Posts Tagged ‘Geoff Dyer’
What We’re Loving: Trains, Stalkers, and Virgins
May 3, 2013 | by The Paris Review
In the 1930s, thirteen-year-old Frank Moshinskie started to build a miniature town for his toy trains. Now run by his son and made up of hundreds of buildings, hand-carved figures, and replicas of national landmarks, Tiny Town Trains is a beloved attraction of Hot Springs, Arkansas. If, like me, you can’t make it down any time soon, check out this amazing video from the Oxford American. It’s no wonder Tiny Town! was nominated for a National Magazine Award; it truly conveys the magic of the miniature, and the definition of labor of love. —Sadie Stein
Last month, Text Publishing launched its Text Classics in the United States, reprints of long out-of-print books, many of which have never been available here. Their first list is made up primarily of books by Australian novelists, and I think I can count on one hand the number of Australian novels I’ve read. So I seized on Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower, originally published in 1966. What a discovery! Harrower’s voice in this book is disconcerting at first: almost fatigued, as though she knows that everything to come is fated to be so and there’s little to do but tell the story. And her characters—two young sisters—likewise passively accept the events that befall them. This fatalism is absorbing, though, as you watch the women move slowly through a comatose state into a kind of awakening. In fact, the story reminded me at times of A Doll’s House—namely, in the younger sister’s internal striving for selfhood and independence—but the long tale of the sisters’ subjugation is far more excruciating than what Ibsen imagined. —Nicole Rudick Read More »
Hatchet Job: When Bad Reviewers Go Good
November 19, 2012 | by Drew Johnson
In February of this year, Adam Mars-Jones, an English writer not much known in this country, won the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year award for his review of Michael Cunningham’s Nightfall: “And a two-person epiphany has to outrank the single kind. Two comely young people standing in the lake shallows, ‘looking out at the milky haze of the horizon’—that’s not an epiphany, that’s a postcard.”
Geoff Dyer, another English writer, much better known since 2008’s Death in Venice, Jeff in Varanisi brought most of his strange work back into print, was nominated for his attack on Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending:
Later, after Tony has broken up with his girlfriend, Adrian commits suicide. This would be my first objection. Obviously people commit suicide, for a variety of reasons, but in fiction they tend to do so primarily in the service of authorial convenience. And convenience invariably becomes a near-anagram of contrivance.
The impulse behind good bad reviews is not much understood, and whether understood or not, is usually disliked or dismissed. It’s considered ungenerous, as though generosity could never be misplaced. Read More »
The Long and Short of It
October 16, 2012 | by Sadie Stein
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Prabuddha Dasgupta, 1956–2012
August 21, 2012 | by Sadie Stein
We were saddened to hear of the death of legendary Indian photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta last week at fifty-eight. As Geoff Dyer wrote in issue 200, with Dasgupta’s work, “we are in the realm of dreams and memories—exactly whose is never clear.”
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On the Shelf
March 7, 2012 | by Sadie Stein
Nabokoving.
A cultural news roundup.
Two ‘Paris Review’ Events Not to Be Missed
March 6, 2012 | by The Paris Review
This week, The Paris Review takes over New York!
Tonight, editor Lorin Stein will be at McNally Jackson with Sarah Manguso to discuss her new book, The Guardians: An Elegy. David Shields rhapsodized that The Guardians “is very pure and elemental, and I wanted nothing coming between me and the page.” Don’t let anything stand in your way, either; stoke your excitement for the discussion by reading our excerpt of the book here!
Then, on Friday, Geoff Dyer and John Jeremiah Sullivan, both contributors to our two-hundredth issue, discuss their books Zona and Pulphead at 192 Books. A man whom Zadie Smith dubbed a “national treasure” and our Southern editor in one room? We can’t imagine anything better.
We hope to see you there!
Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Lorin Stein
March 6, 7 P.M.
Location: McNally Jackson
52 Prince Street
New York, NY 10012
Geoff Dyer in Conversation with John Jeremiah Sullivan
March 9, 7 P.M.
Location: 192 Books
192 10th Avenue
New York, NY 10011
RSVP only. To reserve your spot, call 212-255-4022.
