EDITOR EMILYSTOKES DEPUTY EDITOR LIDIJA HAAS MANAGING EDITOR AMANDA GERSTEN WEB EDITOR SOPHIE HAIGNEY OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING, ORIANA ULLMAN POETRY EDITOR SRIKANTH “CHICU” REDDY ART DIRECTOR NA KIM MAYA BINYAM, MATTHEW HIGGS, NIELA ORR HILTON ALS, ANTONI

The story of Aesop’s partnership with The Paris Reviewis one plotted by a deep reverence for the writtenword. Since 2015, we have been proud to offer thisesteemed quarterly for purchase in select stores acrossthe globe and at aesop.com, inviting cust

My sister called me the other day. She wanted to let me know that I had once more been merciless and cruel in my relations with our parents. “They say there’s a lot of anger in you,” she said. “It makes them mad. It hurts their feelings. They think y

I had an accident but lived in eleganceon methamphetamines and small stacksof Black Beauty paperbacksand plastic plates of breadand black cherry marmalade.Later, a career of killingtime. And wasting money.But I have always been extraordinarily gifted

It was hot that day, hot for the morning and hot for April and with a stickiness in the air that suggested something had to break. I was headed up the street to ask my neighbor Meech to give me a jump when I heard a scream come from the fourplex next

Two actors—Diane, a white woman in her mid-to late sixties, and Erin, a Black woman in her late thirties—stand on a bare stage with two chairs: one comfy, one less so. There’s a music stand in front of the comfier chair and an end table with tea thin

I’m going to make a poem out of nothing.You and I will be the protagonists.Our emptiness, our loneliness,the deadly boredom, the daily defeats:all these things will go into the poem,which is bound to be short, since theyfit in a few lines, maybe as f

Having worn my camouflage for leisure, having fed upon a shale bed’s vapors, having licked my wounds with glacial pleasure, having found out what of a child’s I could own, having known what the child would buy back later, having lectured on gut healt

Kiss the motherthat needs to becomethat needs to needgroundingthat death helps us heave our thoughtsbecome the trying that is trying to becomethe yes that is trying to unify usinto the nothing that is the juttinghelpful greeting that is trying to yea

My brother Eli and I are lying on the couch, both of us nearly asleep, Eli’s toenails gently kneading my neck. I’m raising my throat to their sharpness, wanting him to press in, when from the next room we hear chimes. Then two clangs. Then: “Hello?”

I bought a hatof faux mink furto wear in the war In my hat I sitin my cellarwaiting The enemy’s lateI read his messageson my phone popping openthe jars of strawberry jamlining the cellar walls Like a lovermy enemy sends meflowers, emojis, words of co

I’ve only seen a dead bird up close once. It wasn’t red butblue. I named it Happiness before I buried it. My childfound a few sticks so we could make a cross. We dug a holeand dropped the bird in, along with a few flowers we hadplucked. We didn’t tou

The Roseville Hotel had closed many years ago, and the rooms upstairs had been converted to apartments, but the bar on the ground floor was still called the Roseville Hotel, because everyone was used to the name. One Saturday in January, John James a

“Who are you playing?” “Gertrude. But only today, I’m just helping—” “Oh, hi, Mama.” I laughed. “You’re Hamlet.” “Yeah.” Wael ran a hand through his hair. His cheeks were a little pink. On the drive with Mariam from Haifa into the West Bank, one of h

POLLY BARTON is a translator and writer. Her nonfiction debut, Fifty Sounds, won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. VICTORIA CHANG is the author of The Trees Witness Everything, Obit, and Dear Memory. She is the poetry editor of The New York

Cover: Courtesy of Uman and Nicola Vassell Gallery; photograph by Joseph Perez. Page 16, courtesy of Jeremy Deller; page 32, courtesy of the Frances McCullough papers at Special Collections and University Archives, University of Maryland Libraries; p