March 13, 2025 First Person Self-Assessment By Devon Brody Alan Fears, A PATTERN OF BEHAVIOUR, 2017, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 40″ x 40″. From I’m OK, You’re OK, a portfolio in issue no. 229. Around this time last year, the USB hookup in my car stopped working. I started to listen to the radio more and began to buy CDs again, something I hadn’t done much since I was a teenager. Greg Mendez played a concert in Nashville, and before he went on, I bought two from his merch table: his self-titled album from 2023, and Live at Purgatory, from 2022. I put them in my car. I try not to skip songs on either one. But I am happy when I hear him introduce the sixth track on Live at Purgatory, “Bike.” It’s a short song. Mendez sings the lyrics only once. This is what I hear, which is different from what I see on Genius but is the same as in a handwritten lyric card I can partially see in a picture on Bandcamp: I wanna ride your brother’s bike I wanna stab his friends sometimes I wanna tell a million lies I wanna steal your partner’s heart I wanna turn your pain to art I wanna cry in your mother’s arms I wanna wear your daddy’s jeans I wanna drink the way he did I wanna smoke menthol cigarettes and I wanna fight I wanna fuck on ecstasy I wanna love, but what’s that mean? I wanna go back on EBT Read More
March 11, 2025 Dispatch The Prom of the Colorado River By Meg Bernhard Photograph by Meg Bernhard. Alfalfa smells warm and earthy and sort of sweet, like socks after a long hike, but not in a bad way. It is soft, with oblong green leaves the size of a pinkie nail. I know this because on a chilly February afternoon I drove a hundred and forty miles to the Imperial Valley, one of the state’s largest farming regions, pulled over to an unattended field, and ripped up a clump. It was a brown day; the wind turbines in Palm Springs were spinning and a dust storm was brewing. The air was more humid than normal. Alfalfa grows everywhere around the West, but it’s peculiar to see vast green fields in this place—a low, dry desert where vegetation is scarce and water even scarcer. But the Imperial Valley, home to an accidental salt lake and a mountain made of multicolored painted adobe clay, is one of California’s weirder places. The Salton Sea’s gunky shoreline takes off-road vehicles prisoner. A roving mud puddle eats at the highway. Roughly a hundred and fifty thousand acres of alfalfa grow in a place that sees fewer than three inches of rain a year. People love to hate alfalfa. It’s become the Southwest’s boogeyman, chief offender in the megadrought. Farmers use alfalfa for cattle feed because it’s high in protein, but the crop, a perennial, requires a lot of water—by one estimate five acre-feet per acre in the Imperial Valley. By comparison, Imperial Valley lettuce uses about three acre-feet per acre, while, on average, grapes across the state use about 2.85. (An acre-foot is about enough to cover a football field in water a foot deep; alfalfa, then, requires five of those per acre.) I think about alfalfa a lot, but only in the abstract, as a crop that uses too much water and enables the existence of more cows, which burp methane and make the climate crisis worse. I wanted to see it up close, and I also wanted to speak with one of the West’s most fervent students, and defenders, of alfalfa. His name is John Brooks Hamby, and he’s the vice chairman of the board of directors for the Colorado River’s largest single user, the Imperial Irrigation District, also called IID. Unlike alfalfa farther north, which may see a couple of harvests a year, Imperial Valley alfalfa enjoys a long season, he told me when I arrived at a sterile IID office in El Centro decorated with photos of canals and footbridges. “We can get ten-plus cuttings here,” he said. “Really thick, dense stands.” Alfalfa is not the valley’s only crop; when I was visiting, lettuce was in season, as was celery. I’d apparently just missed the carrot festival in Holtville, where sixteen-year-old Ailenna Salorio was named the 2025 carrot queen. There are dates and lemons and broccoli and spinach and onions too. But alfalfa is king. Read More
