March 11, 2024 At Work “Let Me Tell You Something”: A Conversation with Jamie Quatro By Andrew Martin Jamie Quatro. Photograph by Stephen Alvarez. Last June, the Review published Jamie Quatro’s “Little House”—what appears at first glance to be a quiet, traditional story about childhood and family life. Gentle in tone and careful in construction, it leaves the reader discomfited to realize that the narrator has left the thing that drove her to tell it—the real story—almost entirely unsaid. The story is part of a triptych by Quatro, the second part of which, “Yogurt Days,” was published in The New Yorker; in that story, the same narrator remembers her evangelical mother taking her along as she attempted to save the spirit of a man suffering from a mysterious (to the narrator) illness. The third story, “Two Men, Mary,” published in our most recent Winter issue, completes the triptych, and is itself structured in three parts. Anna recalls herself first at sixteen, working in a frozen yogurt shop, and her first sexual encounters with older men; then, decades later, as a published writer on a plane to a literary conference, who has a rendezvous with the man sitting next to her; and finally, in the present, where she turns to a very different kind of surrender. We exchanged emails about the uses of autobiography in fiction, how these stories came about, and what we are to make of their singular narrator, Anna. Which of the stories in this series came first? Were they published in the order you wrote them? “Two Men, Mary” came first. When I was drafting, I had no idea the story would end up as part of a triptych. “Little House” was the second story I drafted, but chronologically, it comes first, so it’s great that it was the first piece published of the three. In “Little House,” Anna—who narrates all three stories—is looking back on her early childhood and interrogating her relationship with her father and her younger sister, who has accused the father of sexual abuse. After finishing the first two, I realized that I would need to write a third piece foregrounding Anna’s relationship with her mother. That story, ”Yogurt Days,” also wrestles with themes of faith and sexuality. You know, I keep thinking I’m going to write something new, something I’ve never written before. And I keep coming back to God and sex. Read More
February 20, 2024 At Work Reading the Room: An Interview with Paul Yamazaki By Seminary Co-Op Bookstore Courtesy of Stacey Lewis / City Lights. Paul Yamazaki has been City Lights Bookstore’s chief buyer for over fifty years, responsible for filling the shelves of the San Francisco shop with the diverse range of titles that make City Lights one of the most beloved independent bookstores in the United States. Founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953 and once a hangout for Beat poets, today the bookstore and publisher specializes in poetry, literature in translation, and left-leaning books relating to social justice and political theory. Yamazaki was the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2023 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community and has mentored generations of booksellers across the United States. This interview was compiled from conversations held between Yamazaki and friends of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore. INTERVIEWER What a joy it is to be here with you today at City Lights on this foggy Saturday in San Francisco. Walking in the front door, I feel like I instantly know where I am. How do you choose which books to put in the browser’s line of sight, how to signal what the bookstore stands for? PAUL YAMAZAKI It’s all about developing a conversation between the books. When they’re placed side by side, they talk to one another. Our goal when you walk in is to make sure that, right away, you see books you haven’t seen in other spaces and you see books you already know, in a slightly disorienting way. Right now I’m looking at Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and Mike Davis grouped together—what a great party to be invited to. Read More
December 12, 2023 At Work An Excerpt from our Art of Poetry Interview with Louise Glück By Henri Cole TUCSON, ARIZONA, 1978. PHOTOGRAPH BY LOIS SHELTON, © ARIZONA BOARD OF REGENTS, COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA POETRY CENTER. In remembrance of Louise Glück, we wanted to take the special step of sharing the beginning of her Writers at Work interview from the new Winter issue, conducted by Henri Cole, on the Daily. We hope you’ll read it, along with her poems in our archive and the reflections on her life and work that we published after her death this fall. (And to read the rest of this conversation, subscribe.) In early March of 2021, Louise Glück visited Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, where I teach. Because of COVID, she was afraid to fly on a small plane to our regional airport, so I drove her myself from Berkeley, where, for some years, she rented a house during the winters. She packed pumpernickel bagels, apples, and cheese for our six-hour road trip, and she brought CDs of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and the songs of Jacques Brel, a Belgian master of the modern chanson. Long ago Glück and her former husband had listened to operas on road trips, but