Strange Incidents Abound

An unlocked essay by Ishion Hutchinson.

The Paris Review Redux: free interviews, stories, poems, and art from the archives of The Paris Review. View this email in your browser Courtesy of Na Kim. This week, we've unlocked "A Room in August Town" by Ishion Hutchinson, selected from the archive by Elias Rodriques, whose story "Lala and Waldy" appears in our recent Winter issue. Ishion Hutchinson's "A Room in August Town" is, as the saying goes, a portrait of country come to town. First published in The Paris Review in 2023, the essay, ostensibly a tale of Hutchinson's time at college in Kingston, finds the young student's perceptions blurring fact and legend, text and memory, as he encounters the Western canon in his formal education and Jamaican spiritual traditions in everyday life. New terms from his reading pervade his immediate surroundings: his tiny student room is "a veritable Raskolnikov's garret"; the sea from his hometown in Port Antonio appears "skyish," which "I'd picked up from Hamlet, and it seemed the only right word for that blue." Between sessions of listening to Bach's St. Matthew Passion, he remembers Kumina ceremonies in St. Thomas. Slowly, a dread begins to creep in. Perhaps it is the danger of the city, not insignificant in Kingston in the early aughts, when Hutchinson began studying there. Perhaps it is the disorientation of encountering so many new images, decisions, people, characters, simultaneously. Or perhaps it is the work of a guzu man, that Jamaican folkloric figure who, as an elder tells Hutchinson, turns "you into coconut husk." Whatever ails him, Hutchinson soon has trouble sleeping and eating. Strange incidents abound: upon staring at a painting of a bird with a human eyebrow, he feels faint, lies down, and finds the ceiling of his garret has come to resemble "a beehive, reflecting a waxy, vitelline membrane." In my eyes, the student's introduction to great works of European civilization bears some of the blame for the essay's surreal horror. In "A Room in August Town," the postcolonial Caribbean's melding of Western and African traditions becomes, if not frightening in itself, the lens through which the narrator sees something that scares him. Though I have not chosen to watch a horror movie since I was a child (I am prone to nightmares), I keep revisiting this piece by perhaps the greatest Jamaican poet of his generation, who may soon become its greatest essayist.    —Elias Rodriques PROSE A Room in August Town Ishion Hutchinson   I started pacing the room, slowly then faster, muttering to myself. Then I lost control and, like someone possessed, ran hollering through the house. I broke into room after room, and after I had entered what felt like dozens of them, each empty and unlit, I burst into a room where my landlord sat dozing in a chair in front of a television set. When he turned toward me, he didn't have his sunglasses on. His oblong face, black as a rubber tube, shone with sweat. It looked ordinary enough. But one eye was a bulbous scar and the other was a milky pearl staring unblinkingly at me. I fled his room and locked myself in mine. On the mattress, my eyes fixed on the bulb, I waited and waited and no one came. From issue no. 245 (Fall 2023) To read more from issue no. 245, including an interview with Robert Glück, why not subscribe? You'll receive four print issues a year plus unlimited digital access to our seventy-two-year archive. Copyright © 2026 The Paris Review. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: The Paris Review 544 West 27th Street 3rd Floor New York, New York 10001 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe, if you must.