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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Gwendolyn Brooks at her typewriter. Often, when I look back at the poems that have found their sudden ways to me—the ones that have chosen me in particular, to move through me and onto the page—it is hard to imagine they are related to one another. It is hard to believe the poems that sprawl wide, the poems that play their tricks, the poems that exhume and resurrect, that breathe strange and speak with different tongues, all share a common denominator. It is hard to believe all the differently hued poems I’ve written have come from my own throat, born of the same place but perhaps of a different season, fruit of the same tree perched on a different branch. How is one o…
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Ernest Lawson, Garden Landscape, ca. 1915, oil on canvas, 20 x 24″. Public domain, via Wikimedia commons. Ma thought it was a good idea. That we work together in the garden. But it wasn’t a garden then, just a long rectangle of funky-smelling earth behind a two-story apartment house in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. An elderly couple named Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz owned the house and backyard. This was in the early seventies, and already the Jews were moving out. I was ten or twelve the summer we worked in the earth. The Schwartzes lived downstairs from us in that house, and on Fridays their apartment went semidark because of the Sabbath. What a beautiful word for someth…
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Still from Black Bear. Courtesy of Tandem Pictures. Lawrence Michael Levine’s fourth feature, Black Bear, really messed with my equilibrium. I first saw the film as part of Nightstream, a collaborative virtual horror film festival, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it stirred up something deep in my psyche. The plot unfolds in three distinct strands. One follows a filmmaker and former actress named Allison (Aubrey Plaza) who heads to a wooded retreat to seek inspiration for her next film while navigating the awkward tension of the cabin’s caretakers, Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and Blair (Sarah Gadon). The second departs from almost everything established by the fir…
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Jean-Antoine Houdon, Madame His, 1775, marble, 31 1/2″ tall. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Victor Thaw, 2007. There are few uncooler-sounding words than “eighteenth-century marble portraiture.” Even typing these words makes me feel like I’m prepping for the PSAT. But eighteenth-century marble portraiture—specifically that of Jean-Antoine Houdon, known for his uncool likenesses of Voltaire and George Washington—can be extraordinarily strange. Furthermore, the examples here are nearly nowhere to be found on your phone except in lo-res preview form. In other words, you have to actually go to the Frick to see them. Two busts, sculpted within two years of each other, are paire…
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The following essay appears in But Still, It Turns, edited by Paul Graham and published by MACK earlier this month. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same name showing at International Center of Photography (ICP) until May 9. Gregory Halpern. Image from ZZYZX (MACK, 2016), in But Still, It Turns, edited by Paul Graham (MACK, 2021). Courtesy of the artist and MACK. Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be st…
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Ottilie Mulzet on how her adoptive heritage lead her to a life of and in translation. Learning a language is a kind of practice, as anyone who’s ever learned one will tell you. It has its own drills, milestones, peaks, and valleys. Its own rituals, such as repeating phrases aloud three times so they will register in your ears, the choreography embedded into the interface of tongue and palate. The reverberations echo in your skull—even if forgotten five minutes later, a residue remains. One ploughs through printed dictionaries and delights in their idiosyncrasies, which are missing from the online versions. There are “found poems” in certain dictionary entries. There’s …
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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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This morning, PEN America released the 2021 Literary Awards Finalists. More than forty-five imprints and presses are featured on the list, with half of the titles coming from university and indie presses. Twenty books are from writers making their literary debuts, and half the titles among the open-genre awards are poetry collections. Chosen by a cohort of judges representing a wide range of disciplines, backgrounds, identities, and aesthetic lineages, these fifty-five Finalist books represent a humbling selection of the year’s finest examples of literary excellence. The stories on the Finalists lists are about parents, grandparents, and grandchildren, about siblings and…
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Photo: Mairead Small Staid In the torpor of the last ten months, I’ve found myself missing most those things I rarely did before. I miss the grand galleries of art museums, though the nearest are more than an hour away and trips have always been sporadic. I daydream about travel, about the tenuous camaraderie of the airport screening line, the stratus-brushed horizon beyond the window, the world narrowed to a seat, a tray, a book, a bubble of time removed from the world and set ever so gently aside. What I miss, I think, is less action itself than the likelihood of action—or of accident. Even as the pandemic spans four seasons, some underlying transformation (or its pote…
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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. Maya Angelou. This week at The Paris Review, we’re highlighting work by Black American writers in honor of Black History Month. Read on for Maya Angelou’s Art of Fiction interview, John Edgar Wideman’s short story “Sightings,” and Lucille Clifton’s poem “bouquet.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our current subscription off…
