Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Paris Review

    Fecund Sounds Like a Swear

    by Nina MacLaughlin Jun 14, 2019 5 minutes

    In this series on the summer solstice, which will run every Friday through June 21, Nina MacLaughlin wonders what summer’s made of.

    MAX PECHSTEIN, Ein Sonntag, 1921

    The delights of summer are earthly. An older friend lives for pleasure. Just north of sixty, with a thin ponytail and a thick mustache, he does seasonal work, landscaping, collects unemployment in the winter, and pursues the perfect high. After a knee injury, beers and hallucinogens gave way to pain pills. “I’ll die of terminal boyhood,” he tells me.

    Another friend floods me with her schedule, her work, her workouts, this kid at soccer practice, that kid at gymnastics, the new dog needs walking, the groceries do not buy themselves, sixty hours at her job, thirty in her car to-ing and fro-ing. “Usually I’ve reached over ten-thousand steps by seven in the morning,” she tells me.

    When we were high school, in

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Paris Review

    The Paris Review2 min read
    Contributors
    GBENGA ADESINA is a poet and essayist. FARAH AL QASIMI is a visual artist. ELIJAH BAILEY is at work on a novel and a short-story collection. SANA R. CHAUDHRY’s Writing Trauma: The Politics of Mute Speech in the Urdu Short Story is forthcoming from Cl
    The Paris Review35 min read
    An Eye In The Throat
    My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s C
    The Paris Review1 min read
    The People’s History of 1998
    France won the World Cup.Our dark-goggled dictator died from eating a poisoned red applethough everyone knew it was the CIA. We lived miles from the Atlantic.We watched Dr. Dolittle, Titanic, The Mask of Zorro. Our grandfather, purblind and waitingfo

    Related Books & Audiobooks