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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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. Not long ago at the big museum across the river, a little lost, I ended up in the Egyptian realm. I entered a closet-size space, its high limestone walls carved with hieroglyphs. Vultures, tall dogs, fish, bare feet with high arches, serpents, urns, owls, half-moons, eyes. These symbols, familiar and unfamiliar at once, arising, like all symbols, all myths, all language, out of our confusion and our fear, our grasping for sense and pattern, our wonder. “Wonder is ignorance that is aware of itself as …
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Photograph by Sophie Kemp. I was trying on brassieres at Azaleas, the one next to the Ukrainian National Home on Second Avenue. All the brassieres looked terrible on me. This is because I have very small breasts (which is okay, because I have absolutely fabulous areolas). I picked out one that was a very pale blush pink, and paid seventy dollars for it. Then my phone rang. It was my roommate. There were bumps all over her body. “They are very itchy,” she said, and asked me if I had them, too. I did not. When I got back to our apartment in South Brooklyn, I stripped my sheets off my bed. There was a large brown bug sunbathing on my mattress. I poked it with a pen. It made…
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Read an excerpt from In the Land of the Cyclops here. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s newest release, In the Land of the Cyclops, is a collection of essays and reviews translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken and published in the United States by Archipelago Books. The title essay, first published in a Swedish newspaper in 2015, is an enraged response to a critic who asserted that Knausgaard’s depiction of a relationship between a teacher and a student in his first novel was pedophiliac. Knausgaard argues forcefully that explorations of all human impulses are necessary, and touches on many of the themes that have lately become associated with his body of work: Nazism—which…
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Claude Monet, The Beach at Trouville, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This week, we bring you recommendations from three of our issue no. 241 poetry contributors. This August I read three great books. In Anahid Nersessian’s Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (about to be reprinted by Verso), red life streams again through Keats’s poems. It is a risky, passionate criticism that—in addition to yielding all sorts of insights into the man and his writing—tests what of her own life the poems might hold (and quicken). This is living in and through and with and against poetry, a brilliant and refreshingly unprofessional book. I’ve also been reading and admiring Elisa Tama…
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The first thing that needs to be noted about the collected works of MacKenzie Bezos, novelist, currently consisting of two titles, is how impressive they are. Will either survive the great winnowing that gives us our standard literary histories? Surely not. Precious few novels do. Neither even managed, in its initial moment of publication, to achieve the more transitory status of buzzy must-read. But this was not for want of an obvious success in achieving the aims of works of their kind—that kind being literary fiction, so called to distinguish it from more generic varieties. In Bezos’s hands it is a fiction of close observation, deliberate pacing, credible plotting, bel…
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Julie Mehretu frequently has been hailed as an heir to Jackson Pollock. But where many of Pollock’s paintings seem divorced from real-world antecedents, Mehretu blends abstraction and representation in open response to current events: the Arab Spring, deadly wildfires on the West Coast of the United States, the burning of Rohingya villages in Myanmar, the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Some of her paintings and works on paper look like warped views of cities from above; others resemble blueprints for another world. Always, though, amid the layers and layers of symbols, shapes, vectors, and lines, one can see Mehretu’s architectural precision and co…
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Illustration by Na Kim. I can’t fall asleep till my skin—sweaty, sticky, sizzling with bacteria, random fungal itches, swellings, vague histamine eruptions—has been unified by a bath or shower. I wear a white cotton T-shirt softened by age to tame this commotion and to guard my insanely sensitive nipples against the onslaught of, say, the blanket’s edge. Mr. X. and I read for a while. I’m reading Derek McCormack’s wondrous Castle Faggot, but after a few paragraphs the words stop making sense. I whisper, “Bona nit, estimat.” Xavi whispers, “Bona nit, malparits,” and we kiss. Why do we whisper? Sometimes we whisper “I love you.” I roll onto my right side, and incredibly X…
