Winter 2018

The Paris Review

The world's preeminent literary magazine.

The Paris Review16 min read
A Feeling Artist
Onstage, I’m thinking about the postman who was so overwhelmed by the amount of mail he had to deliver that he threw it all, and then himself, into the sea. I’m thinking about the agoraphobic grandmother who refused to go outside, even when the fire
The Paris Review3 min read
Hanif Abdurraqib
my boys & I refused to believe it was Michael who didn’t make it through the night even though the cameras strewn across the sky showed the mansion lawn specked with red sirens & from my own covers I imagined him to be simply asleep the way I slept w
The Paris Review32 min read
I Met Fear on the Hill
It’s the summer of 1966, and Sheila and Peter are a young married couple living in Berkeley. They are very much in love, and also very high—tripping on acid for the first time in their lives, in Tilden Park—walking in a shallow stream full of primord
The Paris Review2 min read
Three Poems by Geoffrey Hill
62. Why such irony in re the mystical context when a graph of even the most commonplace exchange would appear perplexed; when we drop out from the plainest statement in the posture of a bat? So, decide to make something of that, the style to resemble
The Paris Review29 min readSelf-Improvement
The Art of Fiction No. 242
The characters in Sam Lipsyte’s fiction exist in a fog of neoliberal precarity and despair, hustling for affection, for drugs, for a paycheck, for a new story to tell, ranting and bantering their way from one dead end to the next. From his debut, Ven
The Paris Review2 min read
Roger Reeves
Who would have thought—too much simultaneity:The Swan Planters hovering above the windbeatenStatue of the Virgin Mary who casts her gaze downOn the Repainted Lawn Jockey, his brown faceSpreading out over his white cap, a small rebellionOr, merely, an
The Paris Review6 min read
HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work
Fruitlessly you wait for the gardener to show up on the red bench where he has promised to meet you after his shift ends. You encountered him in the bathroom at the museum, and you followed him back to his botanical garden, crowded with statuary and
The Paris Review23 min read
Two Sisters
Two sisters lived together in a two-room apartment. They were very poor. For lunch, they usually had a boiled potato; for breakfast, a slice of bread with a glass of hot water. They were very thin but very neat, and kept their home spotless. Every da
The Paris Review2 min read
Two Poems by Jan Verberkmoes
he unsung me from sound scattered bright my red eye eyes unhooked now from the circle of cedar pine cedar silver the beetles went went silent then stonebite one bite burst the rhythm of the sky of a field of of air electric my azure wing grew wet tho
The Paris Review1 min read
Shane McCrae
I came from life from living I arrivedNowhere in the midst of God in the midst of GodGod is a city in which no one has ever livedWe live in houses like the houses we once hadSome in their first some in their lastI live in the house I lived in with my
The Paris Review2 min read
Toby Martinez De Las Rivas
III. Is belief, like love, first a touch, a feeling,an inclination toward rightness?But I have known—known—myself right somany times & been so, só wrong.Is it a mode of dying? Of benediction?Acceptance of suffering?It is benediction.I am ill. There i
The Paris Review2 min read
Caryl Pagel
And according tothe stranger first ice sheets will thawsea levels willrise you read the stranger said toheights unheard ofshores will smother previous neighbors no onewill weather wellthe earth’s peevish heat will increase airitself septic streetsbri
The Paris Review18 min read
The Stay
Pushed from its hidden end, a sofa drifted into the parking lot under my window. The pushes became feeble thrusts and then short convulsions, until, with a final spasm, the couch nudged one of the abandoned supermarket carts by the trash containers a
The Paris Review2 min read
Margaret Ross
A man in long shorts had a tiny doghe tossed into the leaves piled at the edgeof people’s yards, the dogthe same brown as the leaves.Too small to barkit squeaked as it was tossed. I was seeing someone and we passed iton our way downtown. A street whe
The Paris Review25 min read
The Art of Fiction No. 243
The writer Pat Barker lives in the small city of Durham, in northern England, behind a blue door in one of the rows of nearly identical brick houses in the city center. She’s just a short walk from the famous Norman cathedral on the terraced banks of
The Paris Review25 min read
Hybrid Vigor
By the glow of the headlights, Reney counted again. A calf was gone. A bawling cow trotting ruts into the fence line confirmed Reney’s count. She shoved her work gloves into the back pocket of a pair of Wes’s greasy coveralls. She’d slipped them on o
The Paris Review2 min read
Two Poems by Emily Jungmin Yoon
When I was five, my grandfather took me to the tombof King Suro, lifted me over the stone fences and watched me slide down the mound overand over again. Did he do this because he was an old man, because he didn’t know where youngparents take their ch
The Paris Review5 min read
The Plimpton Circle Is A Remarkable Group Of Individuals And Organizations Whose Contributions Of $2,500 Or More Help Advance The Work Of The Paris Review Foundation. The Foundation Gratefully Acknowledges
1919 Investment Counsel • David M. Adler • Aēsop • Alfred A. Knopf • The Anna-Maria & Stephen Kellen Foundation • Jeff Antebi • Gale Arnold • R. Scott Asen • Debbie & Mark Attanasio • Amanda Urban & Ken Auletta • Kyra Tirana Barry • Mahnaz Ispahani B
The Paris Review3 min readPoetry
Contributors
HANIF ABDURRAQIB is from Columbus, Ohio. His new collection of poems, A Fortune for Your Disaster, is forthcoming in October 2019. RAE ARMANTROUT is the author of Wobble, Partly: New and Selected Poems, and Versed. HERNAN BAS creates works born of li
The Paris Review2 min read
Two Poems by G. C. Waldrep
Morwenstow You stow them to the rear of worship: bits of jagged iron,candle nubs, miscellaneous gears and levers, each perfectunto itself but useless apart from its fellows. The humanback is meant to bear this weight: cable spools, dustyvases. Here i

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