November 14, 2011 Fiction Green Car, Nightfall By Margaret Weatherford Photograph by Boosbob50. One day when my father’s car overheated down in Chula Vista, he came home with beans in a can the size of an oil drum. “This is what the real Mexicans eat,” he announced. That sounded suspicious. We ate beans our mom cooked on the stove and supposed real Mexicans did the same. We gathered skeptically as my dad opened the can. “Look at these beans!” he beamed. He was ready to dig in without even heating them up. We stared into the murky depths. Nobody else wanted to try them. One day as we headed north on Interstate 5, a radiator hose burst right by the big, hollow globe, tilting on its axis in El Toro. Two hippies hitchhiking on the on-ramp kept offering us their ten-gallon bottle of water. “Water won’t do it,” my father said. “It’ll run right through.” There was an Episcopal church there across the street, and the priest took us in for the afternoon. It was 103 degrees that day, but cool in the church. My brothers and I walked up and down the adobe halls for hours. We drank chocolate milk from cartons. The hippies and their dog and their baby and their ten-gallon bottle of water got a ride in a Volkswagen heading for Oregon, but we were there in El Toro till nightfall. I don’t know how my father fixed the car. Read More
October 10, 2011 Fiction At the Hotel Roquefort By James Jones James Jones. The Paris Review was founded in 1953, the year after my father won the National Book Award for his novel From Here to Eternity. James Jones was a newcomer on the literary scene, an outsider who had fought in the Pacific and had only completed two semesters of college. By the time my parents moved to Paris in 1958, The Paris Review was a hugely important literary magazine. And although my father never felt a part of the highly educated, ivory-tower crowd, he was extremely fond of William Styron, George Plimpton, and Peter Matthiessen, the magazine’s founders, and felt a deep kinship with them as people who were committed to the written word. My father was interviewed by Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. for the Autumn/Winter 1958–59 issue of The Paris Review, just after the publication of his second novel, Some Came Running, which was savaged by the critics. The interview gave my father a chance to speak his mind and set the record straight, and it is one of the best interviews he ever gave. It seems only fitting that a section of his earliest, unpublished work should be printed in The Paris Review, whose three founders came to his defense and continued to stand by him and his work long after his death in 1977. —Kaylie Jones Read More
September 14, 2011 Fiction New Art Museum in Hamburg Blown Up By Terry Southern In 1962, Olympia Press editor Maurice Girodias published Terry Southern’s story “New Art Museum in Hamburg Blown Up” in the first issue of the short-lived literary magazine, Olympia (it ran for only four issues). Southern’s trenchant and funny piece was in excellent company: the issue also featured ten episodes from William S. Burroughs’s The Soft Machine, poems by Lawrence Durrell, a selection from Southern’s pornographic novel, Candy, and a suppressed chapter from J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man. This was not a publication to be taken lightly. Southern’s story was relegated to “long-lost” status before his son, Nile, proposed it for inclusion in Gabriel Levinson’s forthcoming anthology, A Brief History of Authoterrorism. We’re pleased to welcome it back after nearly fifty years. Read More
May 6, 2011 Fiction Contact By Adam Gilders I remember thinking, after the second or third unreturned phone call, maybe this is how it begins with stalkers. A few unreturned phone calls, three or four, but it’s the absence of a good reason that really sets you off. I mean, why isn’t he returning those calls? There’s no good reason. You want to address the problem, to set things straight. So there’s a few more calls, like, why aren’t you answering my calls? It’s not that it’s a big deal to me, it’s not that I don’t have anything else to do, or that my life lacks meaning, but there’s no good reason to be avoiding me. We used to be pretty good friends, and it’s not like we had a big falling out. I mean, it just came into my mind to give you a call, since we hadn’t been in touch for a few years, and I thought maybe you’d want to know that things hadn’t worked out with my marriage. The point is, I suddenly had an insight about how stalkers are born: mounting frustration, burning resolution, determination to make contact. So you’re thinking the stalker gives birth to himself, but the stalker, and I use the word loosely, very loosely, isn’t necessarily responsible for the birth; there’s at least two parents, I mean. There was never any threat to your person. With the restraining order you reported that you had reason to believe that you were in danger. The only one who was in danger: me. I’m the first to admit that I went too far with some of my … When I cut off the tip of my finger and sent it in a package. Sent the tip of my thumb, with the note: What would it take Dale? (What does it?) How did that add up to a threat to you Dale? It added up to a lot of pain for me, but not a threat. If he stopped thinking about himself for five minutes and thought about … Sent him my finger. Do you know what that’s like, in terms of pain? Friend is: Dale This story first appeared in Another Ventriloquist. See also: “Adam Gilders and Another Ventriloquist.”