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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Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. “A crush goes nowhere,” Kathryn Davis writes on the Daily this week, in a piece adapted from her forthcoming memoir, Aurelia, Aurélia. “It’s called a crush because it’s like something landed on top of you, making movement impossible.” Still, who doesn’t love to nurture a crush every now and again? Flirtations, racing hearts, and fixations of all kinds certainly abound in our archive. Read on for Italo Calvin…
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Photo by Sarah Lucas Agutoli. Claudia Durastanti has spent years interrogating the limits of language, first out of necessity and later by choice. Born in the U.S. in 1984 to Italian parents, both deaf, who never taught her sign language, she grew up between Brooklyn and Basilicata, a small town in southern Italy. The frustrations, silences, and miscommunications that marked her childhood—and the corresponding impulse to fill in those lacunae via the imagination—can be felt in her work as a writer, and as a translator determined to leave some room for “poetic imprecision.” Durastanti translated the latest Italian edition of The Great Gatsby and is also the translator for…
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Photo by Ken Heaton, via Wikimedia Commons. Early in the morning last week, in a funk of sleeplessness, I tuned in to the afternoon matches of Round Three at the Australian Open. The cool blue geometries of the courts in Melbourne—especially when the sound is off—are usually a balm to my mind. But there’s always a danger that the match will be exciting, and when the Spanish up-and-comer Carlos Alcaraz fought through to a fourth set against Matteo “The Hammer” Berrettini, I gave up and made coffee. Then I reread (for the fourth or fifth time) the opening pages of Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s The Circuit, his account of the year 2017 in tennis—a year that witnessed the comebac…
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Still from The Seventh Seal courtesy of the Criterion Collection. The film is available to stream, and as a disc set. We’re in a room on the ground floor of a hotel, the bed facing a wall of curtained windows that in turn faces the street. It is nighttime. Rain is coming down, steadily, reflectively, a stream of passersby visible through the curtains, which are sheer. Everyone is moving in the same direction, bent slightly forward and holding an umbrella, from left to right, the good direction, from past to future, the opposite of where Death leads the knight and the squire and the monk and the smith and the mute in their final dance against the backdrop of time in Ingma…
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Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. In a new essay published on The Paris Review Daily, the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra explores how a lifetime of cluster headaches led him to seek relief in the hallucinogenic mushroom teonanácatl. He learns an important lesson: always wait before redosing. In the spirit of experimentation, this week’s Redux riffs on writing under the influence. Read on for Hunter S. Thompson’s hard-won advice about which…
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Three-year-old girl riding an Arabian horse. Miragexv at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. “The Bridge 94 (Demo),” by Mobb Deep featuring Big Noyd, went unreleased for twenty years. The fact that you could make something that good and decide not to put it out says everything about Mobb Deep’s seat in the pantheon. The whole thing is a kniving, wintry blast of phonetic artistry, but the last lines are Shakespearean. The rapper is Prodigy, a twenty-year-old Albert Johnson the Fifth (Albert the Third was Albert J. “Budd”Johnson, a major early bebop saxophonist who came out of Dallas and got his break recording with Louis Armstrong in the early thirtie…
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Illustrations by George Wylesol. Teonanácatl. That’s what the Aztecs used to call the mushroom known today as pajarito, or “little bird.” My friend Emilio recommended it as a treatment for my cluster headaches, and he got me a generous dose in chocolate form. I stashed the squares in the fridge and awaited the first symptoms with resignation, though I sometimes fantasized that the mere presence of the drug would keep the headaches at bay. Sadly, soon enough I felt one coming on, and it was the very day we had planned a first-aid course. My wife Jazmina and I had just had a child, and after attending a clumsy, tedious introduction to first aid, we’d decided to call in a d…
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In her monthly column, The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Strange Flower (Little Sister of the Poor), by Odilon Redon, 1880 1. How did you hear about planet Earth? 2. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being abysmal, 5 being transcendent, please rate your experience with planet Earth: 1 2 3 4 5 3. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being frozen numb, 10 being the worst pain possible before exploding into a trillion meteoric fragments, how much pain are you in right now? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 4. In general, do you wish you had more freedom? Please circle o…
