What happens, what emotional threads get pulled, when halfway around the globe a father gets sick from Covid? In an evocative personal essay for The New Yorker, “My Father’s Voice from Paris,” novelist ALEXANDER MAKSIK faces those questions and all the attendant thoughts and feelings provoked by them. Living in Maui with his wife, the novelist Madhuri Vijay, and his six-month-old daughter Ela, Maksik’s only contact with his father was through the phone. He listened as his father grew weaker knowing he could not go to him. It is both a story for our time and a timeless one about a son’s love for a father. In this episode of Beyond the Page, Xander talks with ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING, associate director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, about the essay, about fatherhood and about Paris, the city both father and son know intimately.