The Paris Review

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…

The talk of trying them, of there being nothing else to do, of the possibility, however small, of finding a new kind of purpose—thinking outside the box—was mitigated by concern about epic bad trips or just plain death after what had happened to Amy, though that was more of a broken-leg issue. The AI medical wellness suite being not quite state-of-the-art, and there being the possibility that no one really wanted to explore of some kind of mismanagement of medication. Its being unclear, none of them having trained in medicine, what exactly it was that had caused Amy’s passing. John seemed to argue that death might not be so bad under the circumstances, though it was of course difficult to understand him, as he spoke through tears. Still. There was…

After the last century—what a century!such a rough, long century, we often said,longer than most, and so tall—a giant of a century,it laid itself downin so many enduring stone steps. Such bones in that century.(What do we do with it now?)A strong nose on that century (almost beautiful),a tank of a nose, a fortress of a smile,a stone explosion of a face. A penny for the man who would dare kiss it.A penny for the man who would walk back downits southern steps. A steep cemetery of a smile,the last century—what a century! What a large cemetery. What a long cemetery.What a large, green cemetery.…

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938. Until she was three, she lived at the Hotel Metropol in the heart of Moscow, which, at that time, housed old-guard Bolsheviks and their families—her great-grandfather Ilya Veger had joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party at its founding in 1898, and her grandmother joined in 1912. Many of her relatives were executed or exiled during the Great Purge; the rest became known as enemies of the people. In 1941, the family was forced to evacuate Moscow ahead of the Nazi advance. As Petrushevskaya recounts in her memoir, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel (2006, translation 2017), she spent the war living with her grandmother and her aunt, begging for money and food, haunting the streets. She couldn’t attend school because she had no shoes.…

1.The war is over.I examine my body—my head, fingers, arms—it’s all there.As though it all slipped back,just now,into place. 2.The war is over.I gaze up at the sky.I’ve missed the birds,the clouds—anything but airplanes. 3.The war is over.The broom sweeps awaythe dust, shards of glass, the screwsof the broken door.It sweeps away the stonesof the smashed walls, splinters ofgold-rimmed tea glasses, the framesof family photographs.Children’s toys; the dinner plates.All swept away, and heaped up somewherein my heart. 4.The war is over.My mother arrives, apologetic.There’s nowhere to receive you, she says—The graves are filled to the brim. 5.The war is over.I shield my head with my hands and run.It’s not raining, or too sunny—and I’m not afraid—I’ve just become used torunning this way. 6.The war is over.I take bread, a lot…

When my daughters turned twelve I initiated them into the mysterious powers with which women of my family line have since time immemorial been endowed. Mysterious not so much in that they didn’t know those powers existed, that I’d kept them secret (I hid nothing from my daughters, since we were of the same sex), but rather in that, having grown up dimly and apathetically aware of the powers’ reality, they no more understood the need to care or to suddenly somehow master them than they had any interest in learning to cook the dishes I served, the products of a domain just as remote and unenticing. Nonetheless, they never thought of rebelling against that tedious instruction. Not once, some sunny afternoon, did they invent a pretext to get out…