The Paris Review

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” ―Sylvia Plath

• Sharon Olds, Lena Dunham, and Jennifer Egan on The Bell Jar. 
• Dark horse Antonio Munoz Molina wins the Jerusalem Book Prize. 
• Little-known books, blockbuster adaptations: a bittersweet colloquy. 
• The romance author Jessica Blair is really an eighty-nine-year-old vet named Bill, who has no problem with his nom de plume. 
• In “a reverse Fahrenheit 451,” firefighters carry books to safety. 

DAY ONE

Tonight I went to my first Spanish class at Idlewild on Nineteenth Street. 7:30 to 9 P.M.. When I signed up for this class in November, shortly after I came back from spending a few weeks in Barcelona, I was flush with the joy of recent travel, and intent on injecting some novelty, intellectual and otherwise, into my life. I had an idea that I might try to make it back to Spain at the end of this year, and if that happened, I'd like to be able to do more than buy a few peaches without tripping over my tongue, or wanting to revert to French, the only other foreign language I know. And if that never happened, I would at least be doing something to forestall dementia. But as the intervening weeks, growing colder and darker, put more and more distance between me and that trip—I dreamed that, didn’t I?—I started to wonder why I’d done such a thing. It seemed as unnecessary and out of character as signing up for ten colonics through Groupon. But when, after the fifteen of us had gathered in a circle in the back of the store, and the teacher welcomed us in Spanish, something in me quickened in response to hearing the language. Maybe it was just sound as souvenir, but some sleeping dog in me perked up. Something similar had happened back in Barcelona, while standing in the La Central bookstore, looking at all the books I wanted to read but could not, feeling a strange urgency to get the key that would unlock what lay between those covers, a strange feeling that this was a language I needed to know deeper. Read More »

The controversial new Faber cover of The Bell Jar has inspired the Internet to update other classics! This is one of our favorites.

• “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.