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