Pour another gallon into the bucket of our national grief, David Berman is gone. The poet and front man of the Silver Jews was fifty-two. The phrase national grief is Berman-esque, though municipal grief or federal grief would be even better. I was in awe of him, and like so many people today, I am crushed.

I knew Berman’s poetry, specifically his 1999 collection Actual Air, before I knew his music, but both became deeply important to me. I think of his lines weekly, maybe daily.

You can’t change the feeling, but you can change the feeling about the feeling.
I love your amethyst eyes and your Protestant thighs.
And of course: All water is classic water.

Berman’s great topic was the impossibility of being alive. I was glad to have him on the job. Being alive is fucking impossible! Berman knew this but still saw beauty and strangeness and humor, too. His work seemed to be saying that the world is impossible, yes, but you didn’t have to take it too seriously.

When Hunter S. Thompson died, my dad, who loved him, said, “It’s especially hard because you thought that someday you’d meet up with him and all the people who got it.” With Berman, I did sort of think that. I don’t know what I imagined. A pool party? All the fragile souls, the people who got it, in bikinis and trunks, with Berman at the grill.

But anyway. I never met him and that’s probably for the best. I wouldn’t want to have to tangle with my admiration up close. I wouldn’t want to stand there waiting for an anointing that didn’t come. Stammering out something foolish and leaving disappointed.

Read More

Fran Lebowitz, Danez Smith, and Pam Houston reflect on the impact Toni Morrison had on their lives. 

Toni Morrison (Photo © Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

I met Toni in 1978. The Academy of American Poets sent me a letter. They had a reading series where they put two writers together and the guy asked me, “Do you know who Toni Morrison is?” She wasn’t that well known then. I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Do you like her work?” I said, “I love her work!” Then he asked if I wanted to read with her, and I said, “That’s ridiculous! I can hardly think of a writer I have less in common with.” But we became best friends instantly. I mean instantly. Right afterward, Toni said, “We should go on the road together!” I always knew how old Toni was. She was exactly twenty years older than me.

Here’s a thing that most people don’t know about Toni: Toni was one of the most fun people I’ve ever known. And I am an expert on fun. When Toni won the Nobel Prize, she took a bunch of people with her, including me, and she called us the Nobelettes. When I got to Stockholm, there was a message at the front desk: call Toni immediately. I said, “Okay, I’ll call from my room,” and they said no, you have to call her immediately. They were very excited that she was there. So I called from the desk and Toni said, “Fran, I need your help.” She had two things. “You have to help me with my speech, and I don’t know which gloves to wear.” I went to her room and it was just a sea of clothes and gloves. I mean clothes everywhere. The Nobel Prize ball, which you may never attend, is white tie, and, at least at the time, women wore opera gloves. The gloves were the first thing, the most important thing. Toni loved clothes. Manolo Blahnik was a friend of mine, so I arranged for her to get some shoes from him for the ball. I don’t think he knew her writing, but he loved her. Sue Newhouse once gave Toni a Judith Leiber bag—do you know what those are? You can look it up on your device. She made these extremely expensive bags, bejeweled, in the shape of raspberries or the Queen of England. And this was something that Toni just adored. She said, “Why don’t other people think of this?” I said, “Well, Toni, these things cost thousands of dollars!” But the best thing to give Toni was dessert.

Read More

Toni Morrison. Photo: Angela Radulescu.

We are deeply sad to report that Toni Morrison died yesterday at age eighty-eight. Over the course of eleven novels and several essay collections, children’s books, and plays, she reshaped the American literary landscape and influenced just about every English-language writer currently working. The Paris Review was lucky enough to conduct an Art of Fiction interview with Morrison on the eve of her 1993 Nobel Prize win.

Born to a family of talented musicians, Morrison came late to the realization that she wanted to be a writer, but in her interview, she is clear about her intentions: “All I can do is read books and write books and edit books and critique books.” For twenty years, Morrison worked as an editor at Random House, where she published Gayl Jones, Nettie P. Jones, and Toni Cade Bambara. Once she finally did begin writing, she kept relatively quiet about it; when her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, her coworkers learned of the book’s existence from a review in the New York Times. “It was by the time I was writing Song of Solomon, the third book, that I began to think that this was the central part of my life,” she says. “Not to say that other women haven’t said it all along, but for a woman to say, I am a writer, is difficult … It isn’t so difficult anymore, but it certainly was for me and for women of my generation or my class or my race.” Read More

Michael Seidenberg, the owner of Manhattan’s least-secret secret bookstore, Brazenhead Books, passed away on July 8, 2019. Molly Crabapple remembers the bookstore’s heyday. 

Michael Seidenberg at Brazenhead

I knew Michael Seidenberg through Brazenhead, the illicit bookstore he built in a tiny rent-controlled apartment.

How to describe utopia masquerading as a bookstore? It comes to me as a sense memory—the gold light and the sweetness of Michael’s pipe smoke, the feeling of leisure and vastness as we sprawled, talking, amid the books that smelled like burning leaves. The music he played sounded like it came from an old record player, even if it did not.

Read More

The Paris Review is mourning the loss of our publisher Susannah Hunnewell, who died on June 15 at her home in New York at the age of fifty-two. Her contributions to the magazine were immeasurable. You can read our more formal obituary here, and the Art of Fiction interviews she conducted here. In this post, we are gathering the intimate remembrances of those who knew her well. The page will be updated as more come in. 

Susannah Hunnewell (photo: Stephen Hiltner)

You must go to this place. You need to meet this person. This is the most fucking awesome spot, go there! Ask for this.

Susannah Hunnewell would go on to detail what you would find at those places, her hands poised as if she were casting crisp spells. She was sending you into passageways, her voice getting smaller, you were going to enter the magical world she had found. You might meet a woman. She would send the address. And she did.

Other times you had to get together with her friend because this other person was the most brilliant, hilarious soul. You had to be linked because then pleasure would explode. She relished all-female dinners, planned not as political statement but as a means of maximizing excitement and outrageous storytelling. She adored rock concerts with men in T-shirts thrashing away on Fenders.

Forever helpful, she vetted hotels, found you translators, offered speedy edits, precise life counsel, her ideas as plentiful as cherry blossoms, her jokes, her use of expletives, the same.

When she long ago left the magazine where we worked together to have her first son, we were so sad for ourselves. That electric mind, it seemed, would be reserved for one little being. But how extraordinary it was as each of her sons was born, she like Jo from Little Women, the bold heroine, birthing her men. They were so lucky, those handsome boys. And even in these life experiences, she served as pioneer, issuing raves, cautions. Just you wait, she would often say about one rite of passage or another. College departure: “My god you wait. Hysterical sobbing and I mean hysterical.”

Just a few years ago, after her first diagnosis, she sent me, without comment, a photo of herself from the past. A steel gaze, a bright red mouth, hair as black as her dress, and her white hands curled over her pregnant belly, a gorgeous, mysterious, noir sorceress.

Of course with motherhood, her audience had simply broadened, in her home with her adored husband, Antonio, and around the world. We read her intriguing, epic interviews in The Paris Review, enjoyed the pages curated during her tenure as Paris editor, her many issues as publisher—the reasons for her knighthood. Read More