William F. Buckley Jr., 1954. Los Angeles Daily News. CC BY 4.0. via Wikimedia Commons

Of all the writers whose interviews have appeared in The Paris Review since its founding in 1953, none may be quite so aberrant as William F. Buckley Jr., subject of The Art of Fiction No. 146. Buckley’s interview appeared in the Summer 1996 issue, alongside one with the poet A. R. Ammons and fiction by Jonathan Franzen and Carolyn Cooke. It was curious company for the preeminent political journalist of the American right—the paterfamilias, even, of the whole postwar conservative movement.

It is not Buckley’s politics that makes his inclusion in the Writers at Work interview series surprising; right-wingers before him had made it into the magazine. The old Tory Evelyn Waugh, in his Art of Fiction interview, even declared that “an artist must be a reactionary.” No, what makes Buckley stand out in The Paris Review is that he was being interviewed about the art of fiction, not punditry.

The eleven spy novels Buckley produced between 1976 and 2005 were, essentially, his side gig—his Chablis money. He wrote them in the Swiss Alps while on vacation from editing the magazine he had started in 1955, National Review. The books’ hero is Blackford Oakes, a Bond-like agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. Small wonder: Buckley himself had briefly worked for the CIA in the late forties in Mexico, where his supervisor was the future Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. Oakes’s Cold War escapades are a fanciful version of the life his creator might have led had he stayed on in “the Company” instead of becoming a high-flying magazine editor and television show host. (Hunt, incidentally, went on to write more than fifty spy thrillers and was never interviewed in The Paris Review.) Read More

A jeweler appraises a ring, 1960. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I recently proposed to my girlfriend, and so I spent much of the past few years thinking about engagement rings. In Western culture, at least, the ring has taken on such symbolic significance that we casually and almost exclusively refer to a part of the human body in relation to its function as ring carrier—the one true purpose of the digitus quartus. Spend enough time shopping for engagement rings and one might come to believe that every aspect of a person’s being exists only to honor the extra-human perfection that is the ring. But spend some time in The Paris Review archive and one might find that the ring is as multifaceted as any radiant cut diamond, as subject to human frailty as the promises, ideals, and bonds it has come to symbolize, and as individual as the hand on which it rests.

In issue no. 225, Cristina Rivera Garza’s “Simple Pleasure. Pure Pleasure.” (expertly translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker) is a story built around the desire for a particular ring:

She walked around the decapitated body and paused to look at the dead man’s left hand. There, around his ring finger, right above the edge of a large pool of blood, was the jade ring. Two entwined, green serpents. An extremely delicate thing. The Detective shot her hand out toward the object but stopped short of touching it. There was something about the ring, something between the ring and the world, that blocked her contact. It was then that she looked at her own hand, immobile and large, suspended in the dawn air.

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Gentlemen’s Doubles tennis final at the 1897 Wimbledon Championships. Photo: J. Parmley Paret. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I learned a lot while fact-checking the Summer 2021 issue, and I owe a ton of that knowledge to Joy Katz for her essay “Tennis Is the Opposite of Death: A Proof.” Now, whenever the subject of tennis comes up, I find myself bursting with trivia. Did you know that the first Wimbledon championship was held in 1877, or that the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club employs a Harris’s hawk named Rufus to keep pigeons from interfering with matches, or that Hawk-Eye is the name of the technology used to verify a challenged umpire call? There’s a story in there somewhere. Tennis is well known for drawing the attention of the literary set—Martin Amis, Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, and John Jeremiah Sullivan come to mind—and the archive of The Paris Review boasts a wealth of writing on the subject, the sport often taking the role of the Hawk-Eye—a keen lens through which life’s quick volleys may be slowed, reviewed, and challenged in turn.

In Ross Kenneth Urken’s “1, Love,” a tennis stroke becomes the embodiment of a young boy’s “neurotic, racquet-throwing heart,” with nods to Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth along the way:

At its best, my slice backhand follows the flamboyant path of a violin virtuoso’s bow striking the climactic note of a concerto—from above my right shoulder plucked diagonally down to my left shoestring. The ball’s tone is a hollow pok on hard courts and a chalky chh-chh on clay that dies on the second bounce. All these dramatics—mere vestiges of a time when I wanted to impress Angela, my middle school crush.

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Photo: Charlotte Brooks. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

RL Goldberg’s 2018 essay “Toward Creating a Trans Literary Canon” offers up a list of phenomenal trans writing: Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride, a truly life-changing book; Leslie Feinberg’s utterly devastating Stone Butch Blues; and one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing, Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. But it is Goldberg’s explanation of the ethos behind the list to which I keep returning: “It’s not a canon exactly, but a corpus. It’s something more like a body: mutable, evolving, flexible, open, exposed, exposing. It’s the opposite of erasure; it’s an inscription.” To celebrate Pride in my capacity as intern here at The Paris Review, I’ve been reading works by the queer authors in the latest issues of the magazine. The archive contains a myriad of fantastic queer writers, but I wanted to recognize some of our contemporary contributors, folks whose work has appeared in our most recent pages. As I read, I thought a lot about Goldberg’s notion of inscription and the list as body: mutable, evolving, flexible. What resulted is a corpus nowhere near complete, final, or comprehensive—and I don’t want it to be. Rather, it’s meant to pay tribute to the diversity of art created by our queer contributors, each of them offering something distinct to readers of the Review. Some of the work is about sexuality, some of it is about sex, and some of it is about war, about gender, about eggs in a hot pan.

Many of these writers hold identity at the center of their work; the particularities of each piece demonstrate the various (and incredibly individual) meanings of “identity” itself. Lydia Conklin’s “Rainbow Rainbow,” a coming-of-age story published in the Summer 2021 issue, depicts two queer suburban teenage girls, one out and one coming to terms with her burgeoning sexuality, as they venture to Boston to meet an internet crush. In “Token,” Jericho Brown ruminates on the privilege inherent in invisibility:

… I want the scandal
In my bedroom but not in the mouths of convenience-
Store customers off the nearest highway. Let me be
Another invisible,
Used and forgotten and left
To whatever narrow miseries I make for myself
Without anybody asking,
What’s wrong.  …

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Photo: © Sean Gladwell / Adobe Stock.

One cannot talk about the lottery in a literary context without a tip of the hat to Shirley Jackson’s infamously dystopian story, which received an “incredibly misleading” pulp cover treatment back in 1950 and was more recently reimagined in the comically brief form of the fortune cookie by Jean-Luc Bouchard: “Expect an invitation to an exciting event.” A quick web search of “The Lottery” turns up no shortage of adaptations of Jackson’s story, and a search through our own archives yields a wonderful array of stories showcasing the appeal and versatility of the lottery as a literary trope, covering a range of topics such as the ethics of the Florida Lottery, one family’s struggle with the allocation of public housing, and a classic NFL football play reenactment.

Let’s begin with the Review’s most recent presentation of this timeless game of chance, Camille Bordas’s “The Lottery in Almería,” which appears in issue no. 237:

Andrés played the European lottery every Tuesday and Friday, and the charity lottery to benefit the visually impaired on Mondays and Wednesdays. He played the national Christmas lottery every Christmas, too, but that didn’t mean much: everyone in Spain, even the king, played the Christmas lottery. Most every Spaniard, too, could be guilted into buying a ticket from a tired blind man once in a while—they were all around, these blind men, hamming it up by wearing socks that didn’t match, bumping into your café table while they tried to sell you your lucky number, or stationary behind their street kiosks, their long faces not easy to ignore when you were having a good day. But the European lottery, that was Andrés’s little guilty pleasure.

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