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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Richard Howard receiving the 2017 Hadada Award. Photograph by Matteo Mobilio. Richard Howard, poet, translator, critic, and poetry editor of this magazine from 1992 to 2004, died yesterday at the age of ninety-two. He was the last of a certain type of literary person, of which I am tempted also to call him the first—I can think of no one like him, except perhaps Robert Browning or Henry James, two of the writers whose work most profoundly animated his life. His approach to literature was both comprehensive and conversational—he lived in the books he loved, all the time, was ever in the midst of talking about them, ever encountering the great writers in his imagination, a…
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Image © Ra Boe / Wikipedia, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0 . Gary Goldschneider compiled the character traits of over fourteen thousand people to create The Secret Language of Birthdays. This bible was Goldschneider’s crowning achievement, though he had others. A self-described “personologist,” he was also a pianist notorious for marathon performances: he played all of Beethoven’s thirty-two sonatas, in chronological order, in one sitting (twelve hours), and all of Mozart’s sonatas in one sitting (six hours, three water breaks). The Secret Language of Birthdays follows the same gloriously logical yet irrational ordering principle of this kind of marathon performance. The 83…
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David Wojnarowicz, Oct. 22nd postcard, from the Jean Pierre Delage Archive of Letters, Postcards and Ephemera, 1979–1991. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W, New York. David Wojnarowicz’s final home was on the corner of Second Avenue and Twelfth Street on the Lower East Side. He moved in after the prior tenant, his mentor and former lover Peter Hujar, died of AIDS. A few months later, in 1988, David was diagnosed with AIDS himself; he’d die in the Second Avenue apartment four years later at the age of thirty-seven. Every time I visit the corner across from his apartment, I picture David walking out the door on a cold morning. The puff of his breat…
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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. IMAGE VIA THE PARIS REVIEW ARCHIVES. PHOTOGRAPHS BELOW BY HILTON ALS. “With a picture that doesn’t work, no matter how stupid and how bad, they’re still going to try to squeeze every single penny out of it,” the legendary director Billy Wilder remarked in 1996, in the Review’s first-ever Art of Screenwriting interview. “You go home one night and turn on the TV and suddenly, there on television, staring back a…
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Illustration by Na Kim. In March 2020 the entire human world was out walking. I, too, was walking, longer and farther than I’d ever gone on foot from my house. When I wasn’t walking, I was watching clips of people walking—of hundreds of thousands of workers laid off in the cities of India and setting out on foot across the country toward home. And I watched clips of people not walking—as in Italy, where, we read, people could not go outside for a month and they stood at their windows and sang. Here in Texas we did not have to walk, but we could if we wanted, and walk we did, everyone out on the street, waving from a distance. I found places near my home I had no idea wer…
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Illustration by Na Kim. I bought the dress known in inner circles—that is, in the echo chamber of my closet—as the Dress in 1987, for a rehearsal dinner in New York for a couple I’ll call Peter and Sally. I found it on sale at Barney’s on Seventeenth Street. On the hanger, it looked like a long, black cigarette holder. It was February, and outside on the street, the wind was coming up Seventh Avenue. I had been married for exactly one month. That year, all my college friends were getting married. We barged from one wedding to another, carrying shoes that hurt our feet. In some cases, we knew each other all too well; sometimes the marriage was the direct result of another…
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Historical diorama of Paterson, New Jersey, in the Paterson Museum, licensed under CC0 1.0. Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson is set in Paterson, New Jersey, the city that is also the focal point for William Carlos Williams’s modernist epic Paterson, a telescoping study of the individual, place, and the American public. Paterson is home to—and the name of—Jarmusch’s hero, a bus driver and a very private poet, played brilliantly by Adam Driver. He lives with his ditzy but extremely loving wife, Laura, who is obsessed with black-and-white patterns and becoming both a country-and-western singer and Paterson’s “queen of cupcakes.” Like much of William Carlos Williams’s poetry, th…
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Odesa Monument to the Duke de Richelieu. Photograph by Anna Golubovsky. This story begins more than thirty years ago, in the late eighties. There are poets working at the Odesa newspapers, many of which are faltering. A publisher visits my school classroom. “Who would like to write for a newspaper?” A room full of hands. “Who would like to write for a newspaper for free?” One hand goes up—mine. I am twelve. In the busy hallway of the paper’s office, I meet an old man with a cane, Valentyn Moroz—a legendary Ukrainian-language poet who’s often in trouble with Soviet party officials. He is reading Mandelstam next to me, unable to sit still, unable to read quietly. H…