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Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. CHARLES JOHNSON IN HIS OFFICE, WITH HIS GRANDSON EMERY, 2016. “The question,” writes Emmanuel Carrère in “Exhaling,” a new piece of prose in our Winter issue, “is whether there’s an incompatibility, or even a contradiction, between the practice of meditation and my trade, which is to write.” Carrère isn’t the first to explore meditation, and the tension between silence and setting down words, in The Paris Rev…
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Photo of Sara Ahmed by Sarah Franklin. Who hasn’t had a boss, supervisor, or mentor worthy of complaint? The first person I worked for, who was white, was in the habit of calling me “weak.” Her boss’s boss, also white, one day gave a company-wide address during which he called someone, a childhood friend, by an ugly racial epithet. When I complained about his speech, I was told there was no recourse. That’s simply how my boss’s boss’s boss was. No one felt the need to specify exactly what this meant. They just invoked some vague idiosyncrasy to explain away his bad behavior, which might otherwise be confused for something sinister—heavy and historical and violent—somethi…
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Publicity photo of the Ronettes—Nedra Talley, Veronica Bennett (Ronnie Spector) and Estelle Bennett—by James Kriegsmann. On Wednesday, in the hours after Ronnie Spector’s family announced her passing from cancer at seventy-eight, I played, on loop, her cover of the Johnny Thunders punk anthem “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.” Recorded for The Last of the Rock Stars, her 2006 comeback album, the song is also a dirge for Thunders, who died in 1991; he had been one of Ronnie’s crucial supporters in the period after she left her abusive ex-husband, the megalomaniac, murderer, and iconoclastic music producer Phil Spector. On YouTube, you can watch her perform a live …
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I’m into having sex, I ain’t into making love So come give me a hug if you’re into getting rubbed. 50 Cent, “In Da Club” (2003) Is there any couplet in the English language that so concisely spans the dizzying sweep of poetic possibility, the subtle gradations of sense illuminated in a few short words and the abyss of nonsense toward which we are ever drawn by carelessness and entropy? You don’t have to answer that. The answer is “yes, many.” I was making a point. You’ve probably heard the stately bounce of “In Da Club,” at least ambiently. It was 50 Cent’s mainstream breakout single, and he mostly spends it surveying the fixtures of his nightlife: drinks and drugs, c…
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Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. What were you up to in the seventies? Were you serving popcorn at Westland Twins cinema in LA, like Gary Indiana? Studying history at Dartmouth, like Annette Gordon-Reed? Hanging out at Club 57 on Saint Mark’s Place, like Scott Covert? Here at the Review, we’re looking back to the decade: a pivotal period for some of our recent contributors and the source of aesthetic inspiration for our redesign. To get int…
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Elizabeth Gaskell’s House in Manchester, Greater Manchester, England, UK. Photo by Michael D Beckwith, with permission of the administration. Agnès Varda’s 1967 Uncle Yanco is the earliest—and, at under twenty minutes long, the shortest—of her “California films.” Through greetings, dinners, interviews, and house tours, which she stages and reenacts for the camera as they occur in real time, the short documents the director’s first encounter with a distant relative, the painter Jean Varda, whose nickname titles the project. Jean lives on a houseboat in the endlessly quirky “aquatic suburbia” of Sausalito, where he paints, sails, naps, muses on love and light, receives his…
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Books on Orr’s bed, her “second desk.” Photo: Niela Orr. bell hooks died last month of kidney failure at age sixty-nine; she was, according to her niece, surrounded by her loved ones when she passed. Small towns in Kentucky were the bookends of hooks’s life: She was born and raised in Hopkinsville, and departed this plane seventy miles east, in Berea, home of Berea College, where she’d taught since 2004 as a Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies, and where she had founded a research center, the bell hooks Institute, in 2014. In a chapter called “Kentucky is My Fate,” from her 2008 book Belonging: A Culture of Place, hooks writes: If one has chosen …
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Photo of Elias Canetti courtesy of the Dutch National Archives, the Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANEFO). Collage illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban. 1942 There is no longer any measure by which to gauge anything once the measure of human life no longer is the measure. — Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death. It will be tortuous and insidious, perfectly suited to the task. In better times I would wield it as a j…