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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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Photograph by J.D. Daniels. Saturday. July. 7:15 am Yoga. Translating Bayard’s Peut-on appliquer la littérature à la psychanalyse? from a Spanish copy of ¿Se puede aplicar la literatura al psicoanálisis? One word at a time. Speed limit, 25 mph. To Cartagena with Jamie this 22-26 September. Tonight Jamie, Josh and Ellen will come for dinner. Humid, overcast, drizzling rain, 60˚F but feels much hotter. Sunday. 6:10 am. 68˚F Beginner’s Orchids. Phalaenopsis, cymbidium, oncidium. Reconciliation with the father. Henry IV, Part One. Ideas for essays on films. Sorcerer at Brattle vs. Clouzot’s Wages of Fear. Or Stark’s The Hunter vs. P…
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Camel cigarettes billboard in Times Square, 1943. Photograph by John Vachon. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. March 1946. Albert Camus has just spent two weeks at sea on the SS Oregon, a cargo ship transporting passengers from Le Havre to New York City. He’s made several friends during this transatlantic passage. Sunday. They announce we’ll arrive in the evening. The week passed in a whirlwind. Tuesday evening, the twenty-first, our table decides to celebrate the arrival of spring. Alcohol until four in the morning. The next day, too. Forty-eight …
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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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Jas. I. Campbell, Historic American Buildings Survey: Ashton Villa, Photograph, 1934. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The long-held myth goes that on June 19, 1865, Union general Gordon Granger stood on the balcony of Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and read the order that announced the end of slavery. Though no contemporaneous evidence exists to specifically support the claim, the story of General Granger reading from the balcony embedded itself into local folklore. On this day each year, as part of Galveston’s Juneteenth program, a reenactor from the Sons of Union Veterans reads the proclamation at Ashton Villa while an audience looks on. It is an annual momen…
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Although he’s best known for his lush, technically miraculous oil paintings, Paul Cézanne held his sketchbook near and dear. In a 1904 letter to the Fauvist painter Charles Camoin, Cézanne wrote, “Drawing is merely the configuration of what you see.” Thousands of his works on paper have survived. More than two hundred fifty of these rarely shown pieces form the basis of “Cézanne Drawing,” which will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art through September 25. A selection of images from the show appears below. Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Blue Pot, 1900–06, pencil and watercolor on paper, 19 × 24 7/8″. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Paul Cézanne, Bathers (Bai…
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The following is Dubravka Ugrešić’s preface to Damion Searls’s new translation of Marshlands, by André Gide, published earlier this month by New York Review Books. André Gide, 1893. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Why a preface? Prefaces usually offer the reader a guide to the book before them; they say a few words about the book’s author and place the book in its historical or contemporary literary context. In the pre-Internet age this was a job entrusted to literary experts. Today, with the assistance of the Internet, expertise is no longer considered necessary. I confess, I myself am no expert, arbiter, or competent interpreter of André Gide’s work. I am her…
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Charles Etienne Pierre Motte, The Surroundings of Dieppe, 1833, licensed under CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons. François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) was born in Saint-Malo, on the northern coast of Brittany, the youngest son of an aristocratic family. After an isolated adolescence spent largely in his father’s castle, he moved to Paris not long before the revolution began. In 1791, he sailed for America but quickly returned to his home country, where he was wounded as a counterrevolutionary soldier, and then emigrated to England. The novellas Atala and René, published shortly after his return to France in 1800, made him a literary celebrity. Long recognized as one o…
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Artwork by Hermann Hesse. Photograph by Martin Hesse Erben. Courtesy of Volker Michels. Everywhere we’ve lived takes on a certain shape in our memory only some time after we leave it. Then it becomes a picture that will remain unchanged. As long as we’re there, with the whole place before our eyes, we see the accidental and the essential emphasized almost equally; only later are secondary matters snuffed out, our memory preserving only what’s worth preserving. If that weren’t true, how could we look back over even a year of our life without vertigo and terror! Many things make up the picture a place leaves behind for us—waters, rocks, roofs, squares—but for me, it is …
