{"id":143435,"date":"2020-03-10T14:36:39","date_gmt":"2020-03-10T18:36:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=143435"},"modified":"2020-03-10T15:59:48","modified_gmt":"2020-03-10T19:59:48","slug":"a-story-in-one-picture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/03\/10\/a-story-in-one-picture\/","title":{"rendered":"A Story in One Picture"},"content":{"rendered":"

To celebrate the bouquet of stories in our Spring issue<\/a>, which hits newsstands today, we asked each of the six featured fiction writers to share an image that evokes their story<\/em>:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

John Everett Millais, Ophelia<\/em>, c. 1851<\/p><\/div>\n

I don\u2019t know if \u201cevokes\u201d is exactly the right word for this painting, but I thought a lot about Ophelia<\/em> by John Everett Millais and the mythology of dead women in art and fiction. To some extent, I felt like I was writing in the opposite direction of this painting. It loomed in my brain all the same.<\/p>\n

\u2014Senaa Ahmad, \u201cLet\u2019s Play Dead<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Kate Elizabeth Fowler, Untitled, Family Photographs, 2019<\/p><\/div>\n

A pure baby shining in white at the center of the frame, being held by a shirtless, barefoot boy. Something about it all is so sacred. I believe my main character in \u201cAn Unspoken,\u201d Clara Parker, would have seen this in a dream and felt happy, or could just as easily been haunted by it. And this is everything the story truly hinges on.<\/p>\n

\u2014Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, \u201cAn Unspoken<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is a photograph of the Angel Makers of Nagyr\u00e9v, a group of Hungarian women who killed many men in their village. I believe this was taken after their eventual arrest. My story was very loosely inspired by theirs.<\/p>\n

\u2014Rebecca Makkai, \u201cA Story for Your Daughters, a Story for Your Sons<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Vasily Vereshchagin, A Resting Place of Prisoners, 1878-1879<\/p><\/div>\n

This painting by Vasily Vereshchagin, painted from 1878\u201379, depicts (according to the Brooklyn Museum where it hangs) Turkish war prisoners freezing to death while being marched to Russian war camps during the Russo-Turkish War. I can imagine the characters in my story going to see this painting while in the midst of their War and Peace<\/i> reading group and drawing comparisons between Vereshchagin\u2019s project and Tolstoy’s, their various attempts to bring the reality of Russian history home to their audiences. The characters might have wondered, like I do, whether Tolstoy saw this painting, and what he thought of it. Guessing he would have hated it, but maybe he wasn\u2019t in that phase of his life yet.<\/p>\n

\u2014Andrew Martin, \u201cChildhood, Boyhood, Youth<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Lord Kitchener as a baby on his mother’s lap, with his elder brother and his sister. (published 1916 in The Illustrated War News)<\/p><\/div>\n

This photograph does not evoke the story for me. But there is something in it. That the man who would go on to be the origin of such immense butchery–the famous British hero Kitchener–can rest this way on his mother’s lap. We go from here to there\u2014from there to here, or do we? What is a person?<\/p>\n

\u2014Jesse Ball, \u201cDiary of a Country Mouse<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Edvard Munch, Melancholy II, 1898<\/p><\/div>\n

This 1898 woodcut, \u201cMelancholy II,\u201d by Edvard Munch. The landscape is a little abstract, but I think the woman is sitting beside the water. The coastline looks like a creature, doesn’t it? I love, especially, that you can\u2019t quite tell where the horizon is.<\/p>\n

\u2014Clare Sestanovich, \u201cBy Design<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Keep exploring our Spring issue here<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To celebrate the bouquet of stories in our Spring issue, we asked each of the six featured fiction writers to share an image that evokes their story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18642],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inside-the-issue"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Story in One Picture by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 10, 2020 \u2013 To celebrate the bouquet of stories in our Spring issue, we asked each of the six featured fiction writers to share an image that evokes their story.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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