There’s no end to the woes that mothers face come summer vacation. All the children are at home. When they’re not in front of the TV, they’re either climbing the guava tree in the front yard or perched on the compound wall. What if one of them falls

MOSAB ABU TOHA is a poet, short-story writer, and essayist. His second poetry book, Forest of Noise, is forthcoming from Knopf in fall 2024. REBECCA BENGAL is the author of Strange Hours. DEEPA BHASTHI is a writer and critic who translates Kannadalan

Cover: © Jeremy Frey, courtesy of the artist, Karma, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Page 12, © Jeremy Frey, courtesy of the artist, Karma, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; pages 34, 43, 48, 50, courtesy of Mary Robison; page 53, photograph by

That summer we had decided we were past caring. It was just too tiring, rushing back and forth between mental institutions. My father was in a well-known sanatorium in Switzerland, but to see him each month mistaking himself for Alfred de Musset, tal

Stellatundra, Albadune, Whiteout,Zebranivem, Faloop’njoompoola. —Engaland, she said. Or a crystal bead of meager bees, a noctifuge suitcaseon the tip of the tongue. Give me loops.Give me turtles. O remolino de abejas marronesen un veliz “noctífugo.”

I know a certain amount about sports, mainly baseball. Last night the Rangers won the pennant, for example, and I know what the pennant is. The thing my husband finds truly poetic is sports. He’s always trying to talk to me about it and explain. “Wat

Nobody really knows how it began. Word first started getting around on a Thursday, but that doesn’t prove anything: it might have all begun days or weeks before that morning in early summer when the cigarette and the newspaper vendors at the train st

GLOUCESTER: There is part of a Power already footed … —King Lear, 3.3.13 Through mildewed windshield of the bridge my Franceand I can see the cliffs begin to showthe more as night approaches. Particulatesthat dim the glass release what glows to warme

New Members Charles Baxter Margo Jefferson Alice McDermott New Foreign Honorary Member Olga Tokarczuk Gold Medal for Biography Doris Kearns Goodwin Christopher Lightfoot Walker Award Darryl Pinckney Arts and Letters Awards Luis Alfaro Lan Samantha Ch

I: I think we should begin today by informing the reader that there’s been a considerable break in time since we last met. R: Why should we do that? I: Well, I was thinking about how when we read a novel there’s no real record of the time in which it

EDITOR EMILYSTOKES MANAGING EDITOR KELLEY DEANE McKINNEY SENIOR EDITOR HARRIET CLARK ASSOCIATE EDITOR AMANDA GERSTEN WEB EDITOR SOPHIE HAIGNEY ASSISTANT EDITORS OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING, ORIANA ULLMAN EDITOR AT LARGE DAVID S. WALLACE POETRY EDITOR SRIKANT

Inside the head there lives a lonely dogIt is drooling spitdigging through a mountain pile of garbageopening and closing an empty house’s windowsoverturning footprints in the sandand going into the fog When you’re walking with pounding legs todaywith

1. So do you read literature?2. Yeah.3. Placated and ventilated4. In the room’s relative dimness,5. She waited for the moment6. To pass.7. Then they saw the medieval8. Knights, whose armor9. Did not seem comfortable.10. Would you like something11. To

My books remain on the shelves as I left them last yearbut all the words have died.I search for my favorite book,Out of Place.I find it lying lonely in a drawer,next to the photo album and my old Nokia phone. The pen inside the book is still intact,b

March 26, 1901 (Meiji 34) Sachio brought three carp and put them in a basin next to my sickbed. He said, You’re sick and shut inside and don’t know it’s spring out there in the world, so I’m letting these carp out in the water here and you’ll see how

Some natural flowers had been allowed to bloom across the field. Sunflowers, the big ones, he couldn’t remember the name, Giganteus blah blah. Buttercups, he at least knew those. A pinkish type. Fine petals drawn upward like bunched fingertips. Bees

“It’s the bullets what’s silver, ne’er one tongue, mine’s the fleshyou find in men’s mouths; moonneither, though swore they, fired,shone like one, unbinding nightas it do what it does ever unerring,lighting flesh. my tongue thusunprecious, as song to

Hermes strapped the beautiful sandals onto his feet,Immortal, made of gold, which bore him across the wet seasAnd endless expanses of land as swift as the breath of the wind.He took along the wand with which he lulls to sleep the eyesOf any man he pl

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

My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s C

I didn’t understand. If that boy couldn’t read, why was he up there? The girl they originally had hosting the ceremony didn’t show, but why they put that boy there? Just because he volunteer for everything? You can’t read off enthusiasm. It made the

Cover: Courtesy of Nicolas Party and the Modern Institute /Toby Webster Ltd. Page 12, courtesy of Alice Notley; pages 32, 36, 39, 42, 45, 48, 52, 55, 56, courtesy of Jhumpa Lahiri; page 59, photograph by Marco Delogu, courtesy of Jhumpa Lahiri; pages

I’ve always loved salmon. Not to eat, as I don’t eat fish, but I’ve always loved salmon in general because salmon jump and no one knows why. They jump all over the place—out of rivers, up waterfalls. Some say they jump to clean their gills. Others sa

hasten slowly and you shall soon arrivepriyanka said, quoting milarepa after all this timemy patience waned its wayinto the dipping sun with the pin-tailed onewhose knowledge was encyclopedic…. betelgeuse is turning on and offlike your love—everybody