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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From the afternoon of March 13 into the early hours of March 15, 2022— Journals are more a nervous habit for me than anything else. I tend to copy out passages of whatever I’m reading, less because that passage is particularly important and more as a way of taking a photograph of a time and place and line of thought. Starts with a quote from Jung’s The Undiscovered Self, which I was borrowing from my dear friend and (at the time) traveling companion in Mexico, Sara, a.k.a SR. This pair of thoughts is funny to me: // Is the point of company in partnership to escape the self or to deepen it // I think I’m disturbed by how happy I am // Then some analysis of a few l…
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Photo: © isman rohimly ibrahim/EyeEm / Adobe Stock. I first read the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti in December 2007, when I spent three weeks in the hospital due to an appendectomy gone wrong. Between doses of antibiotics, I asked my father to bring me a book that had just been published, of Onetti’s complete short stories. Before long, I came to one entitled “Convalescence,” which seemed appropriate given my situation. A woman is recovering from an illness in a hotel by the sea. Onetti doesn’t tell us what the illness is. A man keeps calling her on the phone, making threats, insisting she return to the city. I knew it might not be the best idea to read Onetti whil…
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Benjamin Shaw, Aberdeen Quayside, 2003, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The man I was meeting worked on the Brent Field. He was a kind of Typhoid Mary, having worked on the site of several accidents, always escaping unscathed. He was staying in a large, anonymous hotel behind Holburn Junction. The lobby was a columnar space several floors high. Its windows were covered in a kind of mesh, which muted the daylight and cast everything in a cool, neutral gloom. I took a booth, upholstered the same indeterminate shade, and waited for him to appear. There was some splashy abstract art on the walls, and a long, curved reception desk at the back of the room. People were mov…
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Russell Patterson, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I’d never heard of Ursula Parrott when McNally Editions introduced me to Ex-Wife, the author’s 1929 novel about a young woman who suddenly finds herself suspended in the caliginous space between matrimony and divorce. The first thing I wondered was where it had been all my life. Ex-Wife rattles with ghosts and loss and lonely New York apartments, with men who change their minds and change them again, with people and places that assert their permanence by the very fact that they’re gone and they’re never coming back. Originally published anonymously, Ex-Wife stirred immediate co…
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Elif Batuman in 2019. Photo: Valentyn Kuzan. In September 1852, when he was twenty-three, Tolstoy published his first piece of writing, in a Saint Petersburg monthly. Although it garnered praise, he was upset that the magazine had changed the title to “The History of My Childhood.” “The alteration is especially disagreeable,” he complained to the editor, “because as I wrote to you, I meant ‘Childhood’ to form the first part of a novel.” Like Tolstoy, Elif Batuman always intended to write fiction. One of the essays in her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, a collection based on her experiences as a grad student in the S…
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learza (Alex North) from Australia, Aibos at RoboCop, 2005, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. When my husband arrived home, he stared at the dog for a long time, then pronounced it “creepy.” At first I took this to mean uncanny, something so close to reality it disturbs our most basic ontological assumptions. But it soon became clear he saw the dog as an interloper. I demonstrated all the tricks I had taught Aibo, determined to impress him. By that point the dog could roll over, shake, and dance. “What is that red light in his nose?” he said. “Is that a camera?” Unlike me, my husband is a dog lover. Before we met, he owned a rescue dog who had been abused by its for…
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Detail from Sleep (2020–2021), 2021. Taryn Simon. When we take pictures of our children, do we really know what we are doing, or why? The contemporary parent records their child’s image with great frequency, often to the maximum degree afforded by technology. Inasmuch as the baby or child is an extension or externalization of the parent’s own self, these images might be seen as attempts to equate the production of a child with an artistic act. The task of the artist is to externalize his or her own self, to re-create that self in object form. A parent, presented with the object of the baby, might mistake the baby for an authored work. Equally, he or she might find their …
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Billy Sullivan’s studio. Photograph by Lauren Kane. Billy Sullivan’s studio, a fifth-floor walk-up on the Bowery, has a comfortable, elegant dishevelment. Hanging all around the space are some of the brightly colored figurative paintings he has been making since the seventies: portraits of his friends, lovers, and other long-term muses, rendered in loose, dynamic brushstrokes and from close, pointedly subjective angles. A still life of a bouquet and two coffee cups is an outlier among the faces. Near a work in progress on the wall is a table with a color-coded array of pastels, each wrapped in its paper label (mostly the artisan Diane Townsend, with a few older sticks fr…
