June 1, 2012 Windows on the World Francisco Goldman, Mexico City By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. My desk is snugly ensconced in a front corner of the living room, facing wall and bookshelves, a wide window overlooking a park in Colonia Roma to the right and, on my left, the narrow side window drawn by Matteo. I’m sharing the apartment with my friend Jon Lee, who is almost always traveling, but he needed a Latin American base for his work. We only moved in a month ago. It’s the biggest apartment I’ve ever lived in. The living room is so immense that I bought a football (not a futbol) just to prove you can play catch in it, and now I am looking for a wiffleball batting machine, which I think would be a great way to manage the persistent physical restlessness that often makes it so hard for me to sit still at a desk. In the mornings I go down to a café facing the park for breakfast. They have terrific coffee. I usually have the waitress tell me about the chilaquiles, the enfrijoladas, molletes, and omelettes just so that I can savor her descriptions, and then I order the fruit and granola, and she makes fun of me for that. I work in the café for two or three hours and then go back to the desk in my apartment. Apart from a break for lunch, I try to work until seven in the evening, and then usually head to the gym. We’re right around the corner from one of Mexico City’s greatest cantinas, one I’d been coming to for years from more distant neighborhoods. They have a funny ritual there. A waiter will ring a bell to catch everyone’s attention, shout out a name, and then the cavernous room will resound with raucous shouts of ¡Pendejo! (it means, more or less, “asshole!”). You have to pay the waiter to do that. Once a good friend, a writer from Ireland, was visiting, and he paid the waiter to shout out the name of another Irish writer who’d given him a nasty review, and the waiter, though he could barely pronounce the name, shouted it out, and everyone in the cantina, the old men playing dominoes, the Mexican and foreign hipsters, and literary types who also hang out there, et cetera, joyously shouted “¡Pendejo!” —Francisco Goldman
May 4, 2012 Windows on the World Tim Parks, Milan, Italy By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. Do I pull up the shutter before my cappuccino or afterward? That’s the first decision of each new day. I need to see if it’s raining. The cord is worn and the shutter’s slats will jam if yanked too hard. The view scrolls up. “View” is generous. This is an ordinary courtyard in a sixties condo in working-class Milan; my small balcony hangs over the building’s main entrance, looking onto other small balconies above and to the left, some alive with plants, with dogs, cats, canaries, others storing old bikes, buggies, bits of furniture. In the middle of the space, a handkerchief of lawn and a tall hoarse chestnut, golden in midsummer, gaunt in winter, remind us of Nature. Otherwise it’s all cement, stucco, and tiling. Not unpleasant, not oppressive, not exciting. After ten minutes in the café (across the street) where recent Chinese arrivals serve excellent coffee and croissants, I work with my back to the open window which lets in dogs barking, a young man iPhoning on his balcony, some challenged creature who yells sporadically down the street. The portinaia sweeps fallen leaves and cigarette stubs, chatting to all comers with unremitting enthusiasm. But I’m wearing earplugs; her voice is muffled. About ten-thirty the sun hunts me down and a bright boil of light finds out how long it is since I vacuumed the parquet. Too long. I frown and turn up the brightness on this other window I’m typing into. —Tim Parks
April 6, 2012 Windows on the World John Jeremiah Sullivan, Wilmington, NC By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows.This is the back view from my office. It’s raining. You can see a wall of the old garage (which still has a deep oil pit inside, from when more people worked on their own cars). The magnolia that hangs over the backyard is blooming. When it does, we open the door to the sleeping porch upstairs, and the whole house fills with the smell. My wife will cut one of the flowers and let it float in a bowl of water on the kitchen table. Magnolias drop hundreds of large seed pods once a year—they come crashing down from the tree. I’m always worried one of them is going to land on somebody’s head (they’re heavy enough to hurt). We spend about a month just picking them up. They look like brown-green grenades but are bursting all over with bright red seeds. The leaves, when they turn brown and fall, are hard and brittle. That’s a problem down here, because tiny pools of water form on them, and the mosquitoes lay eggs there. You have to pick them up fast. In short, a big magnolia is a lot of work, but I would never get rid of this one. The week or so of blossoming is worth everything. Also, the branches cover the whole brick path from the back door to the driveway. Even in a heavy storm, you can just walk along dry. Sometimes I pat the tree’s trunk and thank it for that, or just to say hello. Once, when we first got home from a trip of two months, my daughter—who was four at the time—hugged the tree long and fiercely, saying nothing, before she ran inside. I think it’s sort of the guardian of the house. —John Jeremiah Sullivan