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Illustration by Alex Merto. Spencer Matheson is a novelist and poet. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions. He lives in Paris, and teaches at the École normale supérieure. View the full article
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Sianne Ngai, Anna Kornbluh, and Jude Stewart try perfumes. Photograph by Seth Brodsky. Even after writing a whole book about smell, I still resisted finding “my” perfume. Perfume has always seemed gimmicky, too expensive, anti-feminist. But researching my book got me rethinking these objections. I wanted to get to yes with perfume but do so honestly. I mentioned this to my friends Sianne Ngai and Anna Kornbluh, who both really like perfumes. Sianne is a professor of English at the University of Chicago and specializes in aesthetics and affect theory in a Marxist context. She has written books about the “ugly feelings” of envy and irritation; contemporary aesthetic categ…
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In compiling the following list of influences and inspirations for my memoir, Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography, I had a certain, specific range of aesthetic experiences in mind. What I was looking for in this list were particular individuals, works, or bodies of work that engendered in me a deep aesthetic experience that expanded and altered my understanding of art, of myself, and of the world. In some cases these were specific experiences that have stayed with me for decades. CIDOC In 1971, I attended a month of seminars, talks, and workshops at CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentación) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. CIDOC was an institute founded by the radic…
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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. PHOTOGRAPH BY NANCY CRAMPTON. “Among the greatest pleasures of the Review’s Writers at Work series,” as our editor, Emily Stokes, wrote this week in a note introducing the Spring issue, “is the opportunity to eavesdrop on a revered author speaking intimately.” That sense that you’re eavesdropping is likewise often crucial to literature’s appeal. This week, we slip back into the archives to listen in on John C…
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Andrew Cranston’s studio. Photograph courtesy of the artist. Andrew Cranston, whose painting A Room That Echoes appears on the cover of the Review’s new Spring issue, did not intend to become a painter. He grew up in Hawick, a small industrial town in Scotland, and planned to become a joiner. For a time he was in a band, and he eventually started sketching. In 1996, he completed his M.A. in painting at the Royal College of Art in London. He now lives in Glasgow with his partner, Lorna Robertson, who is also an artist and works in the studio next to his. When I first saw Cranston’s show “Waiting for the Bell” at Karma Gallery last summer, I was delighted. His paintings, t…
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In Eloghosa Osunde’s column Melting Clocks, she takes apart the surreality of time and the senses. Artwork by Eloghosa Osunde. Back then, one of my favorite leashes to use on myself was a Scripture from Ephesians 4:1. Paul wrote: “Therefore I, a prisoner for serving the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling, for you have been called by God.” I loved his words there because they spoke to something already on the inside of me: a sturdy addiction to a set standard, height marks on the wall. There was something in me already easily seduced by the faith other people put in me, because to be believed in is to have the best of oneself amplified, and what could be…
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Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Singing Revolution Lithuania. LTMKM @ 2020. All rights reserved. Credits. On a recent hungover Sunday, I agreed to meet an old college friend uptown at the Jewish Museum to see their installation “Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running.” Trying not to betray my impairment, I sat down with relief in the black-box room, ready for the cameras to roll. After all, the movies have always been a refuge for the weary—for when you’d still like to feel something but you can barely move. Across a rough semicircle of twelve screens, Mekas’s intimate, nearly five-hour epic of his personal life, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of …
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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. VINTERNATT BY NIKOLAI ASTRUP, LICENSED UNDER CC BY SA 4.0. What is the moon? The moon is a natural satellite, and it reflects the light of the sun. The moon is 4.5 billion years old. The moon is, on average, 240,000 miles away from this Earth. The moon is the fifth largest of the 210 that swing around the planets in this solar system, and the second densest, after Jupiter’s moon Io. The moon is made of iron and nickel at its heavy metal core; lighter crystals of solidified lava, like olivine and pyro…
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Colors extracted, using a traditional recipe, from maritime sunburst lichen the author collected from the wildlife corridor along Ellebækstien in Køge. Fabrics from left to right, top to bottom: handwoven tussah and mulberry silk, wool, silk charmeuse, silk-rayon velvet, cotton, and linen. Photograph by Johan Rosenmunthe. A LOGBOOK TO REMEMBER 16 WOMEN OF WHOM 13 WERE BURNED ALIVE, TWO COMMITTED SUICIDE, AND ONE MANAGED TO ESCAPE, 1612–1615 AND 2021, REWRITTEN, GATHERED, DREAMED BY A WOMAN, AGE 34, THAT’S TO SAY ME, A STAR AMONG ALL THESE RESPIRING STARS WE CALL PEOPLE Johanne Tommesis, burned, August 24, 1612 Kirstine Lauridsdatter, burned, September 11, 1612 M…
