October 30, 2019 At Work The Enigma of Prince: An Interview with Dan Piepenbring By Cornelia Channing In January 2016, Dan Piepenbring—then The Paris Review’s online editor—was offered an opportunity to collaborate on a book with the artist Prince Rogers Nelson, known variously throughout his career as The Kid, The Artist, The Purple One, The Prince of Funk, Joey Coco, Alexander Nevermind, an unpronounceable symbol, or, simply, Prince. Yes, that Prince. Purple Rain Prince. “Act your age, not your shoe size” Prince. Prince Prince. The famously enigmatic musician, then in his late fifties, was grappling with how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world. He wanted to write a memoir about the music industry, about his childhood, about his experience as an African American artist. With Dan’s encouragement, Prince began putting his thoughts on paper. Like his music, Prince’s prose was lyrical and unexpected, reflecting his singular voice and a unique sensitivity for narrative. Even in its nascent form, the book promised to be extraordinary. But, just a few months into the project, Prince died unexpectedly, leaving the fate of the memoir uncertain. Grief-stricken and reeling, Piepenbring and his editors at Random House moved forward with the book—transcribing Prince’s handwritten drafts and curating them with a selection of photographs, lyric sheets, and other ephemera collected from his estate. Introducing the book is an essay by Piepenbring that details the unlikely story of their profound, if short-lived, collaboration. Like much of Prince’s oeuvre, The Beautiful Ones defies traditional categorization. Part collage and part elegy, the book tells a fragmented story of the musician’s young life beginning with his very first memory (his mother’s eyes) and continuing through the early days of his career. In it, Prince writes with candor about his epilepsy, his first kiss, his parents’ separation, and his rise to fame. Much of Prince’s story is told through miscellanea: childhood photographs, a middle school report card, his first check from Warner Brothers. Particularly poignant are the excerpts from a seventies scrapbook recounting when, at the age of 19, Prince first moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music. The photographs, accompanied by handwritten notes (“My first car!” “A crazy snapshot of me!”) capture the hopeful excitement of a young man in the foothills of stardom. What emerges from all of this is a richly textured and intimate portrait of one of the most mysterious pop-cultural icons of the last century. My interview with Dan took place earlier this fall at a cafe near The Paris Review office. INTERVIEWER I want to start by asking a little bit about your relationship to Prince’s music. How old were you when you started listening to him seriously? PIEPENBRING I have a vivid memory of the first time I encountered one of his albums. It was at a Walmart in Hunt Valley, Maryland in 1999. This is embarrassing to admit but, at the time, I was really into nu metal—Korn and Limp Bizkit and other thirteen-year-old-boy stuff. I would go to Walmart, because they sold censored versions, which were the only ones my mom would let me buy. I remember browsing the shelves and coming across the cover of Prince’s record Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. He was going under his unpronounceable symbol at the time. If memory serves, he’s on the cover wearing a blue vinyl outfit with a kind of sparkly texture. It’s skin-tight. It looks very extraterrestrial, very Y2K. And he’s giving this imperious, sultry, mysterious look to the camera. I was utterly drawn in. But I didn’t really go deep into his music until I got to college. Someone in my dorm, from California, had seen him on the Musicology tour and was raving about it saying, If you’re not into Prince, you don’t know what you’re talking about—in the way that eighteen-year-old boys can just throw the gauntlet down with some critical bullshit. So, I started getting my hands on all the Prince I could. and really became obsessed. By the end of freshman year I had amassed his whole discography and was steeping myself in it, listening to it all the time, forcing it on friends. I was a goner. Read More
September 30, 2019 At Work Rigorous Grace: A Conversation Between Leslie Jamison and Kaveh Akbar By Kaveh Akbar Kaveh Akbar, left, and Leslie Jamison, right. Leslie Jamison makes her life more difficult than it needs to be. In her most recent essay collection, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, the subjects she chooses—the world’s loneliest whale, Second Life devotees, the Museum of Broken Relationships in Croatia—could carry the pieces with their propulsive novelty alone. Certainly, Jamison is brilliant enough as a sculptor of language that we’d happily oblige her. But what makes Jamison one of the essential essayists of our generation is her rigor. She renders her subjects, the world that made them, and her own gaze all within the same frame. In each of these essays, there is the subject, but there is also the long history leading up to it, and then there is also Jamison herself, observing and writing. So should we call her new book journalism? Or literary criticism? Or memoir? Yes. For an imagination, a curiosity, as expansive as Jamison’s, there can be no partitions. Her writing, like her mind in this conversation, leaps freely between each world. AKBAR Can we begin by talking about grace? One of the things I’m most drawn to in the book, and in your work more broadly, is the steady orbit you make around the idea of grace. There’s a moment in one of the early essays in this collection where you crystallize it, writing: “The definition of grace is that it’s not deserved.” I have been grappling with this idea in my own life, the notion that if I’m capable of doling out grace only to those obviously deserving of it, it isn’t