December 3, 2021 This Week’s Reading The Review’s Review: Telegraphic, Incandescent By The Paris Review Still from Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) courtesy of the Criterion Collection. Years ago, I went to go and watch the Mike Leigh movie Another Year at a cinema in Bristol. It is a typical Mike Leigh film in that it is just about matchless in its emotional acuity, punctuated by shots where the camera lingers for about ten seconds more than is tolerable on the face of a character who has either had a shit life or is going to go on to have a shit life; it’s funny; it has an overall aesthetic atmosphere that makes you think of allotments even when an allotment never appears on screen; and it’s hellbent on presenting the most unglamorous vision of London that could possibly exist. Read More
December 2, 2021 Bulletin Jamaica Kincaid Will Receive Our 2022 Hadada Award By The Paris Review Jamaica Kincaid. Photo: Kenneth Noland Save the date: on April 12, 2022, The Paris Review will present the Hadada, our annual lifetime achievement award, to Jamaica Kincaid at our Spring Revel. In our Winter 1981 issue (no. 82), the Review published a short story by Kincaid, then thirty-two, titled “What I Have Been Doing Lately.” The story follows the narrator’s recursive, dreamlike journey in search of home, and was later included in Kincaid’s debut collection, At the Bottom of the River (1983), which drew from her early life in Antigua and marked her as a singular voice in American letters. The book won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Also in the collection is the indelible “Girl,” a 650-word sentence of practical instructions uttered by a mother to her daughter on how to avoid becoming “the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread.” Read More
December 2, 2021 Look #nyc #adayinmylife By Taylore Scarabelli Screenshot from “Restaurant Reviews: Lucien” video by @theviplist Earlier this year I was obsessed with watching movies set in New York: campy comedies like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours felt like a night out when I was still hiding at home; erotic thrillers like A Perfect Murder and Dressed to Kill made the city seem more enticingly dangerous than it was during lockdown. As New York reopened, I stopped watching movies and started going out. Dining at restaurants, once a luxury, felt like a necessity—a way of re-entering the fantasy world of New York that I had streamed over the past year. It didn’t matter where I was going or who I was dining with. I just wanted to be out and around people, to feel like a main character living in New York City. Read More
December 1, 2021 Humor When You Misread the Title of a New Yorker Article Called “Going Home with Wendell Berry” as “Going Down On Wendell Berry” By Lulu Miller © Gorilla /Adobe Stock First you tease his hand-knit sweater with your greener thumb. You nudge it into that snail burrow beneath the wool. It is warm against Wendell Berry’s belly, and you consider leaving your thumb there forever. He would not mind. He would ask only that you join him at first light to hoe the earth, and not comment as he crumbles a pinch of soil between his fingers, and not ask how it is, exactly, that the particles fall in such perfect slo-mo. He would ask only that you join him under the hand-wrought pergola at the foot of his radish bed as he sips sugarless lemonade and pays gratitude to the clouds and the mycorrhizal network. He would ask only that you not try to his read his lips as they involuntarily mouth the objects of his gratitude. You think you catch him mouthing “Doritos,” but as you start to ask, he catches your eye in a steely way that tells you to back off. Read More
December 1, 2021 Rereading On the Alert for Omens: Rereading Charles Portis By Rosa Lyster Annotated pages from the author’s copy of The Dog of the South About a month ago, this man dropped an orange peel on me, deliberately, from the third-floor window of a pink apartment building on Bohdana Khmelnytsky Street in Kyiv, Ukraine. If you would like to picture the scene, you should imagine a man with the same shape of head and beard as Karl Marx, dressed in a high-necked white garment that sits at the intersection of “mystic” and “physician,” eating an orange and staring directly into the tired eyes of a woman who is wearing an ankle-length black coat that makes her feel like a corrupt but dignified old banker and big shiny black shoes that make her feel like a powerful car. I was on my way to the A. V. Fomin Botanical Garden a few streets away, and it was early enough in the morning that I had nothing in my head except the thought of how much I loved my shoes. I’d been gazing down at them as I walked, gloating over them in a way that was Rumpelstiltskinesque, when I realized someone was staring at me, hard, so I looked up and there was this man, in the pink building across the street, eating his orange with glazed conviction and giving off an aura of Rasputin. Read More
November 30, 2021 In Memoriam The Fourth Rhyme: On Stephen Sondheim By Adrienne Raphel a letter to the author from Stephen Sondheim. In the late fifties, Stephen Sondheim, who died last week aged ninety-one, performed a song from the not-yet-finished musical Gypsy for Cole Porter, on the piano at the older composer’s apartment. As Sondheim recalls in Finishing the Hat, his mesmerizing and microscopically annotated first collection of lyrics, Porter had recently had both legs amputated, and Ethel Merman, the star of Gypsy—in which Sondheim’s words accompanied music by Jule Styne—had brought the young lyricist along as part of an entourage to cheer him up. Sondheim played the clever trio “Together.” “It may well have been the high point of my lyric-writing life,” he writes, to witness Porter’s “gasp of delight” on hearing a surprise fourth rhyme in a foreign language: “Wherever I go, I know he goes / Wherever I go, I know she goes / No fits, no fights, no feuds, and no egos / Amigos / Together!” Read More