February 2, 2017 From the Archive The Engraver’s Delicate Hammer By Dan Piepenbring 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-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. James Dickey, who would be ninety-four today, contributed a handful of poems to the Review throughout his career. In our Fall 1985 issue, he also published, most anomalously, a remembrance of Truman Capote, whom he’d only met once. “Indeed,” the editors wrote then, “his only firm recollection was a chance meeting in New York’s Gotham Book Mart at which—as Southerners tend to do—the two talked about relatives: Capote had an aunt ‘up ’round Buford way.’ ” Read More
January 26, 2017 From the Archive A Comic Masterpiece from the Seventies By Dan Piepenbring From Carcanet’s edition of The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium. 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-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. Harry Mathews, who died yesterday at eighty-six, was a prolific contributor to the Review. His fifth book, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, was the first novel this magazine ever serialized; it ran in four installments, starting with our Spring 1971 issue. Mathews claimed he was rejected twenty-five times before he found a publisher for it. Reviewing it for the New York Times in 1975, Edmund White called it “a comic masterpiece, as funny as Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, as intricate as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire … [Mathews] has created a seamless fabric, as tense, light, and strong as stretched silk.” The truth in that assessment is clear from the novel’s opening paragraphs. It opens midsentence: Read More
January 19, 2017 From the Archive The Business of Power By Dan Piepenbring Rembrandt’s Trumpeter—emphasize the first syllable, if you wish. 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-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. I don’t need to come right out and say why Peter Leight’s poem “The Business of Power,” from our Spring–Summer 1978 issue, appeals to me at present. Just to see the words “business” and “power” sharing a line is probably more than enough for you to get the gist. I’m not going to raise an eyebrow at the “lumps, muffs, stomach folds, pendant chins” that comprise the bodies of the ruling class, as Leight describes them; nor am I going to note that a phrase like “showcasing girth” is so sickeningly relevant right now as to make one wince; nor will I sally forth and deliver my long thesis on the lines “they mask their puissance and assume a cheapness that ensures / acceptability,” because you know what that thesis is—we’re all living it. So here, then, just read the poem: it may as well have been written two minutes ago, and I fear we’ll be saying the same after another thirty-nine years have passed. It begins, Read More
January 15, 2017 From the Archive The Shadow Shod in Fur By Dan Piepenbring Photo of Osip Mandelstam made by the NKVD after his arrest in 1938. 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-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. In our Summer–Fall 1961 issue, we published a portfolio of poems by Osip Mandelstam, born on January 15, 1891, a Russian writer who was arrested under Stalin and exiled in the 1930s. Sentenced to a labor camp in Siberia, he died en route at a transit camp, aged forty-seven. In one poem, he writes, Read More
January 9, 2017 From the Archive Winter Shadow Box By Dan Piepenbring 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-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. We’re at that time when winter loses what little charm it had: the twinkling lights come down, the mercury plunges, and what felt two weeks ago like rosy-cheeked novelty is now pure marrow-sucking viciousness, part of a stimulus package for brown-liquor distillers. Everyone is holed up with a fifth of something. To deceive yourself that you have the wherewithal to go outdoors, you need wintertime propaganda. I found some in our Winter 1976 issue courtesy of Cletus Johnson, who designs what he’s called “stage sets for the play of the spectator’s imagination.” As the editors explained, Read More
January 3, 2017 From the Archive Guy Davenport’s Elusive Prose By Norman Rush London Tower Bridge, 1901. 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-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. Below, Norman Rush recommends a story from our Summer 1996 issue by Guy Davenport. The other day I realized that the contemporary American writer whose personal journals I most wished I could read before I die was Guy Davenport. In my scan, I included masters in every specialty—poetry, the essay, plays, short and long fictions. It still came out Davenport. And it was Davenport because of his achievements in fiction. I mean his latter-day fictions. He tried, and then abandoned, the conventional narrative-driven change-of-consciousness short story early in his career while distinguishing himself in poetry, translation, and criticism. Twenty years elapsed, and then he emerged, utterly remade, as a creator of experimental prose works. his stories are unique constructs. They are put together with elegant skill and power and tend toward the unclassifiable. In fact, scrutinous readers may change their minds more than once in the matter of what exactly it is that they are reading: Are these essentially armatures for Davenport’s aphorisms and philosophical asides? Are they primarily demonstrations of the possibilities in the interpenetration of poetic and prose forms (and visual—he sometimes illustrated his pieces). Are they freestanding baubles? In his “inhabiting,” in his writing, of the minds of iconic figures in the history of Western art and thought, is he being obscurely didactic? Is he subtly deconstructing the inner lives of culture heroes like Picasso and Diogenes?—What? Read More