Advertisement
The Paris Review
Subscribe
Sign In
Remember me
Forgot password?
Sign In
Subscribe
The Daily
The Latest
Columns
The Quarterly
Issues
Interviews
Fiction
Poetry
Letters & Essays
Art & Photo
graphy
Authors
Podcast
About
History
Opportunities
Masthead
Prizes
Submissions
Media Kit
Bookstores
Events
Donate
Donate to
The Paris Review
Institutional Support
THE SPRING REVEL
Newsletters
Store
The Paris Review
The Daily
The Latest
Columns
The Quarterly
Issues
Interviews
Fiction
Poetry
Letters & Essays
Art & Photography
Authors
Podcast
About
History
Opportunities
Masthead
Prizes
Submissions
Media Kit
Bookstores
Events
Donate
Donate to
The Paris Review
Institutional Support
THE SPRING REVEL
Newsletters
Store
Sign In
Remember me
Forgot password?
Sign In
Subscribe
Sign In
Remember Me
Forgot password?
Levity in the Trenches, and Other News
By
Dan Piepenbring
August 11, 2014
On the Shelf
Got a man in the trenches? Show him you care—with roller skates.
An early manuscript of
The Sun Also Rises
finds Hemingway getting all metafictional
: “Hemingway breaks into the narrative to address the reader directly, and, in so doing, calls out the artifice implicit in the writing and reading of fiction. It is a wink at the marketplace—readers want lively, lighthearted tales from abroad—and alludes to the novel’s central dark, repeated joke: that everything awful in life, in all of its sadness and melancholy, is better laughed at.” That’s so po-mo!
It took E. M. Forster eleven years to write
A Passage to India
—
why
? Even his diary is cagey.
A wealthy Brazilian businessman wants to own and catalog
every vinyl record in the world
. (Don’t worry. He has interns.)
“During the First World War,
advertisers seemed to be responding to people’s needs relatively quickly
… In
Country Life
, one of the things I noticed, being a woman, was that there were a lot of ads for guard dogs. It’s things like that that start appearing throughout the war—obvious and terribly poignant things, such as identity bracelets—that start to be advertised very widely, as casualty lists mounted … Many of the manufacturers who produced the most eye-catching ads are still in business today. The ads
worked
.”
Seduce and Destroy:
dissecting Tom Cruise’s potent performance in
Magnolia
, fifteen years later.
Last / Next
Article
Last / Next Article
Share