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Five days before the Spring issue went to press, I found myself perched on a sofa in the Review’s Chelsea office, listening as Jamaica Kincaid and Darryl Pinckney put the finishing touches on a conversation they’d begun eight years earlier. By then, my colleagues and I had pored over hundreds of pages of transcripts for Kincaid’s Art of Fiction interview, and yet, that Monday afternoon, as the two writers went back over the stories she’d told him about her childhood on Antigua, her adventures as a young journalist in seventies New York, and her life as a writer, new details kept emerging. She was a backup singer in Holly Woodlawn’s band before being replaced by Debbie Har…
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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. Each year, the Plimpton Prize for Fiction celebrates the work of an exceptional new writer appearing in the Review. In honor of this year’s winner, Chetna Maroo, we’re lifting the paywall on four previous recipients of the award, from the very first—Marcia Guthridge, for her story “Bones,” from issue no. 128 (Fall 1993)—to last year’s, Eloghosa Osunde, for “Good Boy,” from issue no. 234 (Fall 2020). If you …
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DIY miniature dollhouse, licensed under CC BY SA 4.0. “Living in America during the Reagan years had the same disorientation as a texture dream,” writes David Wojnarowicz in Close to the Knives, “that sense you get at times lying with your face against the sheets with your eye open, millimeters away from the microscopic weave of the linen, and suddenly your body freezes up and your eye is locked into the universe of textures and threads and weaves, and for an extended moment you can’t shake yourself from the hallucination.” The political subterfuge of the Reagan years is the subject, too, of Maxe Crandall’s recent poem-novel, The Nancy Reagan Collection. Published by Fut…
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Photograph by Erica Maclean. Dorothy Sayers’s Strong Poison opens with a description of a man’s last meal before death. The deceased, Philip Boyes, was a writer with “advanced” ideas, dining at the home of his wealthy great-nephew, Norman Urquhart, a lawyer. A judge tells a jury what he ate: the meal starts with a glass of 1847 oloroso “by way of cocktail,” followed by a cup of cold bouillon—“very strong, good soup, set to a clear jelly”—then turbot with sauce, poulet en casserole, and finally a sweet omelet stuffed with jam and prepared tableside. The point of the description is to show that Boyes couldn’t have been poisoned, since every dish was shared, with the except…
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Photograph by Graeme Jackson. We are thrilled to announce that Chetna Maroo has won the 2022 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, which will be presented at our Spring Revel in April. The prize, awarded annually since 1993 by the editorial committee of The Paris Review’s board of directors, celebrates an outstanding piece of fiction by an emerging writer published in the Review during the preceding year. Previous winners include Ottessa Moshfegh, Emma Cline, and Atticus Lish. Maroo’s deft, affecting “Brothers and Sisters” appeared in our Winter 2021 issue. “At first glance,” as the Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, says, “it looks like a traditional story, told traditionally, i…
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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. ELIAS KHOURY, IN 2007. Elias Khoury began his 2017 Art of Fiction interview with the wry observation that “American reviewers read Arabic literature as if they’re reading the newspaper.” This week, we’re thinking—as we stare, helpless and sore-eyed, at our feeds—about the relationship between journalism and literature, and how artists, writers, and readers might respond to the news. Alongside Khoury’s interv…
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In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photograph by Lucy Scholes. “You are so exquisitely made,” the American Major in Edith Templeton’s 1968 short story “The Darts of Cupid” tells the object of his desire, “I could break every bone in your body.” This predation is unsettling, as is the completeness with which Eve, the young woman who’s being seduced, embraces the role of submissive victim. Entwined in her new lover’s arms, she’s reminded of a Japanese print she once saw, in which a naked female corpse, floating in the sea, is penetrated by the many tentacles of a large octopus. Her physical and emotional surrender i…
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Santa Rosa–Tagatay Road in Don Jose, Santa Rosa, California. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Santa Rosa, California I met you the day your father was shot and killed. I’d been in Oakland for a pink sunrise, watching police sweep a homeless encampment, gathering what we called “string” from residents who had nowhere—yet again—to go. I felt more outraged than usual and also maybe more useful. This was journalism, I suppose I was thinking, making sure the world knew what was happening right here. I wrote three hundred words for my newspaper’s website in a café and was preparing to drive back across the Bay Bridge in brilliant golden morning light. Then I got a call. An …
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