June 25, 2021 From the Archive The List as Body: A Collection of Queer Writing from The Paris Review By Mira Braneck 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. … Read More
June 10, 2021 From the Archive A Jackpot in the Archive By Christopher Notarnicola 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. Read More
January 12, 2018 From the Archive Celebrating Shithole Literature By Brian Ransom In my enviable role as social-media manager, I get to pick through old issues of The Paris Review to find interesting, overlooked pieces to surface. Nestled in issue no. 78 (Summer 1980), among Bobby Anderson’s “Edie Sedgwick: A Reminiscence” and Mallarmé’s poem “A Tomb for Anatole,” I discovered three folks tales by Paulé Bártón, a writer from what the president vulgarly referred to yesterday as a “shithole” country. Little information about Bártón is available, but according to the issue’s contributor’s note, he was born in Haiti in 1916 and spent most of his life as a goatherd. He was imprisoned in Fort Dimanche under the Duvalier regime and subsequently exiled. I stumbled upon this trio of narrative pearls when I was an intern here last summer. The writing is immediate and compact, stunning in its musicality and plick-plock rhythm. Reading “The Woe Shirt” for the first time—not having any idea what it was, where it came from, or how to find more of it—I nearly wept at my desk. Today, we’ve unlocked it from our archives in celebration of writers from shithole countries the world over. “The Woe Shirt” by Paulé Bártón Issue no. 78 (Summer 1980) Bélem did tinker repair his bicycle by the stink-toe tree. Better to work there it smells so bad, work gets done no lazy quick. Then he rode to buy a woe shirt. He saw Mari then, standing. She said, “You going to buy that shirt, I know! You’ll go buy that beggar shirt Bélem, I know. Oh it will cost you all your little money all your goats and old friend parrot to get it! I tell you clearly, look at what you do! Spend everything on a beggar shirt, no sense!” but Mari saw that Bélem felt the shirt on him already, too late, “O.K. then, say good-bye twice to your parrot,” she said. Subscribers can also read two more of Bártón’s short stories in our archives: “The Broom Is Busy” by Paulé Bártón Issue no. 78 (Summer 1980) Boki was watching Álse Odjo with a twig broom sweep the floor. The twig-ends were breaking off and Álse Odjo kept sweeping them up. “You losing broom all over the floor!” Boki said, “I see that broom creating its own work!” “Just like everyone on this island!” Álse Odjo said back, “That’s the island way,” she didn’t laugh, “This broom born and raised here, you know.” “Emile Plead Choose One Egg” by Paulé Bártón Issue no. 78 (Summer 1980) Bélem he says, “The salt sea will find this wound on me, it always does when I swim in it, always clean my wound.” But Emilie knew the wound of confusion and no-choice was too deep inside for the salt sea to sting it clean for Bélem right now. Brian Ransom is the social-media manager for The Paris Review.
August 29, 2017 From the Archive A Party in the Archive (Food-Storage Lovers Only) By Toniann Fernandez A 1950s Tupperware party. We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this very important product from our archive: Tupperware. Late last December, a friend announced that her New Year’s resolution was to replace all of her plastic Tupperware with Tupperware of glass. She was glowing. She already had an IRA, she had learned all of the moves from Gloria Estefan’s “Bad Boys” video, and now she would no longer tote her butternut-squash soup in a polycarbonate container that threatened to leach bisphenol A into her blood stream. In that moment, I wanted her to run for president. Read More
August 15, 2017 From the Archive The Sneaky Brilliance of Geoff Dyer’s “Into the Zone” By Matt Levin Still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. I recently fell asleep in a movie theater. I think the movie is a masterpiece. An hour in, the three main characters, on an expedition into mysterious territory called simply the Zone, have just emerged from a slog through an aqueduct, shouting over the sound of crashing water. They each lie down, exhausted, on the brown-green moss that blankets the water’s edge. The characters speak with each other about where they are going, and for what. It is a late-night road-motel talk—fatigued, but searching. A character called Writer begins a monologue about fame, the future, technology, and soon it doesn’t matter, because he is talking to himself, in the shorthand that exists only in each individual head, using big, meaningless, opaquely personal words like “Life” and “Art.” What matters is the tone of his voice—soft and drifting and stretched seemingly over one long yawn. He is talking himself to sleep. A guitar drone intensifies. And as he went on, I found myself becoming heavily tired, too, and I slumped over. I had a dream that I cannot remember, except that it feels like a kernel lodged under my tongue, and involved a river. I woke up only when a tall man sitting next to me gently tousled my hair and told me in a stage whisper that I had spilled popcorn all over my lap. The characters are sitting up, awake now, listening to a voice telling them about his dream. In my memory of the film, there is a blank. The movie was Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, recently remastered and finishing its months-long run at the IFC Center. Geoff Dyer wrote about the film and his relationship with it for our Fall 2011 issue, in “Into the Zone,” an excerpt from his full-length book Zona. “Into the Zone” is, as much as an essay can be like a movie, an imitation of Stalker. The essay proceeds by summarizing each scene of the movie chronologically. Each scene summary takes on the pace and tone of the scene being described. When the pace picks up, so does Dyer’s prose, and his thoughts come quick and abbreviated. When the movie slows to a pan, or arrests on a static shot, so does Dyer, and he takes the placid moments to tell us things he knows, stories, about Tarkovsky: about Tarkovsky and his relationship with Michelangelo Antonioni, about the fights Tarkovsky had with Mosfilm over the meditative pace of Stalker, about Flaubert and style, inventories of films shown in other films, about time as it exists and is manipulated by movies, about his desire for a drink when he sees characters drinking, and finally, during the scene Dyer calls “one of the great sequences in the history of cinema”—the long, seemingly unbroken shot of the trolley ride into the Zone itself—about himself and things he wants and can’t have. “Into the Zone” is Dyer’s thought, in all its allusiveness and wit and sneaky brilliance, welded inextricably to the rhythms of Stalker. This is the only narrow path to Stalker—a film that is both direct and maddeningly slippery. Read More
August 8, 2017 From the Archive Purfect Prose: An Appreciation of Kitty Litterature By Jeffery Gleaves From the cover of issue no. 136 (Fall 1995) of The Paris Review. It has been said, erroneously, that poets are cat people, novelists dog people. In fact, lots of novelists are into cats. Hilary Mantel included a photo of her cat in her Art of Fiction interview. So did Ali Smith. Hemingway’s home is famous for its clowder of six-toed cats; Capote, Chandler, and Kerouac all kept the five-toed variety. Read More