December 8, 2015 From the Archive Extra, This Is the Meaning of Life By Delmore Schwartz From the cover of our Winter 1986 issue. Edward Ruscha, Several Monograms (detail), 1986, dry pigment and acrylic on paper. “Sonnet,” a poem by Delmore Schwartz from our Winter 1986 issue. Schwartz was born on this day in 1913 and died in 1966; this poem, dated 1938, was drawn from his unpublished manuscripts and typescripts at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Robert Phillips called it “a good example of his earliest work, which took Eliot and Yeats as models. Compact, rhyming, and formal, the poems attempted to mythologize Schwartz, to dramatize history, and to pay homage to the world of culture.” —D. P. Read More
November 24, 2015 From the Archive Chubby Boys and Chubby Girls By Steve Gianakos “Chubby Boys and Chubby Girls,” a portfolio by Steve Gianakos, appeared in our Summer 1983 issue. Gianakos, who was born in 1938, had his most recent show earlier this year at Fredericks & Freiser; it was called “Accessories and Other Girlie Desires.” “With formal perfect pitch, comedic élan and fearless indiscretion,” the New York Times wrote of him in 2012, “he creates disjunctive cartoon allegories of surrealistic perversity.” —D. P. Read More
November 16, 2015 From the Archive For a Cook By Craig Arnold Anonymous painting, nineteenth century Craig Arnold’s “For a Cook” appeared in our Winter 1997 issue. Arnold, born on this day in 1967, published only two collections of poems before his presumed death in 2009, when he went missing while hiking alone on a volcanic island in Japan. —D. P. Read More
November 9, 2015 From the Archive The Dog Wants His Dinner By James Schuyler From the first-edition jacket of The Crystal Lithium. “The Dog Wants His Dinner,” a poem by James Schuyler, first appeared in our Winter 1972 issue; it’s part of his collection The Crystal Lithium. Schuyler was born on this day in 1923. He died in 1991. Read More
October 28, 2015 From the Archive Donna Reed in the Old Scary House By Tom Disch Donna Reed, being spooky. Tom Disch’s poem “Donna Reed in the Old Scary House” appeared in our Fall 1995 issue. A prolific poet, novelist, science-fiction writer, and author of children’s books—including The Brave Little Toaster: A Bedtime Story for Small Appliances—Disch frequently published his work in the Review. He died in 2008. —D.P. At first she is only mildly annoyed: the carwon’t start, it’s happened before. She’ll phoneher husband—what is his name?—at his office,and he’ll come pick her up. Another cup of coffee,meanwhile, in that funeral parlor of a living roomwith old Mrs. Marbleheart, who haunts this old house. Read More
October 22, 2015 From the Archive Portable People By Paul West From the cover of Portable People, illustrated by Joe Servello. Paul West, whom the New York Times once praised for his “unsettling nonuniformity,” died this week at eighty-five. An absurdist with a formidable, playful, idiosyncratic style—“we become inured and have to be awakened by something intolerably vivid,” he wrote, defending purple prose—West published some fifty books of fiction, poetry, and memoir. He suffered two strokes later in life, which slowed him down but couldn’t deter his ingenuity with language. “He would come out of the bedroom and say, ‘Where’s my cantilever of light?,’ ” his wife, Diane Ackerman, told the Guardian. “I suppose you can only know that this means a velour tracksuit when you have been living with someone for four decades.” The Review published nine of West’s stories, the first in our Summer 1971 issue. The excerpts below are from “Portable People,” a satire of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives from our Summer 1990 issue; later that year, Paris Review Editions published an expanded version of eighty-five “portable people” portraits, illustrated by Joe Servello. —D. P. Read More