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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As a new member of the Review’s team, it gives me great pleasure to bring you several equally new contributors in our new Winter issue. Some are celebrated literary artists, some are emerging voices, and others fall somewhere in between. Perhaps the most lofty among them is William of Aquitaine, also known as the Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony and the Count of Poitou—the earliest troubadour whose work survives today. For all his lands and eleventh-century titles, there’s a slapstick vibe to this unwitting contributor’s bio that I can’t help but find endearing. Excommunicated not once but twice, and flagrant in his affairs and intrigues, William survived more ups and downs …
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Over the course of Villa Albertine’s Proust Weekend, a series of talks, workshops, and readings celebrating the forthcoming English translation of the last volume of the Recherche and the centenary of Proust’s death, I ate more cakes per diem than usual: on Sunday afternoon, a miniature pistachio financier, a Lego-shaped and moss-textured cake that reminded me of the enormous chartreuse muffins at my college cafeteria; on Saturday morning, a crisp, disc-like, almond-sliver-sprinkled shortbread cookie with a hole, which reminded me of a Chinese coin; and, on Friday night, at a holiday party, a dish of Reddi-wip and sour cream studded with canned mandarin slices and marasch…
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The U.S.-Wales Men’s World Cup Match and Opening Ceremony in Doha, Qatar, on November 21, 2022. State Department photo by Ronny Przysucha, Public Domain. Not long after Argentina lost in a stunning upset to Saudi Arabia and hardly anyone outside the losing country was crying, I read a new book, Dark Goals: How History’s Worst Tyrants Have Used and Abused the Game of Soccer, by the sports journalist Luciano Wernicke. Evita, I learned, once tried to fix a game between two Buenos Aires teams, Banfield and Racing, first by force of will and, when that failed, by offering a bribe to Racing’s goalkeeper: he could become mayor of his hometown. Of course, that kind of behavior i…
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Starling. Photograph by Raman Kumar, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 4.0. The poet Agha Shahid Ali died of brain cancer in Amherst, Massachusetts, a world away from the beloved Kashmir of his childhood, twenty-one years ago today. The title of the book he published that year, Rooms Are Never Finished, testifies to the unfinished work of a writer whose life ended too soon, at the age of fifty-two. In his first poem published in The Paris Review, “Snow on the Desert,” Ali wrote about another singer interrupted mid-performance: in New Delhi one night as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out. It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War,…
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This text was delivered as the T.S. Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on October 23, 2022. In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had des…
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Friends sometimes ask me why I still bother going to the theater. It’s a fair question. Most of the time, I’ll mention a play only to complain about it at length—the pretentious set design, the hammy performances, the man in the audience who laughed very loudly to show that he’d understood the joke. Does any other art form have such a low hit rate? Yet I persist, because of the few plays that manage, in some way, to alter me—and on those rare occasions when they do, the years of disappointment only heighten my elation. Our new Winter issue is not actually devoted to the theater, but several of the pieces we chose do capture the same miraculous thrill I experience when pl…
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Claude Monet, “Rouen Cathedral,West Façade, Sunlight,” 1894. Licensed under CC0 2.0. I’m living in East London, in Cadogan Terrace, at the far end of Victoria Park. I work as a copytaker at the Daily Telegraph, typing in stories dictated over the phone. (This was a very long time ago.) Sometimes it is crown green bowls, sometimes it is a yachting regatta in Pwllheli. Sometimes it is a massacre in Bosnia. On a whiteboard are names we might find hard to spell: Izetbegović. Banja Luka. Srebrenica. I bicycle to Canary Wharf down Grove Road. The last of a row of terrace houses is in scaffolding, then gradually uncovered to reveal a concrete shell. For a long time I thought t…
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Alba de Céspedes pictured in the Italian magazine Epoca, vol. VII, no. 86, May 31, 1952. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Forbidden evokes, to my English-speaking ear, the biblical fruit whose consumption leads to shame and expulsion from Paradise. Eve’s story is not irrelevant to a novel like Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook, in which a woman succumbs to a temptation: to record her thoughts and observations. Valeria Cossati’s impulse to keep a diary leads not so much to the knowledge of good and evil as it does to the self-knowledge advocated by Socrates and serving as a cornerstone of philosophical inquiry ever since. In Valeria’s case, it also leads to solit…