this was her first car trip in many years. She knew the musical works backward and forward, pointing out Maria Callas’s vocal strengths and clapping her hands while singing along with Brel. The magnificent almond orchards of central California had just begun to blossom and gleam beside the rolling highway. At the farmers’ market in Claremont, she bought nasturtiums and two baskets of strawberries while talking openly about her girlhood and how she’d weighed only seventy pounds at the worst moment of her anorexia. “But you love food, like a gourmand, Louise,” I said, and she replied, “All anorexics love food.” The hotel where she was staying seemed dingy, but she did not complain. Sitting on the bed cover, she propped herself up with pillows and responded to the endless emails arriving on her mobile phone. Some months earlier, Glück had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. When the Swedish Academy phoned her quite early in the morning with the marvelous news, she was told that she had twenty-five minutes before the world would know. She immediately called her son, Noah, on the West Coast, and he was joyful after overcoming his panic at hearing the phone ring in the night. Then she called her dearest friend, Kathryn Davis, and her beloved editor, Jonathan Galassi. Reporters quickly appeared on her little dead-end street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Soon she was exhausted from replying to the journalists’ questions, like “Why do you write so frequently about death?” Because of the lockdown, her Nobel medal was presented in the backyard of her condominium. Gray clouds blocked the sun. A light snow and frost covered the yard. The wind gusted. A small folding table was set up in the grass with an ivory cloth that made the gold medal shimmer. I watched the ceremony from Glück’s back patio, on the second floor. She wore black boots, black slacks, a black blouse, a black leather coat with big shearling lapels, and fingerless gloves. A cameraman asked her several times to pick up her medal, and she obeyed, as the wind blew her freshly cut hair across her face. The Swedish consul general explained that normally Glück would have received her medal from the king of Sweden, but that she was standing in for him. The consulate had sent a large bouquet of white amaryllis, but Glück thought they looked wrong in the austere winter scene, so they were removed from the little table. The ceremony took no longer than five minutes, and she shivered silently until she finally asked if she could go inside to warm up. From the beginning, Glück cited the influence of Blake, Keats, Yeats, and Eliot—poets whose work “craves a listener.” For her, a poem is like a message in a shell held to an ear, confidentially communicating some universal experience: adolescent struggles, marital love, widowhood, separation, the stasis of middle age, aging, and death. There is a porous barrier between the states of life and death and between body and soul. Her signature style, which includes demotic language and a hypnotic pace of utterance, has captured the attention of generations of poets, as it did mine as a nascent poet of twenty-two. In her oeuvre, the poem of language never eclipses the poem of emotion. Like the great poets she admired, she is absorbed by “time which breeds loss, desire, the world’s beauty.” The conversations that make up this interview mostly took place during the days of Glück’s visit two years ago, which included a rooftop seminar—with the San Gabriel Mountains as a backdrop—and a standing-room-only reading at the Marion Minor Cook Athenaeum, during which she dined with students, an experience that evidently gave her pleasure. She had no desire to undertake a cradle-to-grave interview, but she was happy to converse about her new book, teaching, and craft, and read the version of the interview that I sent her as a work in progress. After her unexpected death on Friday, October 13, 2023, I shared our pages with the Review, since there would be no further conversations. INTERVIEWER Am I correct in thinking that you write two kinds of books—one a collection of disparate lyric poems and another that has some of the characteristics of prose, with a narrative thread? GLÜCK Yes, and I seem to rotate between the modes. I also think of my books as either operating on a vertical axis, from despair to transcendence, or moving horizontally, with concerns that are more social or communal, the sort of material you might expect to show up in a novel rather than a poem. Averno (2006), for instance, is a book quintessentially on a vertical axis. And A Village Life (2009) is utterly the opposite—with different speakers coming from different times of life, living in some unspecified little seemingly Mediterranean village, though the model was Plainfield, Vermont, where I lived for many years. You make substitutions to keep yourself inventing. Read More