grace exactly. It’s kindness or it’s pity or it’s maybe even just propriety. What is grace to you? And what can it do? JAMISON Starting with grace is like diving into the deep end of the swimming pool—so much better than slowly lowering each inch of thigh down the steps in the shallow end. Or maybe it’s really like diving into the deep end of an infinity pool, where you come up to the edge and see that below is a more infinite body of water than the one you’re swimming in. Which is part of what grace means to me, you feel the world get larger around you, feel yourself get smaller within it. And the world can get large around you in so many ways. As a bespoke digital wonderland, as the infinite hall of mirrors of your prior lives, as a big blue whale large enough to swallow us all. All of these things—mythic whales, past lives, digital waterslides—can be sources of grace. The vending machine of grace is vast and it never gives you exactly what you asked for. And that means we have to pay attention, because we’re not always aware that grace has arrived. As you wrote, “I live in the gulf / between what I’ve been given / and what I’ve received.” Read More
September 19, 2019 At Work Failing the Driving Test with Kevin Barry By John Jeremiah Sullivan Kevin Barry is widely recognized as one of the most gifted fiction writers to emerge from the English-speaking world in the new century. Five years ago, a critic in the Montreal Gazette spoke of a growing view that in him, “an heir to the great Irish tradition has arrived.” But Barry’s early life was spent in multiple countries and continents—he grew up in Limerick city, spent a decade in Cork city, then lived in various places in England, Scotland, Canada, the U.S., and Spain. His first story collection, There are Little Kingdoms, won the prestigious Rooney Prize when it was published twelve years ago, and his first novel, City of Bohane, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2011. Now, his most recent novel, Night Boat to Tangier, has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. He is known for a distinctive combination of earthy wordplay and taut narration, humor and darkness. We conducted our interview via email, over the span of a few days. INTERVIEWER I wanted to start by asking you about where you live in the northern part of Ireland. How did you choose it? And what is it like there, in the town where you live? BARRY I live beside Lough Arrow in County Sligo, an area that at one time had the highest incidence of reported UFO sightings in Europe. Then a certain old lady passed on—to another dimension—and the sightings somehow dropped off. But I watch the skies, just in case. I’ve lived here with my wife for the last twelve years. It’s essentially a swamp, with rain three hundred days a year, but it’s a very lovely place. Kind of dreamy, kind of melancholic, but beautiful. The house was built in the 1840s as a barracks for the Royal Irish Constabulary and remained a cop shop until the late seventies. I work out the back in a shed that was once a holding cell. Living in the countryside took getting used to—the sheer dark at night, the mystery rustlings from the ditches as animals molest each other, et cetera—but I’m totally into it now. It’s kind of spacey and weird and you discover how affected you are, mood-wise, by weather and atmospheric pressure and presences in the landscape. INTERVIEWER Will you tell me about your wife? What’s her name, and how long have you been married, and what does she do? BARRY Olivia Smith. We’ve been together twenty years and married ten. She used to be an academic, teaching law, but now runs a publishing project that we work on together, Winter Papers, a fancy annual arts anthology. She spends a lot of time helping me find my phone, keys, wallet, sense of decorum. She generally keeps the circus on the road. V.S. Pritchett’s wife used to list her occupation on official forms as “driver” because she had to chauffeur him around all the time. Liv does a lot of that, too. I sit my driving test tomorrow at the age of fifty, and it’s looking touch-and-go. INTERVIEWER What kept you from learning to drive, or from getting your license? BARRY I think it’s genetic—my late father passed his test at something like the eighth attempt, in his midforties. I’m a slow starter generally. I learned to cycle a bike at the age of fourteen and to swim at the age of thirty-two and I published a first slim volume of stories at the age of thirty-seven. Only fools rush in. I’m now an avid cyclist and swimmer and story writer. Once I get going, I tend to have the zeal of a late convert. INTERVIEWER You were obviously a passionate reader during those first thirty-seven years. Were your parents bookish people? Read More
September 10, 2019 At Work We Labor under Tyrants: An Interview with Jesse Ball By Patrick Cottrell Jesse Ball (Photo: Joe Lieske) Jesse Ball is an absurdist writer. His latest work, The Divers’ Game, set in a world much like our own, examines what happens when the lives of others are seen as disposable and small measures of kindness are largely absent. In other words, The Divers’ Game is a meditation on violence, longing, cruelty, pageantry, and joy. It’s made up of four sections, and filled with despair and stark beauty, written by one of the finest writers and humans I’ve had the great fortune to encounter in this frequently calamitous world. I first met Jesse in Chicago in 2010. I was beginning graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches, and I wanted to work with him. I remember we had meetings every other week in which we would sit in a conference room with corporate furniture. Each time, upon entering that sad little room, I felt as if I were visiting a wizened old monk at the top of an arduous hill. A couple months ago, when I proposed this conversation, I was hopeful we could meet to go bowling or gambling or shopping for artisanal hats, but owing to our different time zones, this interview was conducted by email. INTERVIEWER Where are you right now? BALL In Shanghai. I am in a hotel in the city center. I’m seated in the dining area. It’s six A.M. No one but me has yet come down for breakfast. All the breakfast attendants are here, but other than that, I’m alone. They are all very busy and I am answering your questions on a small sheet of paper. A man in a paper chef’s hat is very rapidly making a great pile of fried eggs. I am not sure when or whether he’ll stop. I have on my plate two slices of watermelon, some tofu, bitter melon, and a red bean roll. I was drinking tea but it’s all gone. Read More