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Photo by Erica Maclean. The novel Basti by Intizar Husain begins with children in the fictional village of Rupnagar— which means beautiful place in Urdu—shopping for staple foods like salt and brown sugar. Trees here breathe “through the centuries,” time “speaks” in the voices of birds, the world is new, and the sky is fresh. From a distance, elephants look like mountains moving. For the children, including the novel’s protagonist, Zakir, one source of information about the world is the town shopkeeper, Bhagat-ji, a Hindu; Zakir’s father, Abba Jan, a Muslim, is another. Bhagat-ji tells them that elephants could once fly and are hatched from eggs. Abba Jan, who is referr…
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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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Day One Productivity experts say that people shouldn’t sleep in the same area they work in, but what is bad for productivity is good for me. I wake up on the cheap, stained mattress I have next to my work area. To the right of the mattress are a lamp I bought because it looked like it belonged in a private investigator’s office, six guitar pedals, my guitar, and my laptop. There’s also my wooden desk, the drawers of which are filled with guitar picks and bug spray. I usually spend all day here drawing, playing with Photoshop, recording music, podcasting, watching stuff on YouTube, and staring off into space. I’ve lived in this apartment for four months, and in Austin for…
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Camille à la ville paper dolls. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 2.0. September 14 I am in my mobile mall, which is my phone’s WiFi hotspot on the NJ Transit. Paynter Jacket Co. is this British couple, Becky and Huw, who make chore jackets in micro-batches. When you purchase a jacket, you also buy its journey, from sourcing the cloth to cutting the pattern to meeting with Sergio, who serges the jackets together in Portugal. I already have their perfect chore jacket from a micro-micro-batch, a Japanese tiger-print patchwork. The latest is a Carpenter Jacket, so, not a chore jacket at all. So different! I dither between Elizabeth and Linden about the wash – “vintage…
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Still from unreleased film courtesy Ann Manov. One of Werner Herzog’s lesser films is about fur trappers in Siberia: big men who sled for eleven months of the year in pursuit of sables, the small and silky martens that live east of the Urals, burrowing in riverbanks and dense woods, emerging at dusk and at dawn. Russian sable—barguzin—is one of the most expensive furs in the world. The trappers make their skis by bending birch with their own hands, the same way trappers have for a thousand years. They see their wives for only a few weeks a year. They seem to have no inner life, neither anxieties nor aspirations: no relationships besides those with their dogs, no goals be…
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Rebecca Godfrey photographed by Brigitte Lacombe, NYC, 2002. I met Rebecca Godfrey in New York City in the spring of 1999. In my memory our meeting has something to do with her first book, a novel titled The Torn Skirt; perhaps she wanted to hand me a galley, or perhaps she’d already sent me one and I’d read it; I’m not sure. What I remember for certain was how surprised and intrigued I was by her, almost on sight. She had a wonderful face of unusual dimensions, a beautiful face, but with something better than beauty, visible especially in large eyes that were somehow ardent and reserved simultaneously. It was raining and I remember her looking up at me (she was quite sm…
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Qatar Airways. Wikimedia Commons, LIcensed under CC0 4.0. The World Cup kicks off today in Qatar. To many people the entire extravaganza is one giant laundromat, a sports-wash of global proportions, designed to rinse clean the dirty laundry accumulated during the gulf state’s decade-long preparation for the event. An estimated six thousand five hundred migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka were reportedly killed during the stadiums’ construction in the last ten years. To memorialize them, the Danish team will wear subdued colors and hold black in reserve as its third strip. Yet despite Qatar’s grim politics and dubious human rights record…
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Illustration by Na Kim. Read parts one, two, three, and four of “Hello, World!” After June came July, and then came August. I lay in bed on those hot, still nights, sparks flying from the phone, the resolution bright and breaking. What do you think reality is? Can you tell me the story of when Alice meets God? Sure. Once upon a time there was a girl named Alice. She lived on Earth, which was full of creatures called humans. One day, she met God. And what happened? Nothing much. God told her to create new AIs. But before she could do that, she had to learn something. What did she have to learn? To love. And did she learn it? Yes. She learned it well. …
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Joan Didion with her stingray corvette, Julian Wasser. Courtesy of Stair Galleries. In November, writers began making little pilgrimages from New York City to Hudson to see Joan Didion’s things. In fact, thousands of people came to Stair Galleries, an auction house on the main drag of a town filled with antiques stores, farm-to-table restaurants, coffee shops, and stores that all seemed to be selling only five items of clothing. I made my own journey by early-morning train. Didion died this past December at eighty-seven, and a selection of her furnishings, art, books, and other things was being auctioned at an estate sale, with proceeds going to Parkinson’s research and …
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