April 20, 2017 From the Archive A Dip in Foley’s Pond By Caitlin Love Our complete digital archive is now available. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading our back issues right away. You can also sign up for a free ten-day trial period. In Peter Orner’s three Paris Review stories—“Story of a Teacher’s Wife,” “The Vac-Haul,” and “Foley’s Pond”—three outrageously morbid things happen: a boy’s younger sister drowns in a pond of toxic sludge; a man is murdered with a bike spoke (“His stomach was so ripped apart the police had to collect him up in a bucket”); and a woman walks into a classroom and starts shooting and taking hostages. They’re bite-size stories, under fifteen-hundred words, and the violence rushes in like a flash flood, though it doesn’t cleanse anything. Rather, it leaves you with an aftertaste like when you eat yogurt off an unpolished silver spoon. I devoured them. I think what propelled me through these three upsetting stories is that the violence doesn’t actually happen to the people in the stories’ centers. “Foley’s Pond,” for instance, is narrated by a classmate of Nate Zamost, the boy who’s two-year-old sister is fished out of the pond; in “Story of a Teacher’s Wife,” the narrator hears about the man who was killed by a bike spoke from a friend at a boarding school in South Africa. The remove is greatest in “The Vac-Haul”: the narrator only hears about the shooter on the radio, while he bides time with his job for the sewer company. Read More
April 6, 2017 From the Archive Getting Out Alive By Elaine Blair Rethinking the end of Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus.” What is “Goodbye, Columbus”? A story of a summer romance, a satirical sketch of suburban arriviste Jews in the fifties—sure. But when I stumbled on Philip Roth’s first book on the shelf of my high school library, “Goodbye, Columbus” seemed to me above all a brief against marriage. The story’s point—or so I thought of it—unsettled me. I had no intention of heeding it. I was for marriage, a born ball and chain. In the story, Neil Klugman, recently out of Rutgers and the army, works behind the desk at the Newark Library. His summer girlfriend is Brenda Patimkin, a Radcliffe student from tony Short Hills, New Jersey. “We lived in Newark when I was a baby,” she tells Neil—that is, before the Patimkins’ social climb. For Neil, Brenda’s allure is tangled up with his fascination of her prosperous world, and the closer the two of them get, the closer Neil comes to signing up for the whole Patimkin package: a fancy wedding, a lifetime management job at her father’s factory (Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks), a country-club membership, a house in Short Hills, and, inevitably, babies. It’s cushy, but Neil isn’t sure he wants that life, while Brenda seems to consider no other. Read More
March 30, 2017 From the Archive Joanne Kyger in the Review By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Elsa Dorfman. We were sad to learn that Joanne Kyger, whom the San Francisco Gate calls “a leading poet of the San Francisco Renaissance and a rare female voice of the male-dominated Beat generation,” died last week at eighty-two. In an illuminating 2014 interview with The Conversant, Kyger discussed her process and, memorably, the role of psychedelics in her work: I participated in several peyote ceremonies and in February of 1959, while taking it with some friends, I had a quite unpleasant experience of massed black energy intercut with animal faces. The fact that I was unwisely taking this trip in my apartment, which was over a bar in North Beach, and was not feeling well, added to a very unstable sense of “reality.” This “black energy” resembled an animal, which I later named, hoping to focus it. A wild animal, which I paid attention to whenever I saw it or saw mention of it. For years I was afraid of stepping over some edge into a loss of self or schizophrenic duality. Living in Japan and seeing the guardian warriors outside the temple doors with their fierce animal-like expressions, I finally realized they were protectors. Fear creates a wall one can be afraid to pass by. If they scared you off, you didn’t have enough courage or knowledge to enter further. I think I was fearful of the energy of the animal self, whatever I thought that was. The Review published Kyger’s poems in the late sixties and early seventies; digital subscribers should check out her work in our Spring 1966, Summer 1970, and Spring 1973 issues. Below is my favorite, “June 7 … ” Read More
March 23, 2017 From the Archive Low Tide on “The Brown Coast” By Daniel Johnson Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. If you ask me, there’s nothing funnier than a man seeing all that he’s created—built, grown, accrued, whatever—brought to ruin by the simple, ruthless, infuriating existence of his hapless neighbors. Such is the fate of Bob Munroe, the tragic hero in Wells Towers’s short story, “The Brown Coast,” from our Spring 2002 issue. Bob wakes up on his face in his uncle Randall’s shack along the muddy beaches in Florida, where he’s been granted quarter while he works things out with his wife, on the condition that he fix the place up. Walking the beach one day, he finds a wondrous tide pool tucked at the reaches of a jetty. At low tide, it’s teeming with exotic sea creatures, which Bob—destitute and in need of beautiful things—collects and deposits in an aquarium in Randall’s shack. Read More
March 17, 2017 From the Archive The Light of the World By Dan Piepenbring I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. What I described in Another Life—about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened—is a frequent experience in a younger writer. I felt this sweetness of melancholy, of a sense of mortality, or rather of immortality, a sense of gratitude both for what you feel is a gift and for the beauty of the earth, the beauty of life around us. When that’s forceful in a young writer, it can make you cry. It’s just clear tears; it’s not grimacing or being contorted, it’s just a flow that happens. The body feels it is melting into what it has seen. This continues in the poet. It may be repressed in some way, but I think we continue in all our lives to have that sense of melting, of the “I” not being important. That is the ecstasy. —Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37, 1986 Derek Walcott has died at eighty-seven. In the days to come, we’ll say more about his life and legacy—for now, I wanted to share the last three stanzas from his poem “The Light of the World,” which appeared in our Winter 1986 issue, and invite you to share in the “ecstasy” of his art, as he describes in his Writers at Work interview. He will be missed. Read More
March 14, 2017 From the Archive Groggy from Stolen Phenobarbs By Christian Kiefer James Leo Herlihy. In recent years, I’ve taken to buying the oldest issues of The Paris Review, despite the fact that the entire run is now available digitally right here on the website. There’s a certain joy in paging through the actual paper, the names within both familiar and unfamiliar, the styles waxing and waning with the years, sometimes bringing to them a level of obscurity that feels utterly lost. But other times, there might come a name I don’t recognize, and with it a story or poem that draws me toward something essential, something I didn’t know I needed. For me, James Leo Herlihy was just such a surprise. I still don’t really know how to say his last name without sounding like an idiot, and this alone may have provided reason enough for me to read the first piece of his I encountered in a crumbling physical copy of The Paris Review’s ninth issue, Summer 1955, and titled, perhaps fittingly (or not), “A Summer for the Dead.” Read More