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Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Photos courtesy of Killarnee, Wikimedia Commons It’s the very first week of 2022, so you can probably guess the theme of this Redux. Whether you spent New Year’s Eve setting off fireworks or having a road to Damascus moment, we hope you gave 2021 a good kick in the shins. Unlocked for you to read in these first days of the year: our interview with Octavio Paz, an excerpt from Rachel Cusk’s Transit, a poem by …
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Author photo of Daniel Galera © Suhrkamp Verlag. Daniel Galera was born in São Paulo, and spent a year and a half in Garopaba, the Brazilian seaside town that became the setting for his tense, violent, and funny 2012 novel Blood-Drenched Beard, which was published in the U.S. by Penguin Press in 2015. His other novels include The Shape of Bones (2017) and Twenty After Midnight (2020). He has translated works by John Cheever, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith into Portuguese, and his latest book, The God of Ferns, published in the Portuguese by Companhia das Letras, is a collection of three novellas. Earlier this year, we read the title story, translated by Julia Sanc…
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Illustrations by Oliver Munday. An adapted excerpt of the novella by Daniel Galera, translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches. Manuela hates that it’s taking so long. For the past two weeks, she’s hauled her belly up and down the stairs of their building, and along sidewalks where dirty water from the last October rainfall still splashes against her swollen ankles—and she’s sick of it. She wants to sleep belly-down, without pillows to support her. She wants to get up from the toilet without needing to hold on to the sink, to stop being kicked on the inside of her ribs, to have normal sex again. And Lucas, who’s always thought of himself as the kind of guy who can …
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Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. When we at the Review first read Sterling HolyWhiteMountain’s story “This Then Is a Song, We Are Singing,” which is published in our new Winter issue, we found ourselves in thrall to the story’s narrator—who, for all of his rage and confusion, self-justification and delusion, is undeniably charismatic. Inspired by the pleasure we took in spending time in his company (at least on the page), we hunted through …
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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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In which we tell you some of the things we most enjoyed reading this year. Rhian Sasseen’s reading log. Maybe this is unsurprising for an audio producer, but I like listening to people talk: about their job, their bad childhood, their love life, the bigots living next door. People are funny, especially when discussing things that aren’t. Here are some of the books I read this year that felt like listening. In Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Belarusian oral historian Svetlana Alexievich sits at kitchen tables across the former USSR and records people’s stories. Not for the faint of heart. Or if you are, I recommend taking frequent breaks to watch dogs at the …
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In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Harald Sohlberg. Månesskinn (Moonlight), 1907. Photo © O. Vaering, Norway The birds have gone. Off to pull worms from softer earth, drawn by the magnetic force alerting them each year to leave. Their shadows slid across the fields, reflections shivered over the dark surfaces of rivers and ponds. Each month has flown away, leaving a year’s worth of shadows and reflections on the surface of the mind. We’ve landed in December. Night is at its longest now. During one of these cold, endless nights not lon…
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Illustration by Anna Bak-Kvapil Henry Hudson Wood is a masculine substance. Witness the Arts and Crafts movement, the men at the helm of it. Witness, for that matter, this room: Oak floor, oak walls, oaken ceiling. The air-conditioning grate ersatz oak. The slats of the ceiling fan oak veneer. The table I write on, particleboard with no pretense to oak, oak’s sad cousin. And the craftsman-style light fixtures, triangles, right angles, dreamed up in the minds of geometers. What does geometry illuminate? I’m the sad cousin of a mind. The Arts and Crafts men were reacting against Victorian furbelows, the ornaments of empire, or, as they might ha…
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In her monthly column Notes from Paris, Madeleine Schwartz records some unexpected aspects of everyday life in France. Photo: Madeleine Schwartz Not long after I moved to Paris from the United States, in 2020, I began to hear reports of women disappearing. It happened at the bank, at the doctor’s office, when they were picking their children up from school. They were there and, suddenly, they’d been erased. In France, women who marry do not legally relinquish their maiden names, as many do in the United States, but they may choose to add a husband’s surname as a second nom d’usage. The trouble is that even someone with no intention of taking her husband’s name can hav…
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