In Warsaw - Elisa Gonzalez

The End of Dinner, Jules-Alexandre Grün, 1913.

"In our new Spring issue, we published the short story 'The Beautiful Salmon' by Joanna Kavenna. It features one of the most disastrous-sounding dinner parties I’ve ever read about in fiction, which is a meaningful distinction; it is also very funny at times and slightly surreal and imbued with a kind of offbeat philosophical bent. 'People often talk about learning experiences and, in the days after the salmon-based fiasco, I wondered about this,' the narrator says, at the end of the story. And it’s a good question: What do we learn from an experience like this? Anything at all? 'The Beautiful Salmon' made me think of dinner parties I’d attended or hosted—ones that had gone well and ones that had gone quite poorly and ones that had gone just fine, so that they mostly escaped my memory except for the specific dish or the offhand comment that has stuck with me for years. ... And so I asked some writers we admire to write short essays on dinner parties they remembered, often long after the dishes were removed from the sink. —Sophie Haigney, web editor ..."

The Paris Review