Interior view of the San Francisco Columbarium & Funeral Home, as seen from the second floor, via Wikimedia Commons. © Frank Schulenburg / CC BY-SA 4.0.

An overcast morning in July on a train to San Francisco. In my coat pocket, a blank page torn from the back of a book, on which I’d written: “4th floor, Dome Room, South Wall, Tier 3, Niche 2.” Coordinates for finding you, or rather what remains of you, interred inside a niche at the Columbarium.

I once read that the late writer Kevin Killian used to drive out-of-town guests to a cemetery in Colma, a small, foggy town on the outskirts of San Francisco that, in the twenties, became a necropolis. The city dug up thousands of graves and transported them to make room for the living. The Columbarium stayed put thanks to its spatial economy: niches that contain the funeral urns are stacked on top of one another like multiple-dwelling units for the dead.

The purpose of Killian’s day trips to Cypress Lawn was to pay homage to the poet Jack Spicer, whose ashes were stored in a niche there. But you get the sense that these drives were occasions to spend a few hours with poets he didn’t know well but who he thought might share his frequency. He was genuinely enthused about visiting the final resting places of his artistic heroes. “For a man like me,” he wrote, “there’s no closure unless I go to the grave and fall down on it … and embrace spectral memory as a living thing in my arms.”

Read More

Read More

John Cheever poses for a portrait with his wife, Mary Cheever, on March 13, 1964, at their home in Ossining, New York. Photograph by David Gahr/Getty Images.

Jim was too tired to make even a pretense of sociability, and there was nothing about the dinner to hold Irene’s interest, so her attention wandered from the food to the deposits of silver polish on the candlesticks and from there to the music in the other room. She listened for a few minutes to a Chopin prelude and then was surprised to hear a man’s voice break in. “For Christ’s sake, Kathy,” he said, “do you always have to play the piano when I get home?” The music stopped abruptly. “It’s the only chance I have,” a woman said. “I’m at the office all day.” “So am I,” the man said. He added something obscene about an upright piano, and slammed a door. The passionate and melancholy music began again.

“Did you hear that?” Irene asked.

— from “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever, originally published in The New Yorker in 1947

I was the model for a group of mischievous, neglected, wise-before-their-time prepubescent girls who did everything from getting lost to nabbing the nuts put out for cocktails, and my mother was my father’s one-woman university for the study of women—especially pretty, selfish women. “The Enormous Radio” was written in early 1947, and it features the superficially attractive family that often opens my father’s short stories, whether they are set in New York City or in the suburbs that line the Hudson River—the Rhine of America. In this story, written when we lived in the brick apartment building at 400 East Fifty-Ninth Street near the East River, Jim and Irene Westcott and their two children live in an Upper East Side apartment building near the East River. They are an ordinary family except for one unusual thing: their love of music. They share an eccentric passion for Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach. They love the Chopin études and thrill to the Fifth Symphony. How can this be a problem? How could this enthusiasm unravel their perfect lives?

If the Westcotts have a guilty secret, something that sets them apart from the neighbors in their prewar brick building with its doorman and awning, it is this music. They are moved by Schubert quartets in a world where many people have adjusted their ears to silence, traffic noise, or the ambient music piped into public spaces. But as the Westcotts find out when a new radio triumphantly bought to replace the old one comes into their living room, their neighbors have a less savory assortment of guilty secrets.

Read More

From Details of “Winter,“ a portfolio that appears in the Winter 1976 issue of The Paris Review.

Yan Lianke’s story “Plants, Stones, Dirt, and Sky,” translated by Jeremy Tiang, appears in the Fall 2025 issue of The Paris Review.

When an author is blocked from publication in his own country yet cannot live anywhere else, he finds himself being both debated and yelled at, attacked and beloved, forgotten but always remembered again, like a hedgehog that, for whatever reason, has to crawl along human pathways, surrounded by onlookers, getting kicked and shunted with sticks into the undergrowth, though there will inevitably be some people who find this creature as important as life itself and gently swaddle it in their clothes to carry it to an uninhabited part of the forest. Yet that hedgehog will crawl back onto the path whenever the sun is out.

Because the sun shines on that forest path.

Because the hedgehog longs for sunlight.

That’s how things are, cyclical and repetitious, repetitious and cyclical. Might the day come when the hedgehog expires on that sunlit path?

