof our past— can you see it?it has wounds—it’s bleedingyears from its mouth [.] when we left ourhouses that aprilit was for history’s pleasure— twice the war wasin far-flung townsthen it grew a light foot and veered
The Paris Review31 min read
The Art of Fiction No. 252
Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on Antigua in 1949. When she was sixteen, her family interrupted her education, sending her to work as a nanny in New York. In time, she put herself on another path. She went from the New School in Ma
The Paris Review1 min read
Flowers in Vases
Bertha “Birdie” Lusch (1903–1988) worked for most of her life on an assembly line at the Timken Company, a metal-bearing manufacturer in Columbus, Ohio. She began making poetry, collages, carvings, and illustrations as a teenager. In the seventies an
The Paris Review2 min read
Three Sonnets
When I look at myself I see a stranger.So obsessed am I with feelingThat I sometimes lose my way when I step freeFrom all the sensations I receive. The air I breathe, the liquor I imbibe,Both belong to my way of existing,And I never quite know how to
The Paris Review2 min read
A Nocturne for Eurydice
for “the maiden in her dark, pale meadow” Twilight through the roof of a rain forestshatters like a chandelier of green glass,the shrillness strafed by keening cicadasand unseen flocks of cockatoos that cawtheir catcalls at the meltdown of the sun. D
The Paris Review17 min readWorld
Diary, 1988
On November 16, 1989, I phoned the Soviet embassy in Paris and asked to speak to Mr. S. The switchboard operator did not reply. After a long silence, a woman’s voice said: “You know, Mr. S. returned to Moscow yesterday.” I immediately hung up. I felt
The Paris Review1 min read
Felix by Proxy
We’d arranged to meet under the High Line,Outside the Whitney; I was running down fromThis photo shoot in Chelsea so I hadMy clothes stuffed into a hiking backpackAnd I was naked except for stilettos.Felix was coming from choir practice.He was tall,
The Paris Review15 min read
I Feel It
In Majorca, jet-lagged at the airport, Nathan bought a one-liter bottle of Tanqueray, and then, after an hour’s drive, their van stopping in a small, possibly medieval town, a second bottle of gin, soda water, limes. They drove farther, another half
The Paris Review2 min read
Contributors
CHIBUIHE OBI ACHIMBA is a poet, essayist, and editor whose work has appeared in the New York Times and Harvard Review. WILL ARBERY is a playwright and screenwriter. Corsicana will premiere in June at Playwrights Horizons. CHRISTIAN BÖK is the author
The Paris Review1 min readLaw
Credits
Cover: Copyright © Andrew Cranston, courtesy of the Ingleby Gallery, photograph by Alan Dimmick. Page 14, courtesy of the Phillips Collection, acquired 1939, copyright © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; pages 24–25, 54, courtesy of Jane C
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Acknowledges
The Plimpton Circle is a remarkable group of individuals and organizations whose annual contributions of $2,500 or more help advance the work of The Paris Review Foundation. The Foundation gratefully acknowledges: 1919 Investment Counsel • ACE Conten

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