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Photo: © 3asy60lf / Adobe Stock. Michael Jordan is facing the camera. It’s May 7, 1989, and Jordan has just made the winning shot in Game 5 of the first round of the NBA playoffs. He is rising, effortless, his legs swinging open like scissors. Craig Ehlo, behind and to the left of Jordan, is sinking, crumpling into profile, making himself thin. Jordan swings his arm in sync with Ehlo; they are nearly perfect mirror images of each other. They hit the ground, magically, at almost exactly the same time, drifting in the same temporal current. Time in a sporting event is, like accordion bellows, structural and flexible. On some throws the ball seems to stay suspended in the …
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Promotional still from Ethos. As I searched for new shows to binge during quarantine this fall, I kept forgetting the title of the most recent Turkish Netflix drama. Ethics? Event? Euphoria (no), Eulogy … Ego … What was that show friends had told me to watch? The English title is Ethos, but the words you see in the opening credits are, of course, in Turkish: Bir Başkadır. Episode after episode, I would rack my brain for a suitable translation—one that fit the idea of ethos, but also matched the delicate world of the show. “It’s Something Else,” I ventured to my partner. Or, “There’s One More Thing.” Or, maybe, simply, “The Other,” as in, an-other-ness? Something about t…
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In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Photo: Erica MacLean. A police inspector wakes up in his beachfront apartment in Sicily and goes for a long swim, then to the office to confront his day of paperwork and complications: the corrupt officials, the jealous girlfriend, the frequent corpses. He has barely started before it’s time for lunch at the kind of restaurant he likes—one with no decor and the owner’s wife in the kitchen. The inspector is an aggressive, tightly wound man who does his job well. The pleasure that he takes in his food is an escape of a kind, an embrace of life by a person who regularl…
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In Reel Bay: A Cinematic Essay, Jana Larson recounts her longtime pursuit of the truth about Takako Konishi, a Japanese woman who, as the urban legend goes, froze to death in the Minnesota snow while trying to find a buried suitcase of money featured in the film Fargo. An excerpt from the book, which was published by Coffee House this past month, appears below. Photo: © romantsubin / Adobe Stock. Bismarck, North Dakota, is a six-hour drive from Minneapolis, but it takes about ten hours by bus. You sit toward the back, next to an old man who sleeps with his mouth hanging open and an older woman with a red checkered shirt and dyed black hair in curlers. She reads a coupon…
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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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Edward Hirsch with his father before a football game at Grinnell College, 1971. Courtesy of Edward Hirsch. It has been nearly fifty years since I played college football, but sometimes I still wake up on Saturday with the old feeling. It’s fall, there’s a certain chill in the air, and suddenly I am catapulted back into the bruised light of my dorm room in the early morning, a brisk day dawning in rural Iowa, football weather. I can feel the tingle of anticipation as soon as I open my eyes—a day for running routes and catching passes, blocking down on tackles, hitting, and getting hit. I was a pass receiver. All night I ran the patterns in my mind until they seemed like …
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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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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. John Hall Wheelock. Photo: Rowland Scherman. This week at The Paris Review, we’re peering through windows. Read on for John Hall Wheelock’s Art of Poetry interview, an excerpt from Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts, and Forough Farrokhzad’s poem “Window.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing y…
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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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Still from Kentucky Route Zero. Kentucky Route Zero is haunted in the same way America is haunted. In this five-act play of a video game, the characters Conway and Shannon and their bizarre companions amble back and forth, around and through the real and unreal roads and rivers of rural Kentucky. Everyone has a goal of some sort—delivering one last antique, finding a new workshop, reaching another gig—but all of it folds into the layers of this dreamscape underworld. Just as so many Latin American writers took inspiration from Faulkner, the Southern Gothic of Kentucky Route Zero takes inspiration right back from the magic realism of García Márquez and the pointed politic…
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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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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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Little known in the U.S., the writer Tove Ditlevsen (1917–1976) is widely beloved in her native Denmark. She wrote dozens of books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, but her crowning literary achievement is The Copenhagen Trilogy, a trio of frank, riveting memoirs published stateside by Farrar, Straus and Giroux earlier this week. An excerpt from the third volume, Dependency, newly translated from the Danish by Michael Favala Goldman, appears below. Tove Ditlevsen. Photo courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Everything in the living room is green—the carpet, the walls, the curtains—and I am always inside it, like in a picture. I wake up every morning around five o’clo…
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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. Céleste Mogador as a countess (wikimedia commons) My horse carried me like the wind. I couldn’t breathe; I hugged his neck, like jockeys do; I called out to him; he leapt forward again … I was going to overhaul my companions, maybe win the race! This idea transported me. I threw my horse against the ropes at the turn … I blocked the woman who was pressing closest to me and I passed her! I was so happy that, for fear of seeing the other woman beat me, I closed my eyes, left everything to my horse and spurred his left flank. I heard them say: …
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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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