August 27, 2019 At Work Dark Thread: An Interview with Kimberly King Parsons By Lauren Kane Kimberly King Parsons is a writer who lives in the wilderness. When we spoke on the phone, we were interrupted by the cawing of a large bird outside the window of her Oregon home, which sits on a hill surrounded by a forest populated with “loud squirrels, loud birds, and voles.” She grew up in Lubbock, Texas, with generations of ancestors rooted in the nearby cities of Quitaque and Turkey, where unsettled land stretches endlessly. She would pass the time by walking miles in any direction. Wildness is in her fiction as well; the story “Fiddlebacks” begins with three children shaking out their shoes before putting them on, expelling poisonous insects hidden in the toes. There is also something untamed in her deeply flawed characters, who are constantly caught between reining themselves in and indulging their feral darkness. However, Parsons’s true gift is couching the savage in the great beauty of her prose. Her story “Foxes” appears in The Paris Review’s Summer 2019 issue, and her debut collection, Black Light, was published this month. Our conversation revealed her to be an exacting craftswoman, someone for whom the articulation of each sentence is an act of listening to the character and knowing just when to leave a story. INTERVIEWER Have you always known you would be a writer? PARSONS I grew up an only child, so I used to really love going to birthday parties or hanging out with groups, and at a certain point my role became designated scary-story teller. I don’t know why they chose me, but I loved it. There’s something about having a captive audience and having a room full of terrified people listening to you. I remember knowing that I wanted to be a storyteller or a writer in some way. INTERVIEWER Do you remember some of the scary stories you used to tell? Read More
August 21, 2019 At Work Dislocated Realities: A Conversation between Helen Phillips and Laura Van Den Berg By Helen Phillips and Laura Van Den Berg Helen Phillips (left) and Laura Van Den berg (right) When an early copy of Helen Phillips’s new novel, The Need, turned up at my apartment, I had not read a book in two months. I had been unable to read, in fact. My father had died recently and each time I tried to open a book, longing to slide into an alternate present, I instead hit a wall. The Need broke that wall for me. The novel concerns a woman named Molly, a paleobotanist who is home alone with her children when she thinks she hears an intruder in the house—and the events that follow upend her understanding of her world. The book is written in short and thrilling chapters, at once a cat-and-mouse tale of suspense and a profound exploration of identity and reality, of fate and time. I had the great pleasure of interviewing Helen at the Harvard Bookstore recently and as we talked we discovered some intriguing overlap between our most recent projects. So we decided to keep talking. This conversation took place over email, over the course of several weeks in August. We discussed The Need, published by Simon & Schuster in July, and The Third Hotel, out in paperback from Picador this month, plus dislocated realities, genre, maternal love, and endings. PHILLIPS On the first page of The Third Hotel, your protagonist Clare admits, “I am experiencing a dislocation of reality,” a sentence that stayed with me as I read the book. The sands of reality do seem to be shifting under Clare’s feet in each scene, which brings me to a perhaps unanswerable question that arises for me in many of my favorite works of fiction. Do you consider your protagonist to be an unstable narrator in a stable world, or a stable narrator in an unstable world? VAN DEN BERG I am inclined to claim both, if I may. Clare is wild with grief of various sorts, which creates instability in her own perspective. At the same time, I do think the world—her world, our world—is inherently volatile. To make an obvious point, there is just so much we don’t know and can’t explain. I was just reading about the physicist Leah Broussard’s work on mirror matter, which is bananas, and a concept that is certainly relevant to The Need. After my father died, I thought on several occasions that he was speaking to me through my sister’s dog. I know how that sounds, and yet after a series of deeply uncanny occurrences, such a thought not only seemed possible but also like the obvious and logical conclusion. Was that instability coming from my own grief-deranged self or from some other cosmic force or a collaboration between us? Who can say? I would love to ask the same question of your protagonist, Molly. The novel opens with a dawning awareness that there is an intruder in her home—and, without veering into spoilers, the intruder’s identity introduces major questions about Molly’s grasp on reality. The intruding force is a wholly real element in the book, it’s not a dream or a fantasy, and at the same time, the novel could also accommodate a reading more grounded in psychological realism—that Molly unconsciously conjured this threat. Do you see the instability as rising from the world around Molly or more from Molly herself? Or both? Read More