The Paris Review

Checking out books on the subway? We can dig it! (And those bookshelf mock-ups would make a pleasant change from Dr. Zizmor ads—not that we don’t love him, too.)

Called “one of the finest prose stylists at work in the language, an Emerson of our time,” the psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips joins Paul Holdengräber for a live Writers-at-Work interview on Monday, February 25, at the New York Public Library. In the tradition of Paris Review interviews, Phillips will discuss writing, life, and his most recent work, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life.

See program details here.

To receive a $10 discount off general admission, click here and enter code FRUSTRATION at checkout.

• “In Plath’s case, her writing began, soon after her death, to be relegated to a supporting role in a seductive, but intensely misleading, narrative of victimhood.” How to give the poet her due. 
• Are these the fifty key moments in English literature? Discuss. 
• The strange mystery of who firebombed London’s oldest anarchist bookshop, Freedom Books. 
• “Believe me, when you get a dozen people seated at a fairly formal dinner party, and they’ve all got on perfectly ridiculous chapeaus, the evening takes care of itself.” A display of Dr. Seuss’s hats is going up at the New York Public Library. 
• Related: Jon Stewart gets Seussical. 

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Joanna Neborsky is a book lover’s illustrator. She may be as passionate and romantic about books and bookmaking as anyone I’ve met. She also draws the kind of pictures I’ve always wanted to make. They are deceptively simple due to the naive charm of each wobbly line, and they owe a great deal to the inspiration of mid-twentieth-century illustration—an obsession she and I both share. A few years ago Joanna and I collaborated on the cover of John Bowe’s Americans Talk About Love. A recent art school grad, she was willing to endlessly modify caricatures of the people interviewed for the book. The final package made for a witty and accessible take on social history. I always urge the artists I work with to keep me apprised of new projects, and so a few weeks ago I was tickled to discover a jpeg of Joanna’s poster “A Partial Inventory of Gustave Flaubert’s Personal Effects, As Catalogued by M. Lemoel on May 20, 1880, Twelve Days after the Writer’s Death” in my inbox. We had to share it with readers of The Paris Review, and now I wanted to share a little about how it came to be.

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