Winter 2017

The Paris Review

The world's preeminent literary magazine.

The Paris Review2 min read
Dear Reader:
Like many of you, we at the Review spend more and more time listening to podcasts. (We take longer doing the dishes, we do extra laps around the block, we keep one earbud in at the drugstore …) So when the audio company Stitcher proposed that we make
The Paris Review4 min read
Four Poems by Brenda Shaughnessy
Watching little Henry, six, scoop up blueberriesand shovel them into his mouth, possessed. I’m so glad I brought blueberries—wish my kidscould/would eat them. Cal can’t; Simone won’t. Henry’s sisters, Lucy & Jane, took turns feeding eachother goldfis
The Paris Review26 min read
Stacy Schiff
Anyone else might have easily written off a life of Véra Nabokov as impossible. In the two major biographies of her husband—both written during her lifetime, when she controlled access to his papers—she is a cipher. Her letters, either lost or destro
The Paris Review4 min read
Nick Laird
I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood
The Paris Review7 min read
Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams
The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?
The Paris Review1 min read
Rana Dasgupta
The last ones to work for dollars aroused hatred in the town, and some were subjected to regrettable acts of retribution. In our defense, it was an unusual time. We had built a beautiful system to replace wages and entertainment; people hanging on to
The Paris Review6 min read
Hilton ALS
At first, the TV light is silver. Then it goes to black and white. A moment passes and we see the Columbia Pictures lady. She’s a figure in Adrienne Kennedy’s 1976 play, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, where she speaks the author’s thoug
The Paris Review28 min read
Peter Mountford
Vivian spends most of the afternoon naked and strapped to the giant ottoman in the interior decorator’s office in Bethesda. When he finally unties her, the sun is low and she’s shaky and exhausted. He paddled her hard at some point, and that hot stin
The Paris Review3 min readPsychology
Two Poems by Morgan Parker
The Impressionism wing strikes me as toodainty for my mood, except for one oil paintingby Gustave Caillebotte, Calf ’s Head and Ox Tongue,which is described in the wall text as“visually unpleasant.” A bust of an African womanbums me out. This year, I
The Paris Review38 min read
Katharine Kilalea
A house is a three-dimensional answer to the question of how someone can be together with someone and something in something. —Peter Sloterdijk Each society expects architecture to reflect its ideals and domesticate its deepest fears. —Bernard Tschum
The Paris Review25 min read
Richard Holmes
Born in London in 1945, Richard Holmes has written ten biographies and books of biographical essays. Even in his earliest works, Shelley (1974) and the two-volume Coleridge (1989, 1998), Holmes demonstrates a keen eye for place and a striking empathy
The Paris Review2 min read
Tony Hoagland
In the hospital waiting room, seated in my plastic chair,I think about Leonard Cohen and start quietly to cry.I’m glad no one is watching, because I can see the childish indulgence of it all—the displacement of my personal self-pityonto the cadaverou
The Paris Review16 min read
J. Jezewska Stevens
The party was a failure. I can’t even tell you what a failure it was. There are no words. Only a great pain in my chest when I wake up. On the veranda. It’s better when I sit in the chair. Oh, but then I can see around. The gauzy curtains, pushed by
The Paris Review35 min read
Duncan Hannah
NYC September 1973. I can’t believe it. I’m on the 9th floor of One Fifth Avenue, facing south. Apartment 9H to be exact. It’s a plush hotel suite being used as a Parsons dorm. My new residence. I love it! I have three roommates, curly haired Tom Fox
The Paris Review1 min read
Three Poems by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
When equality feels like oppressionTo you, the keyboard a sword and cannonAnd the comfort of being everyoneOr no one, which you learned without learningIt, fools you into thinking that you’re brave.No, bored. It wasn’t quite football seasonYet, was i
The Paris Review37 min read
Karl Ove Knausgaard
One morning, almost fifteen years ago, I woke up from a dream that was so vivid and powerful that I knew it must be true. I still remember both what happened in the dream and the feelings it left me with. Now the fact is that listening to someone els
The Paris Review1 min read
Two Poems by Henri Cole
after Apollinaire I lived in a rooming house thenand tried to be good but was a realdisappointment. A man without cunningis like an empty matchbox. I can’t remembernow the sad, slow procession of wordsbetween us. Only the hurt. Plug the holeif the pa
The Paris Review4 min read
Acknowledges
1919 Investment Counsel • David M. Adler • A?sop • Alfred A. Knopf • Theresa Gavin & Mark Almeida • Peggy & Keith Anderson • The Anna-Maria & Stephen Kellen Foundation • Jeff Antebi • Gale Arnold • R. Scott Asen • Debbie & Mark Attanasio • Amanda Urb
The Paris Review2 min read
Contributors
HILTON ALS is the author of The Women and White Girls. A theater critic at The New Yorker, he is the recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and an advisory editor of The Paris Review. HENRI COLE is the author of nine collections of poetry

The Paris Review

More Issues From The Paris Review