December 25, 2017 Best of 2017 A Number of Reasons I’ve Been Depressed Lately By David Sedaris We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! One. It’s early September of 2015 and I’m on the island of Santorini for a literary festival. After the short reading, which takes place outdoors on a patio, the Greek audience asks questions, the first of which is, “What do you think of Donald Trump?” Since announcing his candidacy, the reality-show star has been all over the news. Every outrageous thing he says is repeated and analyzed—like he’s a real politician. I answer that I first became aware of Donald Trump in the late 1980s. That was when Alma, a Lithuanian woman I was working for, bought his book The Art of the Deal and decided he was wonderful. Shortly afterward, I saw him on Oprah, and ever since then he’s always been in the background, this ridiculous blowhard, part showman and part cartoon character. I see his presidential bid as just another commercial for himself. It wouldn’t surprise me if he were to name the Hamburglar as his running mate. So I say that on stage and then have to explain who the Hamburglar is. Read More >>
December 22, 2017 Best of 2017 The Paris Review Staff’s Favorite Books of 2017 By The Paris Review Danez Smith. It turns out that the books that top my reading list this year are, in one way or another, about intimacy. First, biography: Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker and Sam Stephenson’s Gene Smith’s Sink (which, full disclosure, I worked on as posts for the Daily). Kraus and Stephenson have written unconventional lives, approaching their subjects askance and with varying degrees of subjectivity. The lesson these books offer is twofold: no matter how much we nose around in another’s life, it is impossible to know that person fully; and the story of our lives is never really ours alone—the telling comes, in large part, through the words, observations, and experiences of those with whom we’ve shared time. Which brings me to Barbara Browning’s The Gift, a novel that incorporates discussions of music, dance, performance art, writing, and correspondence in order to describe collaboration, not just in the artistic sense but as a community of intimates—friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers. Browning’s prose is open and unpretentious; I read her book deliberately, soaking up the fullness of each sentence. Last, a book that knocked me over: Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead, a collection of poems about the deaths of black men and boys, about love and sex, about hope, and, above all, about bodies. The form each poem takes, particularly in the various ways the lines break (or don’t), creates an especial urgency, heightens the rhythm and emotion: “we say wats gud meaning i could love you until my jaw / is but memory, we say yo meaning let my body // be a falcon’s talon & your body be the soft innards of goats / but we mostly say nothing, just sip // some good brown trying to get drunk / with permission.” Another kind of recommendation: I’ve dog-eared nearly every page. —Nicole Rudick I spent the last two years working retail, toiling away as an indie bookseller, and in that time I read plenty of books but learned the stories of many, many more. The business of bookselling requires its worker bees to stretch beyond the limits of their own preferences, to slot into place season after season of titles and authors and blurbs and buzz—and then to step back, assess the amassed galaxies of information, and zero in on which exact book best suits a particular customer. It’s a wonderful way to stay in the know, but it’s exhausting. I’ve been happy to spend most of 2017 letting the new books stream past me like schools of fish. It means I’ve been able to go back and nudge stones I haven’t touched yet: the mind-warping nightmares of Kenzaburo Oe; the haunting agony of Han Kang; Joy Williams’s dead-eyed, disquieting brushes with the beyond; and the peppy charm of Haruki Murakami (whose running memoir, to my doctor’s dismay, did not turn me into a pro athlete or even a casual jogger, but I’m getting there). And after all this buildup, I’m still going to tell you that the best thing I read this year is Lincoln in the Bardo, the hottest, tenderest ghost chorus I’ve ever witnessed. Relative unknown George Saunders knocks it out of the park with his debut novel, and then the park dissolves into ectoplasm and the pitching mound sings a shanty. Enough has been said already about Saunders’s latest; I don’t have much to add. I’ll just say that prior to reading Lincoln in the Bardo, I had left the contemporary novel for dead, and Saunders—with his characteristic heart and funny bone—showed me just how deeply wrong I was. Looking back at a strange, terrible year, that discovery is enough for me. —Brian Ransom Read More
December 22, 2017 Best of 2017 Ten of Our Top Stories from 2017 By Nadja Spiegelman The Paris Review’s office. This year has certainly been a memorable one for The Paris Review, with more than a few moments that tried our resolve. But we prefer to remember it as a landmark year, measured out by four extraordinary issues that included Hilton Als’s imaginary biopic about James Baldwin and Nina Simone, the fiction debuts of J. M. Holmes and J. Jezewska Stevens, and an interview with Maxine Groffsky, one of the magazine’s first female editors, which reads like a page-turning feminist adventure story. This was the year we launched our podcast (there are six episodes to carry you into the new year, and many more to come) and reintroduced the Paris Review Editions imprint with the Women at Work interview anthology. As of this writing, the volume is sold out, but sign up for our newsletter: the next book is already underway. And here on the Daily, we’ve been publishing exciting new writing, well, daily. When I took over this post in September, I was nervous. My predecessor, Dan Piepenbring, had left big shoes to fill (as well as, it turned out, actual high-heeled shoes behind the desk, though he has denied ownership). Since the 2016 election, I have been filled with an existential dread that only seems to recede when I felt I was doing something worthwhile. Three months in, I can proclaim with absolute certainty that what we’re doing on the Daily and at The Paris Review is more than worthwhile—it’s essential. In a year of constant, terrifying news alerts, we have carved out a space for humor, for reflection, for going deep and going wide, and for capturing our moment not through its tweets but through its culture. It’s easy to get lost in despair. We want to make it easy, too, to get lost in writing that makes us feel reinvigorated, hopeful, and less alone. To get you started, I’ve selected ten pieces we’ve published online in 2017—starting with monstrous men and ending with good advice: Read More
December 20, 2017 Best of 2017 Our Contributors’ Favorite Books of 2017 By The Paris Review Fleur Jaeggy This past July, I read Fleur Jaeggy’s most recent collection, I Am the Brother of XX (New Directions, 2017) with a mix of envy and admiration. While it may not qualify as holiday reading, this slim volume combines all of my favorite fictional things: a touch of cruelty, the comitragedy of the absurd, and a reverence for the domestic. I am a firm believer in the idea that in everyday household objects we find the magic, menace, and violence of our world distilled, a notion Jaeggy extrapolates to great and unsettling effect. In these strange, dark tales, photographs and paintings frequently come alive. Tea cups and spoons converse with spinsters. A lonely diner finds companionship in the fish she is about to eat (“He is already a friend”), while nihilistic children harbor sartorial obsessions with a “certain blue coat” or “eggplant-colored penny loafers.” As with all of Jaeggy‘s work, I Am the Brother of XX is menacing, moving, and disturbingly comic—austere, but without ever losing its sense of play. I recently shared my favorite story in the collection, “Agnes,” with a poet friend of mine. Her response sums up my feeling exactly: “It’s perfect. I wish I’d written it myself.” —J. Jezewska Stevens (“The Party”) Read More