March 10, 2025 At Work Making a Claim on Language: A Conversation with Adania Shibli By Max Weiss PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ADANIA SHIBLI. The Winter issue of The Paris Review opens with “Camouflage,” a story by Adania Shibli, the first line of which nudges us, ominously, toward a much broader picture: “We have nothing to do with what’s happening.” And yet what’s happening in the story itself isn’t initially clear. Instead, the scene—in which a Palestinian brother and sister inch forward in their car toward a flying checkpoint in torrential rain—comes into focus slowly, with a masterful control that transforms that obscurity itself into a way of illustrating the dread, tension, and uncertainty of living under the control of the Israeli authorities and military. Shibli, who lives between Berlin and Palestine, where she was born, is the author of plays, short stories, essays, and novels, including Touch, We Are All Equally Far from Love, and, most recently, Minor Detail, which was first published in Arabic in 2017 and translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette in 2020. It was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature, longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, and awarded the LiBeraturpreis in 2023. When I met Shibli in Berlin in the fall of 2024, there was a stack of papers on her desk that amounted to the most recent draft of a new novel written in Arabic. The Review had commissioned me to translate its opening pages, but Shibli, apparently keen to protect my innocence, or my confusion, was adamant that I not read beyond them. Over a home-cooked meal, she and I spoke about how I might want to approach the translation that would appear in The Paris Review. I asked basic questions like “Who is the narrator?” and “But what is this novel about?” Shibli was gentle but sometimes elliptical in her responses. Following our work on the translation, I sent her a few questions over email. INTERVIEWER You once told me, half-jokingly, that you’re “just a farmer.” Why? ADANIA SHIBLI You witness the trust that Palestinian farmers have in trees and in the land despite the colonial violence they face every single day of their farming lives as Israeli authorities, military, and settlers see to it that trees are uprooted, crops attacked with pesticides, and farmers killed. Then you have to ask how this trust—its source or even its justification—is any different from the trust that sleepwalkers have in the night. Writers also move through the field of language guided by that trust, but ever more slowly. Read More
March 7, 2025 In Memoriam For Gary Indiana (1950–2024) By Sam McKinniss Gary Indiana in HIS NEW YORK APARTMENT, FEBRUARY 2002. Photograph by SYLVIA PLACHY. “Live Free or Die” is a false dilemma as well as the state motto of New Hampshire, where Gary Indiana was born and raised. The aphorism originated with the American Revolution and was revived in the sixties to boost up the boys sent to kill and die in Vietnam. New Hampshire began stamping it onto license plates in 1970, when Gary was twenty. By then he was living in California (state motto: “Eureka!”), having fled west at sixteen. What has proven true in the ensuing decades is that Gary lived freely and died anyway. Read More
March 6, 2025 Lectures Horrific Surrealism: Writing on Migration By Viet Thanh Nguyen Feliks Michał Wygrzywalski, Charon’s Boat, 1917, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. My father has crossed many borders. Born in northern Việt Nam under French rule in 1933, he was educated in a French Catholic school. More than eighty years later, a widower, he could still sing fragments of French songs when we sat together at the dining table. The meal I could prepare which he most enjoyed was filet mignon, medium rare, with a glass of red wine. He had a cupboard full of Louis Jadot Beaujolais, for when he liked something, he bought it in bulk. When he stopped being able to eat meat and drink wine, I took the last two bottles of Louis Jadot and brought them home with me, where they remain untouched. Perhaps I will drink one when he passes away. Perhaps I will open the second decades from now and see what I remember when I taste it, even if all I will taste is spoilt wine. Read More
March 5, 2025 The Revel Announcing the 2025 George Plimpton and Susannah Hunnewell Prizewinners By The Paris Review Photograph of Elijah Bailey courtesy of the author; photograph of Julien Columeau by Valentina Kim; photograph of Sana R. Chaudhry by Virginia Hobbs. We are delighted to announce that Elijah Bailey will receive this year’s George Plimpton Prize and that Julien Columeau and Sana R. Chaudhry will receive the Susannah Hunnewell Prize. The prizes will be presented at our annual Spring Revel on April 1 in New York, cochaired by Laurie and Oskar Eustis and MCed by Lena Dunham. We’ll also be honoring Anne Carson with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature, which will be presented by Ben Whishaw. Prizewinners are selected by the editorial committee of the Review’s board of directors. The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993, honors our founding editor’s commitment to championing new talent by recognizing an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the magazine during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Jesse Ball, Amie Barrodale, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Yiyun Li, and Ottessa Moshfegh. Read More