The Paris Review - A Literary Wonderland
From one of the most classic literary journals of all time, famous for its author interviews (among other things), comes the PR feed. Grab your coffee and conjure your most literary mindset cause you're going to need it. Academics and shut-ins will wet their pants over this. Ya gotta love it!
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Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. The Plague Doctor (Photo: Sabrina Orah Mark) “I can’t find my plague doctor.” “Your what?” says my mother. “My plague doctor.” “I don’t know what that is,” says my mother. I text her a photo of my plague doctor in his ruffled blouse and beak mask sitting on my bookcase a few months before he disappeared. “I still don’t know what that is,” says my mother. “Forget it,” I say. “If you want to find it then look for it.” “I am looking for it.” “Then look harder.” “I am looking harder.” “It’s the strangest thing,” I keep saying. But I know it isn’t the strangest thing. I tell everyone who will l…
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Kansas, Alabama, Illinois, New York—wherever Gordon Parks (1912–2006) traveled, he captured with striking composition the lives of Black Americans in the twentieth century. From his first portraits for the Farm Security Administration in the early forties to his essential documentation of the civil rights movement for Life magazine, he produced an astonishing range of work. In his photographs we see protests and inequality and pain but also love, joy, boredom, traffic in Harlem, skinny-dips at the watering hole, idle days passed on porches, summer afternoons spent baking in the Southern sun. With “Half and the Whole,” on view through February 20, Jack Shainman Gallery pre…
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Stephanie Burt on how to remember Jan Morris’s trans memoir Conundrum. Jan Morris died in November of 2020, and you can read a remembrance of her by her colleagues here. JAN MORRIS Before the actor Elliot Page and the model Janet Mock and the legislator Danica Roem and the TV star Nicole Maines were born, before Against Me! and Anohni and Cavetown had sung a note, before Jenny Boylan’s She’s Not There and Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw and Eddie Izzard’s Definite Article, twenty years before the first recorded appearance of the word cisgender, and three years after I was born, in 1974, the Anglo-Welsh travel writer and veteran Jan Morris published a short and beautiful…
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Najwan Darwish. Photo: Veronique Vercheval. Courtesy of New York Review Books. If I could come back, I wouldn’t come under any other banner. I’d still embrace you with two severed hands. I don’t want wings in paradise, I just want your graves by the river. I want eternity at the breakfast table with the bread and oil. I want you— earth, my defeated banner. This poem, “My Defeated Banner,” is from the fifth section of the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish’s latest collection, Exhausted on the Cross, and in its devastating beauty, it represents one of the peak moments of his poetry as well as of the writing of our time. As in all of Darwish’s poetry, this defeated…
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Aerial view of Alexandria, ca. 1929. Photo: Walter Mittelholzer. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. It’s my first Palm Sunday in Rome. The year is 1966. I am fifteen, and my parents, my brother and I, and my aunt have decided to visit the Spanish Steps. On that day the Steps are filled with people but also with so many flowerpots that one has to squeeze through the crowd of tourists and of Romans carrying palm fronds. I have pictures of that day. I know I am happy, partly because my father is staying with us on a short visit from Paris and we seem to be a family again, and partly because the weather is absolutely stunning. I am wearing a blue wool blazer, a leather ti…
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Illustration: Elisabeth Boehm. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Aunt Galya, my father’s sister, died. She was just over eighty. We hadn’t been close—there was an uneasiness between the families and a history of perceived snubs. My parents had what you might call troubled dealings with Aunt Galya, and we almost never saw her. As a result I had little chance to form my own relationship with her. We met infrequently, we had the odd phone call, but toward the end she unplugged her phone, saying “I don’t want to talk to anyone.” Then she disappeared entirely into the world she had built for herself: layered strata of possessions, objects, and trinkets in the cave of her …
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If navigating the internet were an Olympic sport, Patricia Lockwood would sweep the medals. She is not a coder or a programmer (though surely she could be). She doesn’t live in the internet but upon it. She sails along on trends and tweets, a fisher of men, understanding, as she writes, that “everyday their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once.” As the tides shift, she is always be one twist ahead of the internet’s dangers, such as overexposure and cancellation. We here at The Paris Review are often made aware of her one important question we have yet to answer: Lockwood is not only the quiet queen of twitter, she is also a poet, memoiri…
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In Susanna Forrest’s Écuyères series, she unearths the lost stories of the transgressive horsewomen of turn-of-the-century Paris. Émilie as a “beauty of the circus” holds the center as Hippodrome girls and lesser écuyères make up the frame. Illustration appears in the January 5, 1878, issue of La Vie parisienne. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. On the circus poster, nothing but these words: “Today: Debut of Mademoiselle Émilie LOISSET” Nothing else, no other program. Why would you add more? It suffices for the habitués of the Franconi circus. It’s a talisman, this feminine name … Émilie Loisset! ÉMILIE LOISSET! ÉMILIE LOISSET!!! —“Scapin,” a.k.a. Al…