September 8, 2023 At Work Does Lana Del Rey Read The Paris Review? By Sophie Haigney Sam McKinniss, Lana Del Rey Reading The Paris Review, 2023, five-color offset lithograph with hot foil stamping on acid-free 352-gsm Sappi McCoy Silk, plate size 24 ½ x 18 ¾ in, paper size 30 x 22 in. The latest image in our recently relaunched print series is by Sam McKinniss and features the singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey—white-gloved, in a sun hat—reading the Review. The lithograph print, based on a painting by McKinniss, was made with the help of Dusty Hollensteiner at Publicide Inc.; on Friday, September 8, at 9 P.M., the print, made in a limited edition of twenty-five, will be made available for sale to the public at parisreviewprints.org. McKinniss and I talked on the phone a few weeks ago about his process, Lana’s latest album, and images of women reading on the internet. INTERVIEWER What led you to make an image of Lana Del Rey reading The Paris Review? SAM McKINNISS A friend of mine told me that once upon a time she was having a bad day, so her boyfriend bought her a copy of Lana Del Rey’s poetry book to cheer her up. It worked. Then I thought: What if Lana Del Rey has been photographed somewhere reading? I started googling for pictures of “Lana Del Rey reading,” and I found a photograph of her reading her own book of poetry. Based on that, I decided to make a picture of Lana Del Rey reading The Paris Review, which is not so hard to believe that she does, from time to time. INTERVIEWER What do you think she would be reading in The Paris Review? McKINNISS Poetry. Read More
June 20, 2023 At Work The Cups Came in a Rush: An Interview with Margot Bergman By Na Kim Margot Bergman’s studio. Photograph courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago. Do cups have souls? If you look at Margot Bergman’s portfolio in our Summer issue, you might be tempted to say yes: the cups she has painted, from various vantage points and in bright colors, seem filled with life. Bergman, who was born in 1934, has been painting for nearly her whole life. She is best known for her series Other Reveries, which features collaborative portraits painted over artworks she has saved from flea markets and thrift stores. Each painting is layered with decisive, bold paint strokes, revealing a face latent with layers of emotions. They are at once beautiful, frightening, humorous, and welcoming. Who knew that cups could contain similarly human emotion? We talked about the joys of painting, the female form, and of course, what drew her to cups in the first place. —Na Kim INTERVIEWER Much of your work revolves around faces, and especially female figures. When did start painting these? MARGOT BERGMAN In the fifties. The artist R. B. Kitaj was painting very flat paintings. I was attracted to his style. I began to paint like that. I still have some of those paintings in the basement of my home, left over from the fifties—a series of flat paintings of naked women. They were very flat, very unsexual, though the women were butt naked, with their backs turned to the viewer. At one point, the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wanted some of my paintings for the hallway of a government building. They were these Kitaj-like paintings of women, all naked, their backs turned, with what look like bits of collage randomly placed in the paintings. There was a controversy, and the paintings made it in to the newspaper in Milwaukee, because some women’s group had demanded for them to be taken down. Read More
June 7, 2023 At Work The Action of Love: A Conversation with Charif Shanahan By Morgan Parker Charif Shanahan and Morgan Parker. Photographs by Rachel Eliza Griffiths. I read Charif Shanahan’s Trace Evidence two ways: first as a new work by a friend, written through and about what I know to have been some of his most harrowing years, during which he recovered from a near-fatal bus accident in Morocco, and also as the second collection of a phenomenal early-career poet with a dangerously skilled command of craft. I read it as an intimate reader, and as a distant one, and both times, I experienced a sense of introduction. When we talked on Zoom, Charif told me the book “feels like a birth,” and that feeling of birth, or rebirth, permeates Trace Evidence, as a deepening and an extension of the questions in Shanahan’s first collection, and as an announcement of self and purpose that feels brand new. —Morgan Parker PARKER I love the last line of “Trace Evidence,” the book’s titular poem: “For us here now I will be the first of our line.” It’s such an exhilarating sentence. Can you tell me about that idea of deciding to be a beginning? SHANAHAN It is only we who get to tell others who we are, even when—and perhaps especially when—we are inside a system that empowers those around us to tell us who we are. Put another way, choice and agency are questions I’m thinking about in this book. I think the agency here, inside that pronouncement, is in moving deeply into what had already been waiting for me. One could call it an acceptance, but it required first a clearing of the fog such that I could see this reality and not exactly choose it, but choose to name it and step into it and inhabit it. One of the things you and I have talked about a lot is how layered my family story is as regards race. It wasn’t just white parent, Black parent; it wasn’t just light-skinned, dark-skinned; it wasn’t just American Blackness, non-American Blackness; it was all these things at once. That was part of what was so challenging while growing up. But it’s also the beauty of how my family holds race. For me to be able to say that it is beautiful is, I think, a mark of tremendous evolution and growth. Read More