Since turning sixty, I’ve thought about death every single day. Read More

“Watchers,” from the portfolio Painting Past Photographs by Bradford Johnson, which appeared in the Winter 2003 issue of The Paris Review.

So this is hunger. A new war raging inside the war of missiles and bombs, a war no less brutal or mighty than the one searing us with its fires and sending us running to escape its crushing force. Hunger came for us in our home, as it did for others. We eat one meal a day now, halfway through the day; in the morning, a few biscuits are first shared between the children and then the adults, and in the evenings, we make do with tea.

Shortly after flour disappeared from the market in November 2023, it began to circulate again in the sacks originally intended for distribution by UNRWA. This sudden appearance was the result of an act of mass looting by crowds of hungry people, which we only heard about afterward: they had stormed the UNRWA warehouses, some breaking down the doors while others scaled the walls, and emptied them of their supplies—not only flour, but also tinned sardines, corn oil, milk powder, and dried lentils and chickpeas—in a matter of minutes. Apparently, they’d even taken wooden desks, shelves, and the agency’s archives—all of which could be used as firewood. I bought a sack of looted UNRWA flour for more than four times the usual price and made my way home as if bearing priceless treasure. My wife Ula and her sisters were jubilant, and we were all seized by a dark joy amid the wasteland of fear and grief that grows vaster and more desolate by the day as the war continues to escalate. We felt momentarily comfortable and safe; we could bake our own bread now, instead of waiting under the hot sun for hours in the uncertain hope of finding some at the bakery. But another problem stood in our path: to turn the thin rounds of dough into bread we needed an oven, and all we had in the apartment was a gas canister that barely sufficed to cook our regular meals. We would have to find some other way.

Mud ovens, which are what rural Gazan families have always used for cooking and baking, are dotted across the green patches that lie between the apartment blocks in Hamad City. The women they belong to are generous and volunteer their help when other families turn up needing to bake something, only asking them to bring enough paper and cardboard for fuel. But we didn’t have any paper or cardboard in the house—only my books. Read More

Ed Archie NoiseCat, Coyote Survives the Night. Courtesy of Julian Brave NoiseCat.

The night watchman who found my newborn father in the dumpster said his cries for life sounded like a cat. But that was pure, if darkly ironic, coincidence. Because our last name, NoiseCat, originally had nothing to do with noises or cats.

Instead, “Noiscat,” as it was once written, is a missionary’s bastardization of our ancestral name, Newísket. My family was colonized so hard we don’t remember what Newísket means. What I do know is that the name belonged to my great-grandmother Alice Noiscat from the village of Canoe Creek on the Fraser River. Listening to family and elders, I figure Alice was either a daughter, granddaughter, orphan, or slave of Copper Johnny Noiscat. Copper Johnny must’ve been both clever and industrious. During the Gold Rush and subsequent settlement of the colony and then province of British Columbia, he laid claim to a meadow that still bears his name. Today, Copper Johnny Meadow Indian Reserve No. 8 is part of the reserve lands of the remote Stswecem’c/Xget’tem (Canoe Creek/Dog Creek) First Nation. I’m not sure what Copper referred to. Maybe it referred to his red skin—a name stuck on him by semé7 (whites) who gave Indians names for amusement and convenience: “Oh yeah, this one’s ‘Indian Jim’ and that one’s ‘Copper Johnny.’ ” (In Secwepemctsín, the 7 denotes a glottal stop. The word kyé7e, “grandmother,” for example, is pronounced “kya-ah.”) Or maybe it referred to his wealth. In the Indigenous Northwest, copper is a prized trade good signifying that its owner has a wealth of food and culture to share. In a world where Indians had all our land taken from us, an Indian with land like Copper Johnny was rich. Copper Johnny Meadow may be the ancestral territory of the Newískets going back to some mythic progenitor whose deeds were marked and remembered on that land—through creation, transformation, and forces both natural and supernatural that make our world the way it is—all the way back to Coyote and whoever the first Newísket was. Or maybe, Copper Johnny is that first Newísket. He’s the oldest one we still remember today.

Based on conversations with my kyé7e, Alice’s daughter, the name Newísket could mean a couple of things—maybe “Long Day” or “Tall Timber Day.” But to see how that might be the case, it’s necessary to understand some of the history and peculiarities of Secwepemctsín and the Salish languages. Because like the meaning of my name, my ancestral tongues are fast slipping from the Land of the Living to that of the dead. Read More