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Donnetta Lavinia Grays. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan. Donnetta Lavinia Grays is a Brooklyn-based playwright who proudly hails from Columbia, SC. Her plays include Where We Stand, Warriors Don’t Cry, Last Night and the Night Before, Laid to Rest, The Review of How to Eat Your Opposition, The New Normal, and The Cowboy is Dying. Donnetta is a Lucille Lortel, Drama League, and AUDELCO Award Nominee. She is the recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwright Award, National Theater Conference Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award, the Lilly Award, Todd McNerney National Playwriting Award, and is the inaugural recipient of the Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award. She is curren…
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Still from accompanying video (below), edited by Miles Lagoze and Eric Schuman. A few weeks before our unit’s operation started, Lance Corporal Loya and I stood over a wadi, waiting for each other to throw our cameras down into its dusty, hollow trench. Wadis—the streams or natural ravines that farmers in the region often used as irrigation canals—were our generation’s rice paddies; they were everywhere in Helmand Province. When they weren’t wet, it was comforting to climb inside them—womblike slits in the ground to curl up in and shoot out of. They were the last thing some of us would see before dying. Like feudal tendrils etched across the fields, the wadis in the Sang…
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<em>Krazy Kat </em> by George Herriman. In 1910, a mouse named Ignatz first beaned Krazy Kat with a brick. The plot of this comic strip, centered on a “heppy go lucky kat,” is simple. Krazy Kat loves Ignatz Mouse. Officer Pup loves Krazy Kat. Ignatz Mouse hits Krazy over the head with a brick; Officer Pup pursues and usually arrests Ignatz Mouse; Krazy, to whom the brick seems to be a sign of love, is ecstatic. A small heart pops up above his head. The cartoonist, George Herriman, twisted and tangled the three-lover triad and cat-mouse-dog triad and spent thirty-one years retying the same surreal knot. You know what will happen in any strip of Krazy Kat—the s…
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The following photographs are taken from the archives of Lester Sloan, who was a photojournalist for Newsweek, where he documented the 1967 uprising in Detroit, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the O. J. Simpson trial, from the late sixties until the mid-nineties. The captions are transcribed conversations between Lester and his daughter, the writer Aisha Sabatini Sloan. They have been edited for concision. They are offered here in the spirit of an eavesdropped conversation. While this is a work of nonfiction, the stories relayed here are recollections, prone to the vicissitudes of memory over time. Aisha’s questions and prompts to her fath…
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Leonora Carrington. Photo: Emerico “Chiki” Weisz. Courtesy of New York Review Books. The first time I read Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, I knew nothing about its author, so I had the incredible experience of coming to this short novel in a state of innocence. I was wholly unaware, for instance, that Carrington had been a painter, that she spent most of her life as an expat in Mexico, and that in her youth she had been in a relationship with Max Ernst, one of the greatest surrealists. But the anarchic tone and perverse nature of this little book made a powerful impression, one that has never left me. There are two qualities in fiction that I find particularly…
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Edvard Munch, Vampire or Love and Pain, 1895, oil on canvas. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries. Look: I am eleven, a girl who is terrible at sums and at sports, a girl given to staring out windows, a girl whose only real gift lies in daydreaming. The teacher snaps my name, startling me back to the flimsy prefab. Her voice makes it a fine day in 1773, and sets English soldiers crouching in ambush. I add ditchwater to drench their knees. Their muskets point toward a young man who is tumbling from his saddle now, in slow, slow motion. A woman rides in to kneel over him, her voice rising in an antique…
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In an undated note bequeathed to the Tate Archive in 1992, Eileen Agar (1899–1991) writes of her admiration for the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Lewis Carroll is a mysterious master of time and imagination, the Herald of Sur-Realism and freedom, a prophet of the Future and an uprooter of the Past, with a literary and visual sense of the Present.” The same could be said of Agar, whose long career as an artist spanned most of the twentieth century and intersected with some of the prevailing movements of the time, including Cubism and surrealism. Her timeless work—including the oil painting Alice with Lewis Carroll—will be on view through August 29 at the Whi…
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Photograph by makeshiftlove, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0, This week, we bring you reviews from three of our issue no. 240 contributors. The documentary Rocco, which follows the Italian porn actor and director Rocco Siffredi, feels like a hundred perfect short stories. We learn that Rocco carries around a photo of his mother at all times. We watch Rocco and his teenage sons chat in their cavernous and starkly lit climbing gym/weight room in Croatia. We discover that Rocco’s hapless cameraman of many decades, Gabriel, is actually his cousin, a thwarted porn star. During one virtuosic shoot (Rocco Siffredi Anal Threesome with Abella Danger) Gabriel acci…
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Fred Bchx from Tournai, Belgique, 2010, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. It is not incorrect to say that, for years, the way my family grieved my mother was to avoid acknowledging her altogether. It is not incorrect to say that we hardly invoked her name or told stories about her. Shortly after college, my father, Caroline, and Steph descended upon my cleared-out group house in Washington, D.C., for Thanksgiving. In my childhood home, my father’s stacks of clutter multiplied until they overtook the space that my mother had so carefully cultivated; it crowded my sisters and me out. I reacted efficiently, diligently, which is to say that I pretended that trips to Steph’s…
