An Ignoble Experiment: We Are Temporarily Out of Oreos

The Paris Review Redux: free interviews, stories, poems, and art from the archives of The Paris Review.
View this email in your browser

A letter from Edward Gorey to Tom Fitzharris.

"Time is passing. None of us is/are getting any younger. What does it all mean? We are temporarily out of oreos. Oh God," wrote Edward Gorey in one of his many letters to Tom Fitzharris. The two shared a brief but intense friendship after meeting on the streets of New York in 1974, and Gorey sent richly illustrated correspondence to Fitzharris throughout that period. "Although it's a revolting phrase yesterday was a happy day and I'm glad we did it," wrote Gorey, in the same letter. "One cannot help but think how seldom in life one knows one is having one at the time."

This week, we're unlocking a story by Gorey about the adventures of a girl named Angelica and her acquaintance with one particularly admonitory hippopotamus. The text, which Gorey never got around to illustrating, first appeared in issue no. 162 of the Review.

PROSE
The Admonitory Hippopotamus: or, Angelica and Sneezby
Edward Gorey

One day when she was five Angelica was in the gazebo, playing snap with her brothers.

Suddenly she caught sight of something rising from the ha-ha.

It was a spectral hippopotamus. "Fly at once!" he said. "All is discovered."

She remembered the bread pudding under the carpet.

From issue no. 162 (Summer 2002)

To read more from issue no. 162, including an interview with Ian McEwan, why not subscribe?

You'll receive four print issues a year plus unlimited digital access to our seventy-one-year archive.