March 2, 2012 Windows on the World Emma Larkin, Bangkok By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. My study window looks out over an incongruous jungle located in the heart of Bangkok. As the rest of the neighborhood is dominated by high-rises and townhouses that have sacrificed yards for concrete parking spaces, all remaining wildlife seems to gravitate to our garden. Myopic fantail birds tap against the windowpanes, squirrels chew on the frayed corners of the shutters, and neon-green tree snakes sunbath silently in the rain gutters. (I keep the number of a local snake catcher in my phone, as the lack of rats suggests the presence of a well-fed python somewhere in the vicinity.) There is another type of wildness here, too. The ficus tree on the right-hand side of this drawing is where the house spirits now reside. At the advice of a fortune-teller, a tricolored band of cloth was tied around its trunk not long after we moved in. In accordance with Thai custom, regular offerings of food and flower garlands are laid out for the spirits so that they might be enticed to exist outside the house, rather than inside—a practice that has put a stop to most (but not all) of the inexplicable shadows and footsteps that flit through these old wooden rooms. This scene encompasses both the wild and the urban, the known and the unknown. It reminds me that the dividing line between fact and fiction is less clearly defined here in Thailand and that the boundary between the two is porous. In such a place, stories thrive. —Emma Larkin
February 3, 2012 Windows on the World Xi Chuan, Beijing By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. This is one of three windows in my study. The study is a one-bedroom apartment on the fifteenth floor. I don’t know how many stories this building has—probably twenty-five or more—but I have never been above the seventeenth floor. During the day, if I don’t need to be at school, I stay in my study. It is crowded with books and old objects I collected from flea markets. I don’t have many friends visit me. I used to have a neighbor who was the manager of a small company that installed central heating. He occasionally came to talk with me, and I discovered that he had been a lover of poetry when he was young. I am sure he didn’t know who I was, though, so I told him that I was a teacher of literature, which is true. The window faces east. When I sit at my desk in front of a wall of books, writing, the window is to my left. When I bought this apartment, which is a fifteen-minute walk from my home, in the late nineties, the building standing in front of my window was already there, as was the bridge, but the building behind the bridge was not, so there was a vast view across the city. But the whole city of Beijing was a giant construction site in the nineties and 2000s, and the view couldn’t last. Once I got used to the buildings in the window, I seldom looked out of it. No trees can reach the fifteenth floor, so no birds perch at my window. When I look out, I see cars running on the bridge. Nothing else. —Xi Chuan
January 6, 2012 Windows on the World Dennis Cooper, Paris By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is a famous drawer of cities. He is known for his witty, loving, obsessively detailed renditions of the Manhattan coastline (Manhattan Unfurled), the perimeter of Central Park (Manhattan Within), and the banks of the River Thames (London Unfurled). Several years ago, Matteo began to draw New York from a new vantage point—from its windows. He asked artists, writers, politicians, editors, and others involved with the cultural life of the city to let him draw whatever they saw when they looked outside. These were collected in the book The City Out My Window (and the view from 62 White Street appeared on the cover of The Paris Review). In 2010, the project grew. Matteo was commissioned by The New York Times op-ed page to draw the window views of writers around the world, and the writers were asked to describe them. Starting today, that series—Windows on the World—will continue in The Paris Review Daily. Stay tuned for a new window each month. —Lorin Stein This is the only window in the room where I live. It looks over the former grounds of the former monastery turned artists residency in the 10th arrondissement of Paris where I reside. I only look through it when I’m smoking. —Dennis Cooper