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Victorian spirit photograph. Preus museum, no restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons. One Monday evening some five years ago, I walked into my first Spiritualist service. In those days, the New York Spiritualist Church held services roughly once a month in a broad-minded white-marble Methodist structure designed to hold some thousand parishioners. But the Spiritualists only filled the first few rows. It was dim, churchy-smelling, and vast. I’d thought about what to wear. It was, after all, a church; it was also seven in the evening in late November. In the end, I changed out of my jeans and wore a high-necked Laura Ashley dress and a tweed jacket and my least ironic glasse…
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Max © Reinbert Tabbert Biography is always a matter of joining holes together, like a net, for reasons that W. G. Sebald’s own work explores: the fallibility of memory, the death or disappearance of witnesses, the dubious role of the narrator. All these reasons must exercise any biographer. But Sebald’s biographer more than most. For the holes in the net of this story are many. The central absence is his family life, because his widow wishes to keep this private. Without her permission, his words from privately held sources, such as certain letters, cannot be quoted, only paraphrased. Even his published words, in books and interviews, can be quoted only within the limit…
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Episode 23, our Season 3 finale, opens with “The Trick Is to Pretend,” a poem by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, read by the singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers: “I climb knowing the only way down / is by falling.” The actor Jessica Hecht plays Joan Didion in a reenactment of her classic Art of Fiction interview with Linda Kuehl. Jericho Brown reads his poem “Hero”: “my brothers and I grew up fighting / Over our mother’s mind.” The actor, comedian, and podcaster Connor Ratliff reads Bud Smith’s story “Violets,” about a couple who makes a suicide pact but then turns to arson instead. The episode closes with Bridgers performing “Garden Song.” To celebrate this last episode of the s…
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As a child, the Queens-born photographer Dawoud Bey marveled at the vibrancy of midcentury Harlem, where his parents had met and many of their friends and family members still lived. “Driving through the crowded streets, I was amazed by what appeared to be the many people on vacation,” he has written. “It seemed to me that no matter what the day, everyday was Saturday in Harlem.” In 1975, equipped with a camera, he began paying weekly visits to the neighborhood, walking the streets and capturing pictures. This approach—on the ground, studied, empathetic—led to his first series of photographs, “Harlem, USA,” and would inform his practice in the ensuing decades of his caree…
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On April 12, The Paris Review announced N. Scott Momaday as the recipient of the 2021 Hadada Award, presented each year to a “distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” In the coming weeks, the Daily will publish a series of short essays honoring the multifariousness of Momaday’s achievements. Today, in an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir Poet Warrior, Joy Harjo recalls how Momaday’s poem “The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee” inspired her to begin writing poetry. N. Scott Momaday. Photo: Darren Vigil Gray. Though I loved poetry all of my life, it wasn’t until poems like “The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee” by …
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Katherine Dunn. Photograph courtesy of Eli Dapolonia. Katherine Dunn didn’t really make a living from her fiction until 1987, when, at forty-two, she sold Geek Love, her third published novel, to Sonny Mehta at Knopf for twenty-five thousand dollars—a windfall that briefly swept away her persistent financial concerns. Dunn had relied on all sorts of ways to make ends meet while she was coming up as a writer. At eighteen years old, in 1963, she sold fake magazine subscriptions door-to-door in the Midwest until she was arrested in Missouri for trying to cash a client’s fraudulent check. As a college student, first at Portland State and later at Reed, she worked as a toples…
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Black Thought. Photo: Erica Génécé. In 2016, wearing a white shirt with tiny embroidered roses, Black Thought centered himself in front of a whispering audience at the Harvard Innovation Labs. He had just finished a conversation with host Michael Keohane about the hand-painted clothing he’d made as a young artist, his rise within rap music, and his eventual aspirations as an actor. To the delight of the campus crowd, he asked, “I can kick a rhyme?” Nudging up his glasses, he then unleashed five minutes of complex stanzas, double entendres, and expository verses. Somewhere within the burst of sentences, he veered into the biographical. “I got to see how gangstas played…
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An illustration by the painter Natalie Frank for The Island of Happiness. One of Frank’s favorite tales is ‘The Green Serpent,” in which the prince is a snake, though only literally. “I love the image where you have to get into bed with this creature but you can’t look at him, and of course you look at him.” Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville was born into a rich family in the fall of 1652. At thirteen, she was wed by her mother to the middle-aged Baron d’Aulnoy, who had purchased his title. Three months pregnant that same year, in the summer of 1666, she inked a jinx in the margins of a fifteenth-century religious play from their library: It has been almost 200 ye…
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