The Paris Review Winter 2021

Dear reader, This past summer, I kept turning to a certain kind of prose: the diaries in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, the biomythography of Audre Lorde, Elias Canetti’s journals, the field notes of the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner. It seemed to promise me something, but what? The writing sometimes felt unpolished, as if the authors were allowing me to watch them work through a problem. It dealt with obsession, disappointment, depression. It wasn’t an obvious choice for the subway. I had just started editing The Paris Review, a literary quarterly with a formidable sixty-eight-year record of publishing the best writing, and of hosting glamorous parties. Every morning, in the office, I made coffee under the gaze of a bronze George Plimpton, one of the founding editors. The space was dominated by…

Divorce 1 He wouldin case of divorcelay claim to halfof everythinghe said.Half a sofa,half a TV,half a summerhousehalf a pound of butterhalf a child. The apartment was hishe saidbecause it was in his name.The thing washe loved her. She loved anotherwhose wife wouldlay claim to halfof everything. So the marriage act stated.As clearly astwo and two makes four. The solicitorsaid so too.She broke half of everythingand ripped the tax bill apart.Then she left forthe women’s shelter on Jagtvejwith half a child. The child was teased at schoolbecause he only hadone ear.Other than that,this life toowas bearablesince things couldn’t beany different. Divorce 2 The day hepicked uphis furniturethe frost hadleft the groundso the buildersin the suburbscould pourfoundationsfor the prefab houses. It was a Thursday.Spring was on its waysaid the housekeeper.There were only two often little soldier boys left.The child was…

Gary Indiana was in his late thirties by the time he began to publish fiction, which may account for his wide array of sidelines. For many years he wrote and performed for theater, cabaret, and arthouse cinema. From 1985 to 1988 he savaged the pretensions of the art world each week as the critic for the Village Voice, and he is now an artist himself: one of his video pieces, Stanley Park (2013), which appeared in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, was shot in the ruins of a prison in Cuba, a country Indiana has visited since the late nineties. The piece, which inflects left-wing politics with black comedy, includes a snippet of Josef von Sternberg’s 1941 melodrama The Shanghai Gesture. In 1951, a group of surrealists riffed on scenes from…

All day I think about what to do with the day.I walk down the street for a coffee and to thinkAbout what to do after that. On the tableSomeone before me has left a littleSaucer of salt, with a wooden spoonLike a tiny oar in white sand. Eventually I walkBack to my apartment. When I turn the keyIn the front gate, at the bottom of the steep staircaseLeading up to our door, my left eyelid twitches twice.Inside I know there are things I want to doWith Monday: they levitate in the field of viewMy mind makes, opening, like fireflies,Or those old yellow lanterns along the perimeter of a yard.My mother calls from New York: tomorrow isThe last day of Ramadan and I should be sureTo call her, to say Eid…

In the spring they ripen and swarm the trees,the waxy little fruits that resemble bald heads. I collect their remains: piebald, sweetand sour. A syrup made of loquats is said to cure cough. Their woolly twigssplinter in pear blight. I am bereft when I eat them all. My throat and heartalways sore. Whenever I got sick my mother used to skin yellow loquats, but they tastedbetter with the skin on. This season, my cough grows and grows. There is a tree or a fungusin my chest. I once kissed a man in the hollow. His tattoo of a stump on his chest. I countedthe rings to a hundred. His memory broke against my cracked phone screen like wavesagainst the Sutro Baths. In different years of my life, 2012 and 2017, two menwith the same name fucked me. Futility was…

They sayed she had gotted a white mans education. She had climbed the jet and flied across the ocean to read abroad. They sayed she had a big house in the big town of Meru. A big house and big car like a Prado that all the rich people driving in town. They sayed she had one children. A boy children that go to big school for rich people. They sayed she had a law degree but all she did was obey the orders of the wardens and pray. She prayed a lot. Some of the times she used to cry small small when she was praying. Some of the times she would kneel down but not that many times. The wardens would beat us when we showed funny behavior.…