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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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Claire Schwartz. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan. Claire Schwartz is the author of the poetry collection Civil Service, forthcoming from Graywolf, and the culture editor of Jewish Currents. Claire’s writing has appeared in The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. From 2018 to 2020, she wrote a column for The Paris Review called Poetry RX, with Kaveh Akbar and Sarah Kay. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and Yale’s Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize, and received her PhD from Yale University. *** From Civil Service: Apples The townspeople paste wax apples on the trees, glow shyly ou…
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Alison Bechdel’s new graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, follows the artist through a lifetime of fitness and exercise. These memories and musings are interspersed with transcendentalists, Romantics, Eastern philosophers, and other literary figures who shed light on our obsession with transformation and transcendence. In the excerpt below, Bechdel follows in Jack Kerouac’s footsteps up the Matterhorn, only to find the hike to be far more difficult than expected, and with surprising lessons in store. Alison Bechdel’s cult following for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For expanded wildly for her best-selling memoirs, Fun Home, adapte…
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I don’t use a journal, just a small piece of clipboard material on which I place quartered (torn) sections of 8.5 x 11″ paper that I have folded in half. I generally keep several such fresh sheets with me, as well as others containing things I am working on—plans, schedules, tasks. Above, you see the board: I put a ridiculous drawing (by Bruegel) on one side. You also see a piece of paper, folded, as it would sit in my pocket. Then you see one such in-use, unfolded sheet: my accounting. This sheet tabulates various habits—you may guess what they are—that I am TO PERFORM or TO AVOID each day. This is a middling eleven days; I could have done better. Jesse Ball is the a…
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Copyright © 2021 by Shary Flenniken. I don’t know how old I was when I first read Shary Flenniken’s Trots and Bonnie, but I definitely wasn’t old enough. I was a precocious reader and pretty sex-obsessed for a child, and my parents would buy National Lampoon every now and again and leave it where it could fall into my unsupervised little hands (parenting was a different animal entirely in 1984, kids). I couldn’t have been more than seven, but the experience is as clear and vital as if it happened yesterday: here was something that looked friendly and kidlike, but it was dangerous. It was confusing, it was weird, and it was very, very hot. Copyright © 2021 by Shary Fl…
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Ghost Ranch, 2019. Fuji Instax photographs taken by Josephine Halvorson in and around Georgia O’Keeffe’s houses, New Mexico, 2019–2020. There’s a certain weather-beaten tree stump at Ghost Ranch—the U-shaped, adobelike home once occupied by the famed American Modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe—where Josephine Halvorson, the first artist-in-residence at Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, often took breaks from her own work. It offered her a clear view of Cerro Pedernal, the narrow New Mexican mesa that appears in many of O’Keeffe’s desert paintings, and where the artist’s ashes are scattered. From here Halvorson could observe weather patterns forming around the mesa’s ca…
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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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In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Photo: Erica MacLean. Geek Love, Katherine Dunn’s 1989 novel about a family of circus performers, was one of my favorite books in college. I’d memorized the opening lines, in which Al Binewski extols his wife’s grace in biting off chicken heads, and used to get drunk and murmur them to boys at parties: “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing. ‘Spread your lips, sweet Lil,’ they’d cluck, ‘and show …
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Photo: Erica Maclean The Mexican writer Amparo Dávila (1928–2020) is known for uncanny, nightmarish short stories full of strange visitations and sudden violence. Reading The Houseguest, a sampling of her work translated into English by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson, my thoughts turned toward several people I love who are suffering from alcohol dependency, depression, or other mental health afflictions worsened by the isolation and unemployment caused by COVID-19. These conditions sometimes feel to me like evil spirits, loosed by social chaos, and they are all the more disturbing because of the ways they trick their hosts into participating with them. I find myself w…
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