February 1, 2024 Paragraphs Too Enjoyable to Be Literature By Helen Garner Photograph by Jane Breakell. I knew nothing about F. Scott Fitzgerald when I stumbled on Tender Is the Night in 1962. I didn’t know he’d struggled with the book for almost nine years, and that during his lifetime it never settled into a finished version. I was a naive and ignorant twenty-year-old, studying English and French literature at the University of Melbourne, an unawakened literary snob who had hardly read anything twentieth-century American in her life, and was weighed down by the mighty eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and European novels and poetry that we were to study for final examinations. I pulled the Fitzgerald off a shelf in the bookshop where I had a summer job. It was so delicious and joyful to read, I could canter through it with such bright and sudden pleasure, that it felt almost criminal. Secretly I knew it was way too enjoyable to be literature. Read More
January 30, 2024 Writers' Houses At the Britney Spears House Museum By Emmeline Clein Photograph by Emmeline Clein. Besides Britney, bottled water is Kentwood’s biggest export. Across most of Louisiana, this town is more famous for the water than the woman. “Why are you going to the water bottle town?” the man sitting next to me at the bar asks. I’m in New Orleans, on Carondelet Street. I’m eating at an oyster counter near my grandfather’s former office. Not his favorite, the Black Pearl, where he used to eat a dozen daily on his lunch breaks, grading each one on a scale of 1–10 in his notebook. He died at the start of spring this year, smack in the middle of Carnival, the ambulance stuck in parade traffic for an hour. When I tell the man next to me I’m going to Britney Spears’s hometown to see her house, he says he saw her perform before she became Britney Spears, when she was still Britney from Kentwood, at a concert called Louisiana Jukebox. She was there with her mother, answering audience questions after the show. A childhood friend of my mother’s was there, too, and had incidentally emailed me about it the night before. It was disturbing, she remembered; Britney was so young, but her “song was so sexual, and in person, she looked like the girl next door who every man wants to devirginize.” The next morning, the drive through St. John the Baptist Parish is mostly swamp. Highways on thick stilts through the cypress glens; the long, low bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. Two men fishing, smoking, laughing. Once you cross into Tangipahoa Parish, you’re mostly on dry land, which means Bible billboards and fast-food spots. Read More
January 29, 2024 Syllabi Recommended Readings for Students By Yu Hua Yu Hua in Paris, 2004. Courtesy of Yu Hua. The new Winter issue of The Paris Review, no. 246, includes an Art of Fiction interview with the Chinese writer Yu Hua, the author of novels such as To Live, Brothers, and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. We asked Yu to contribute a syllabus to our ongoing series, and he obliged with a list of recommendations that he’s provided to his students—but, as he says in his interview, remember not to be narrowly focused on reading lists: “Literature is not the only thing in my life. I encourage my students to think this way, too. Recently, I told one of them, ‘Let’s meet this afternoon to talk about the story you wrote,’ and he said, ‘Professor, I’m going clubbing tonight.’ I said, ‘All right, have fun.’ ” I am a professor of creative writing at Beijing Normal University, and with few exceptions, most of my students have no experience writing before enrolling in my course. We begin with short stories before transitioning to novellas, a literary form uniquely popular in China—works of fiction between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand Chinese characters. Julio Cortázar’s “The Southern Thruway” and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach are both excellent examples. When recommending literary works to my students, I base my suggestions on two principles. The first is to avoid works that are already extremely well-known in China, which most of my students will have read during senior middle school or high school. (The Old Man and the Sea, which I ask them to reread, is an exception to that rule.) The second principle is to tailor my lists to students’ individual writing goals. I have one student whose mind is filled with strange and unusual thoughts; I advised her to read “The Southern Thruway” three times and then search for a scene from everyday life to use as a starting point from which her own narrative could gradually expand, so that the magnification of the narrative would be dependent upon real-life details, which can allow the writer to reveal the vastness and complexity of human nature. I also asked her to read Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” three times, as an example of how the literature of the absurd can actually arrive at the real more quickly. In other words, our starting point is “the real” and that is where we ultimately return—even if “the real” to which we return has become completely unrecognizable. Read More
