December 24, 2018 Best of 2018 On the Radio, It’s Always Midnight By Seb Emina We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! “Ultimately, we don’t belong in the world governed by time,” says Michael Cremo, a guest on KNWZ, a radio station in Palm Springs, California. “As beings of pure consciousness, we are essentially timeless.” It is around two thirty A.M. in Palm Springs and around eleven thirty A.M. in Paris, where I am tidying my apartment. Cremo is talking about the end-time, which he thinks could well be imminent, but his point is relevant to the experience of listening to local radio from somewhere I am not. I love listening to radio, but sometimes I don’t want to listen to a particular station, genre, or category. Sometimes I want to listen to a time of day. Which is, of course, entirely possible thanks to the rise of online streaming at the expense of older analogue broadcast methods. If I am feeling afternoony in the morning, I can leave the world that is “governed by time” and join whichever community of radio listeners—in Mumbai, Perth, or Hong Kong—is currently experiencing three P.M. The optimism of a morning show somewhere to my west offers a fresh beginning to a day that’s become lousy by midafternoon, whereas the broadcasts of early evening, burbling across the towns and cities to my east, can turn my morning shower into a kind of short-haul time machine past those hours in which I’m expected to be productive. But for the loosest and strangest of broadcast atmospheres, I am drawn most often to the dead of night, to the so-called graveyard shift. That low-budget menagerie of voices and music is concocted to serve an unlikely fellowship of insomniacs, police officers, teenagers, and bakers—and cheats like me, tuning in from afar to behold radio’s closest equivalent to the Arctic Circle. Read more >>
December 24, 2018 Best of 2018 Ode to Gray By Meghan Flaherty We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Vilhelm Hammershøi, Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne (Dust motes dancing in sunbeams), 1900. The color gray is no one’s color. It is the color of cubicles and winter camouflage, of sullage, of inscrutable complexity, of compromise. It is the perfect intermediate, an emissary for both black and white. It lingers, incognito, in this saturated world. It is the color of soldiers and battleships, despite its dullness. It is the color of the death of trees. The death of all life when consumed by fire. The color of industry and uniformity. It is both artless and unsettling, heralding both blandness and doom. It brings bad weather, augurs bleakness. It is the color other colors fade to once drained of themselves. It is the color of old age. Because I have no style, I defer to gray. I find it easier to dress in gray scale than to think. I buy in bulk, on sale, in black and white and shades between—some dishwater desolate, some pleasing winter mist. I own at least five cardigans in grandpa gray. Read more >>
December 24, 2018 Best of 2018 I Have Wasted My Life By Patricia Hampl We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Winslow Homer, Sunlight and Shadow, 1872. “I vant to be alone,” my mother used to say distractedly, channeling Greta Garbo, when my brother and I were wrecking havoc at home. In fact, though Garbo’s character said the line in the 1932 film Grand Hotel, Garbo herself never said it. What she said, when faced with a scrum of journalists at a press conference a few years later, was “I want to be let alone.” But in our culture, the distinction between the two statements has been conflated. For us, “I vant to be alone” means I want to be off the grid, no iPhone, no email, the 24-7 connectivity of our lot. I want to be let alone to be alone. No wonder that, to a writer—to readers, to all overwhelmed people now—solitude suggests not loneliness but serenity, that kissing cousin of sanity. We speak of being alone to recharge our batteries—even in our reach for solitude, we seem unable to unplug from the metaphor of our connectivity. Read more >>
December 21, 2018 Best of 2018 The Paris Review Staff’s Favorite Books of 2018 By The Paris Review Lucia Berlin in Oakland, California, 1975. Photo: Jeff Berlin (© 2018 Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin LP). 2018 has been a year of fragments, brief episodes, flashes. The seasons, at least here on the East Coast, fractured into kaleidoscopic hot and cold days, which alternated at random. The news was bad, then very bad, then bad, then worse. We were all watching, then no one was watching, then we lay under the covers, lit only by our screens. Was there a summer? Yes, but that’s its own novella, long ago. There was no single narrative. It seems no surprise, then, that many of the books I loved this year are short-story collections. Lydia Millet’s Fight No More fulfilled the voyeur in me, the one who stares into incandescent ground-floor windows of Brooklyn brownstones. In these linked stories, Nina, a realtor, drifts in and out of the lives and homes of strange, estranged Angelenos. She reveals a web of strangers and, in that isolation, shows our shared humanity. In the stories of Some Trick, Helen DeWitt skewers the publishing world, the art world, mathematicians, and computer scientists with an outsider’s cutting wit reminiscent of Paul Beatty and Nell Zink. Reading Lucia Berlin’s Evening in Paradise (and the accompanying volume of memoir and letters, Welcome Home) is like sitting in the back seat of a car driven so fast over broken roads that your teeth rattle and the empty whiskey bottles clank together, while the driver sings the most heartbreakingly beautiful of songs (if that was a terrible metaphor, then please know I’ve written about these books using fewer metaphors here). Sabrina Orah Mark’s Wild Milk reinvents the fairy tale in a way I didn’t know could still be done. Her craft feels generous, fluid, inventive: she bends myths and archetypes like balloon animals. And yet for all that sense of play, what she reveals is not lightness but wildness. There is something elemental in her stories, as complicated and tangled as the roots of any ancient tree. I read novels this year as well—Sight, by Jessie Greengrass, flew woefully under the radar, though it’s one of the sharpest, smartest books on motherhood I’ve read in a long time. Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman stuck with me far longer than I expected it to, especially for a book so intentionally flat and strange. The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard, was published in 1980, but anyone who knew me this year heard about it. It filled me with a sense of giddiness about the possibilities of literature that I haven’t felt since I was twenty. I followed it up with Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, from 1988, which, though it didn’t siderate me with the same outrageous coup de foudre (but what could?), made the perfect companion to Hazzard. Both books capture a sense of lucid, quiet feminine fury at the world’s limited possibilities, of desire and intelligence bridled but by no means dulled. They felt, I must say, very appropriate to this year. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More