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Shirley Jackson, Photograph. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Shirley Jackson is born in San Francisco, California, on December 14, 1916. Her father, Leslie, emigrated from England at age twelve with his mother and two sisters and became a successful self-made business executive with the largest lithography company in the city. Her mother, Geraldine, is a proud descendant of a long line of famous San Francisco architects and can trace her ancestry back to before the Revolutionary War. Shirley grows up primarily in Burlingame, an upper-middle-class suburb south of the city. But when she is sixteen, Leslie is promoted and transferred, and the family moves—luxuriously, …
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“Don’t you think it’s funny how now the people making these ads get it?” I say to my best friend, my voice cradling the words “get it” with invisible quotation marks. We’re watching television, something we do together often now, grateful to be in each other’s bubble. “What?” she replies, looking up from her phone. “The models,” I say. “Oh, I know,” she says. We’ve been friends for twenty-eight years. She knows what I mean without my having to explain. After yet another murder, one salve seemed to be representation. Between announcements of our crumbling democracy and more and more people dying, there were now ads with smiling Black faces. Black girls with crowns of 4c c…
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Charles Lloyd and the Marvels. Photo: D. Darr. Charles Lloyd, one of the living legends from the great era of sixties jazz, has ridden a late-career high with a sort of supergroup he calls the Marvels, consisting of himself on tenor sax, Bill Frisell on guitar, Greg Leisz on steel guitar, Reuben Rogers on bass, and the wizardly Eric Harland on drums. On their first two albums, the group offered a mix of classic Lloyd originals, jazzed-up folk and rock covers, and vocal collaborations with Lucinda Williams. This group doesn’t feel like a studio band; clearly they’ve played together and enjoyed it, learned each other’s ticks and tricks. So their latest record, Tone Poem, s…
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In Pardis Mahdavi’s new book Hyphen, she explores the way hyphenation became not only a copyediting quirk but a complex issue of identity, assimilation, and xenophobia amid anti-immigration movements at the turn of the twentieth century. In the excerpt below, Mahdavi gives the little-known history of New York’s hyphenation debate. Flyer for the New-York hyphen debate, 1774 copyright © New-York Historical Society In the midst of an unusually hot New York City spring in 1945, Chief Magistrate Henry H. Curran was riding the metro downtown to a meeting at City Hall. Curran, the former commissioner of immigration at the Port of New York, and former president of the Associat…
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In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Here’s a question: Can you name the debut novel, originally published in Britain in September 1965, that became a more or less immediate best seller, and the fans of which included Noël Coward, Daphne du Maurier, John Gielgud, Fay Weldon, David Storey, Margaret Drabble, and Doris Lessing? “A rare pleasure!” said Lessing. “I can’t remember another novel like it, it is so good and so original.” Coward, meanwhile, described it as “fascinating and remarkable,” admiring the author’s “strongly developed streak of genius.” Du Maurier—a writer whose own work is famously mesm…
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On Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet In 1973, the psychologist David Rosenhan published a paper in the journal Science called “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” The paper was based on an experiment he had conducted, sometimes called “the Thud experiment,” designed to interrogate how we distinguish the sane from the insane, if in fact sanity and insanity are distinguishable states. Rosenhan arranged to have eight “pseudopatients” seek voluntary admission to a psychiatric hospital. The instigating complaint was of auditory hallucinations: The patients claimed to hear voices saying the words “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” All eight were admitted into psychiatric war…
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In his column Notes on Hoops, Hanif Abdurraqib revisits the golden age of basketball movies, shot by shot. Still from White Men Can’t Jump. © 20th Century Studios. I can always tell which one of my friends didn’t grow up around hustlers by how they look up and lock eyes with the person at the mall kiosk, who—by virtue of that enchanting eye contact—doesn’t even have to wave them over. They drift into the grasp of the salesperson without even being aware of it. And that’s when their money is no longer theirs. On the street in a city my pal had never been to, a woman sells her a bracelet before she even knows what’s happening. Compliments her skin tone and lays the bracel…
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In 1954, the Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker met her life partner, Ernst Jandl, with whom she would live and collaborate for nearly half a century. In the wake of Jandl’s death, in 2000, she wrote a series of books documenting the swirl of her grief. Two of these memoirs have been translated by Alexander Booth and compiled as The Communicating Vessels, which was published by A Public Space Books earlier this month. A selection from one of the books, 2005’s And I Shook Myself a Beloved, appears below. Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker at a public reading in Vienna, 1974. Photo: Wolfgang H. Wögerer, Wien, Austria. CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by…
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“Ptolemy with a falcon,” from Der naturen bloeme by Jacob van Maerlant When you go on a first date, do you struggle to make conversation? Read Morris Bishop’s The Middle Ages, a popular history from 1968, and your troubles are over. Did you know that if you failed to attempt to return a lost falcon to its rightful owner, flesh was cut from your breast and fed to the falcon? Did you know that there was plastic surgery, with noses, lips, and ears enlarged via skin graft? Did you know that to become a Master of Grammar at Cambridge, you had to prove that you were skilled at beating students by hiring a boy and hitting him with a birch rod, with a beadle as your witness? Did…