January 26, 2024 The Review’s Review Qishu: Han Song’s Hospital Nightmares By Michael Berry Digital artwork of a science-fictional surgery room by alan9187, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Hospitals play a big role in Yu Hua’s life and fiction—his parents were both doctors, he grew up in and around hospitals as a child, his first job was that of a dentist, and hospitals would later frequently appear in his work as sites of violence and trauma. Yu Hua first made a name for himself in the eighties with a series of dark, violent, experimental short stories, but over the course of his career, his writing became more conventional, earning him a broad readership and fame in the process. But what if Yu Hua had gone the other direction? What if he had gone darker, stranger, more experimental? If one is looking for someone to inherit the lineage of Yu Hua’s early experimentalism today, I would point them to Han Song’s Hospital trilogy, which not only shares a fascination with the medical setting but also presents an unflinching look at the violence lurking just under the surface of the everyday. It is no coincidence then that, during a recent interview I conducted with Han Song when he was speaking of his formative influences, he told me: “I was particularly fascinated by Yu Hua at that time and even imitated him.” Read More
January 25, 2024 Books The Darkest Week of the Year: Fosse’s Septology By Sean Thor Conroe Hans Gude, From the western Coast of Norway, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 1. This past fall, Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In December, I attended a traditional Norwegian brunch and live stream of Fosse’s Nobel lecture at the Norwegian consul general’s residence in New York City. At the time, I’d only read Melancholy, Fosse’s 1995 novel about a grandiose and possibly ephebophilic painter who ends up in the asylum. I had no idea, at the time, how intensely Septology, his recent seven-volume epic, set over the seven days leading up to Christmas—the same seven days, in the liturgical calendar, as it so happened, that I’d end up reading it—would hit me. That it would serve as a guidebook, a religious text, a light over the darkest week of the year. Septology follows Asle, an aging painter and widower living in Dylgja, on Norway’s western coast, as he prepares for his annual Christmas exhibit in the nearby town Bjørgvin. He lives alone, doesn’t drink or smoke, and is a practicing Catholic. His social circle is limited to Åsleik, his neighbor and friend; Beyer, the gallerist who shows his paintings; and Ales, his long-deceased wife, with whom he still speaks every day. Each volume starts with Asle contemplating a painting he’s just painted, a blank canvas with two strokes forming a cross; each volume ends with Asle praying the rosary. Every Christmas, Åsleik invites him over to his sister’s house for Christmas dinner. And every year, Asle declines, choosing to spend it alone, in his house he got with Ales, since “even if Ales has been dead a long time she’s still there in the house.” Only this year he thinks he might accept Åsleik’s invitation to Christmas dinner at Sister’s. He spends the seven days, over the seven volumes leading up to Christmas day, deciding. Read More
January 24, 2024 Dispatch How to Rizz (for the Lonely Weeb): Derpycon By Liby Hays My first brush with Derpycon lore—and by lore I mean its legally enforced code of conduct—was a scroll through its extensive weapons policy. “LIVE STEEL,” the website went, “is defined as bayonets, shuriken, star knives, metal armor—including chain mail.” Studs on clothing constituted a fringe case, subject to approval by convention staff. This precaution was not due to fear of terrorist attacks but to the preponderance of weapon-wielding anime characters, a popular costume choice among attendees. The rules, I imagined, had been set in response to years of disastrous horseplay, yaoi paddle hazing rituals, and airsoft-gun-as-ray-gun mishaps. Thankfully everyone on the registration line ahead of me had gotten the memo, and their cardboard scythes buckled innocuously. Derpycon was billed as a three-day, all-ages, “multi-genre” anime, gaming, sci-fi, and comics convention for nerds of all stripes. It boasted “panels, concerts, video gaming, cosplay, vendors, dances, LARPs, artists, and so much more.” The branding this year aligned the convention with the conventional definition of derpyness, meme-speak for bumbling or awkwardness, rather than the more controversial Derpy, a cross-eyed background character from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Any catering to the controversial “brony” (adult male fans of My Little Pony) set would have surprised me. Instead, images proliferated of mishaps: someone running late for the train with a slice of toast in their mouth and “under construction” imagery (the convention’s mascot is the Derpycone). The provisional or half-baked aspects of the con would therefore feel on-brand. The press pass I received contained a charming illustration of a blushing man struggling to stop a train with a large wooden beam in his arms. Read More