The Paris Review Summer 2022 (240)

The story of Aesop’s partnership with The Paris Review is one plotted by a deep reverence for the written word. Since 2015, we have been proud to offer this esteemed quarterly for purchase in select stores across the globe and at aesop.com, inviting customers to join us in discussing the thought-provoking ideas explored in its pages. Now more than ever we believe literature has the power to nurture meaningful connections, nourish weary minds and give voice to those whose words have, for too long, been kept in the margins—so, here’s to the next chapter. Aesop Chelsea 74 9th Ave, New York, NY 10011…

People got out in strange ways. No stranger, I suppose, than the ways they got in. One year an American military helicopter flew too low over an Italian ski village, killing two families headed up the lift. A woman at Hillcrest had Italian citizenship and, like that, release became a reparation. Just like that it could happen. “The ski-lift option,” my mother called it. “Who knew?” When a woman went free her friends and not-friends could watch from the north side of the mess hall to see her descent. But watching her was like watching that joke where a person stands behind a couch and pretends to walk down stairs that aren’t there by crouching lower and lower, then falling over. The women up top could watch the one woman descend…

Today we’re going to get to work on the detailsof your expression. And believe it or not,the only colors we’re going to use will be blacker than most blacks. We’ll use a black canvasand just a single finger instead of a brush.So let’s take and dab the tip of a pointer finger into the black like so. And now we’re going to covereverything between jawbone and temple,cheek and nostril, on both sides of the mouth, in black. You folks at home are welcome to use a thumb.Use a pinkie or a pinkie toe. I just want you to enjoyyourselves. Get the feel of the color until it suits you. And just gently tap, tap gently the colorinto the shape of a forehead. There we go.Maybe like we’re touching a tiny tender button, gently dabbing and…

The pack of boys had released their first album in Seoul two years ago, and now they were selling out corporate arenas and Olympic stadiums all over the world. I was familiar with the story of their explosive ascent, how the premiere of their latest music video had triggered a power outage across an entire Pacific island. I knew they were performers of supernatural charisma whose concerts could leave a fan permanently destabilized, unable to return to the spiritual attenuation of her daily life. I also knew about the boys’ exceptional profundity in matters of the heart, how they offered that same fan her only chance of survival in a world they’d exposed for the risible fraud that it was. At least this was what I’d derived from hours of listening…

Whoo, whoo. An owl in the tallest blue spruce. Before sunrise.Patches of icein the driveway. Facing each other, we held a single brush in the air with ourright hands.I, left-handed, felt awkward holding it, but, holding it higherup, hebeckoned me to start. A melody played on the piano with five black keys. I heard it,walking acrosspacked snow and ice with microspikes under my shoes. I tried to bring the brush down onto the white paper, but he kept it an inch above. Whiteout. Then we pressed it down and, lifting, completed a dot. Full moon. Dogs barking, racing up and down the glassed-inhallway. Xenon,krypton, argon, neon, helium. Inert gases. Blue bottles onbranches. Nothing’sinert. Where am I? Moving the brush in the air, we made another downwardstroke, then,releasing pressure, brought it up. I drew a deep…

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a revolutionary. Take nearly any pressing political topic: the horrors of incarceration, the erasure of indigeneity, the oppression of the poor, the rights of the working class, the corrosive effects of neoliberalism. You’ll find in Ngũgĩ’s oeuvre—his fiction, his criticism, his theory—an incisive, often prescient treatment of the issue, one that always attends to the conflicts that underlie it. This is because Ngũgĩ is a Marxist thinker. In our conversation in early 2021, we discussed his fascination with the idea of contraries: “I talk about struggle a lot, dialectical struggle, dialectics of Marx, dialectics of Hegel,” he said. Born James Ngũgĩ in 1938 in a village in Limuru, Kenya, he attended Alliance High School, a missionary boarding school in the nearby town of Kikuyu, and in 1959…