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Photo: Bríd O’Donovan. In the work of the Irish writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa, history is amorphous, a living thing that frequently bleeds into or interrupts the lives of those in the present day. “The past has come apart / events are vagueing,” reads the Mina Loy epigraph that begins Ní Ghríofa’s sixth collection of poetry, To Star the Dark, published earlier this year. In A Ghost in the Throat, a hybrid of autofiction and essay first published by Dublin’s Tramp Press and out this week in the U.S. from Biblioasis, she writes, “To spend such long periods facing the texts of the past can be dizzying, and it is not always a voyage of reason; the longer one pursues the past, t…
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The following serves as the foreword to Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints, a newly translated selection of the Russian writer Teffi’s stories, which was published earlier this week by New York Review Books. Teffi. Photo courtesy of New York Review Books. There are writers who muddy their own water, to make it seem deeper. Teffi could not be more different: the water is entirely transparent, yet the bottom is barely visible. —Georgy Adamovich It is not unusual for a writer to be pigeonholed, but few great writers have suffered from this more than Teffi. Several of her finest works are extremely bleak, but many Russians still know only the comic and sat…
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“If I write as though I were addressing readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that form. It is a form, an empty form—I shall never have readers.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground The muses don’t sing to cover letter writers—they’re busy with the poets. But me? I transact exclusively in unloved prose. No one loves cover letters, but everyone needs a job. So my business, editing them, always booms. My process may prove unorthodox, so let me offer a disclaimer before we begin. In the butchery of cover letter editing, one removes metaphors with chainsaws, cauterizes complexity with hot iron, and amputates anything more ambiguous than a …
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In Paul Anthony Smith’s Untitled (Dead Yard), a figure stands with arms outstretched in the midst of a haze of ghostly breeze-blocks. The physical appears to commune with the spiritual; unreality encroaches on the real. It’s a startling effect, one that persists throughout Smith’s second solo show with Jack Shainman Gallery, “Tradewinds” (on view through April 3). Using a needled wooden tool, Smith painstakingly works over his photographic prints, puncturing the surface and chipping away at the ink. Each stipple, each architectural flourish laces the images with the fabric of memory. This is not reality; this is the world in recollection, the white noise of time and dista…
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In the following excerpt from her landmark biography of Tom Stoppard, Hermione Lee explores the background of one of his most personal works to date, the 2020 play Leopoldstadt. Tom Stoppard. Photo: Gorup de Besanez. Time and again Tom Stoppard had talked about his good luck. He told people that he had had a charmed life and a happy childhood, even though he was taken from his home as a baby in wartime, his father was killed, and many members of his family, as he later discovered, were murdered by the Nazis. This narrative had become part of his performance, his built-in way of thinking and talking about himself. And that story of a charmed life was profoundly connected…
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Engraving from Gustave Doré’s 1861 illustration of Dante’s Inferno. Scanned, postprocessed, and uploaded by Karl Hahn. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. There is money to be made off the dead. Nikolai Gogol knew this when he wrote his masterpiece, Dead Souls, the story of a middle-aged man named Chichikov who buys dead serfs with the intention of mortgaging their souls for a profit. I chose to read this novel at the start of quarantine, when everyone else was reading War and Peace. I had already read War and Peace. It ruined my life. I wasn’t keen to have my life ruined again. I wanted some other grand, sweeping Russian epic to fill my time. I wish I would have been…
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Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. An illustration from Jack and the Beanstalk, Elizabeth Colborne I am cleaning my house when I receive a Facebook message from the manager of Project Safe that a volunteer has found my plague doctor, or someone who looks like my plague doctor. The baseboards are thick with dust. I spray a mix of vinegar and lavender, and run a rag across them. The plague doctor, or someone who looks like my plague doctor, has been put aside in the office for me. I write back, “Oh! oh! I hope it’s him.” The rag is black. I am on my hands and knees. “I hope it’s your doll!” writes the manager. “Fingers crossed,” I …
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Still from Season 3 of Caveh Zahedi’s The Show about the Show. Courtesy of Zahedi. Many artists are in some sense cannibals, but the filmmaker Caveh Zahedi takes it further than most. The initial premise of his brilliantly deranged series The Show about the Show was that each episode would be about the making of the one before it (so Episode 1 follows Zahedi’s travails in selling the show’s pilot, Episode 2 reveals what went wrong behind the scenes of Episode 1, and so on). When a moment hadn’t been caught on camera, he’d ask everyone to re-create it; if someone refused to repeat the embarrassing thing they’d said, he’d cast an actor to play them instead. The recursive f…
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