December 24, 2021 On Writing Daniel Galera on “The God of Ferns,” the Review’s Holiday Reading By The Paris Review Author photo of Daniel Galera © Suhrkamp Verlag. Daniel Galera was born in São Paulo, and spent a year and a half in Garopaba, the Brazilian seaside town that became the setting for his tense, violent, and funny 2012 novel Blood-Drenched Beard, which was published in the U.S. by Penguin Press in 2015. His other novels include The Shape of Bones (2017) and Twenty After Midnight (2020). He has translated works by John Cheever, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith into Portuguese, and his latest book, The God of Ferns, published in the Portuguese by Companhia das Letras, is a collection of three novellas. Earlier this year, we read the title story, translated by Julia Sanches, and were instantly hooked by its almost uncanny state of suspense, so we decided to share an adapted excerpt with you, to get you through these rather strange holidays we’re having. Galera answered some questions about the story and about his writing from his home in Porto Alegre, where he lives with his wife, his young daughter, and his Australian cattle dog. Read More
October 28, 2021 On Writing Skinning a Cat: On Writer’s Block By The Paris Review Yesterday, we launched Season 3 of our podcast, with an episode that includes Yohanca Delgado reading her story “The Little Widow from the Capital.” To mark the occasion, we asked Delgado what allows her to begin writing again when nothing else has worked: When I struggle to write, I shrink my expectations: two words a day. No more, no less. The part of my brain that seeks narrative shyly re-emerges. Maybe day one is easy: a first and last name. But even as I close my laptop, I don’t want to stop there. Beatriz Ortiz wants something. And word by word, the exposed brick wall in Beatriz’s office emerges, the smell of the tangerine she’s peeling… It becomes an Oulipian exercise, a game of Pass the Story. In A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders describes the construction of a story as a gradual process, in which different versions of the writer slowly build the best possible draft through small revisions. The version of me who has just watched Viy has access to a different set of narrative links than the version of me who has just re-read a story from Christine Schutt’s Pure Hollywood or Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s Heads of the Colored People, or who has just spent an hour googling “is shrink-wrap recyclable.” Each day, a version of myself floats a decision about where the story might go, and I relearn that by putting one word in front of another, I can make my way to places I’ve never been before. Read More
May 18, 2018 On Writing For Sarah By Antoine Wilson I was drinking coffee with a friend in Los Angeles, in an adorable cafe that also happened to sell books. On a whim, I decided to see if they had any of mine. I made my way to the w’s, and there it was—my first novel—on the shelf. I felt happiness followed immediately by anxiety. Why had nobody purchased it? I opened the book and realized it was a used copy. There was the inscription: “For Sarah—I hope you enjoy my twisted little book!” Followed by my signature and the date. I went through a mental Rolodex, trying to figure out who Sarah might have been. I knew many Sarahs—it must have been one of the most popular girl’s names in the early seventies. I pictured first the writer Sarahs, several of whom I respected greatly as my peers or my same-age betters. I tried to remember whose names ended with an h and whose didn’t. I wanted to impress these Sarahs. I wanted them to find my work as valuable as I had found theirs. It pained me to imagine one of them deaccessioning an inscribed copy of my first novel. Read More
April 20, 2018 On Writing Leaves of Grass: Writing Under the Influence By The Paris Review To celebrate today’s holiday, we bring you an excerpt from our latest Paris Review Editions book, The Writer’s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from “The Paris Review” Interviews. These quotes are pulled from the chapter “Do You Write Under the Influence?” Enjoy. —Jeffery Gleaves “I’ve found that there’s only one thing that I can’t work on and that’s marijuana. Even acid I could work with. The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane. Either you function or you don’t. Functionally insane? If you get paid for being crazy, if you can get paid for running amok and writing about it … I call that sane.” —Hunter S. Thompson “I’ve tried it long ago, with hashish and peyote. Fascinating, yes, but no good, no. This, as we find in alcohol, is an escape from awareness, a cheat, a momentary substitution, and in the end a destruction of it. With luck, someone might have a fragmentary Kubla Khan vision. But with no meaning. And with the steady destruction of the observing and remembering mind.” —Conrad Aiken “The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts, and feelings. They are painkillers, pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers—the whole spectrum of sedative drugs. As for visions and heroin, I had a hallucinatory period at the very beginning of addiction, for instance, a sense of moving at high speed through space. But as soon as addiction was established, I had no visions—vision—at all and very few dreams.” —William S. Burroughs Read More
April 19, 2018 On Writing On Becoming an American Writer By Alexander Chee Photo: Paulo Barcellos Jr. My generation of writers—and yours, if you are reading this—lives in the shadow of Auden’s famous attack on the relevance of writing to life, when he wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen.” I had heard the remark repeated so often and for so long I finally went looking for its source, to try to understand what it was he really meant by it. Because I knew it was time for me to really argue with it. If not for myself, for my students. * In the winter before the Iraq War, I lost two friends, one old, one new. The first friend died of cancer in December 2002. She was just thirty-six. She had been misdiagnosed by her doctor. First, she was told she had a rash and then that she was imagining the severity of it. She was told to take antidepressants. After further tests, she learned she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A lifelong hypochondriac who always looked to be in the bloom of health, she had finally fallen seriously ill and was not believed. And when she eventually was believed, when the truth of her disease was incontrovertible, there was not time enough to undo the damage, and she succumbed. She had once been my boss at a magazine launched in the early nineties. I had met her in San Francisco, when she was the girlfriend of my boyfriend’s roommate. When I moved to New York to be closer to my boyfriend, she and I sometimes spent whole days together. She herself dreamed of writing a novel one day and in the meantime wrote poems more or less in secret, showing them rarely. When I was an editor of an experimental literary journal called XXX Fruit, we asked her for poems and published some of them. I remember looking at the typeset page and thinking of it as a picture of her secret self. By then, she had moved on to a job at a national weekly newsmagazine, which she loved, though the responsibilities often crushed what energy she might have had to write. Or at least this was what she said. Most writers I know say they don’t have enough time to write. It’s usually a feint. Read More
April 9, 2018 On Writing On Telling Ugly Stories: Writing with a Chronic Illness By Nafissa Thompson-Spires Google “stock images of women with excruciating menstrual cramps,” “women having nervous breakdowns,” “women on hospital gurneys.” Make several of the women black even though your Google search will not produce these results. String them together on a chic laundry line with clothespins and hang it on your mantle, or maybe paste them into a photo collage, digital or print. Splatter the collage with blood. Untwist the women’s ovaries and take them away. Sew up their vaginal openings so their private parts look like the deformed hermetic triangles of Barbie dolls. You now have a visual rendering of life with endometriosis. It is a poor approximation. Throw the collage in the trash. Maybe it is too ugly after all. In and out of invasive procedures to misdiagnose and then finally diagnose my symptoms—a colonoscopy, two upper endoscopies, a gastric emptying scan, an MRI, a vulvar biopsy, a dozen transvaginal ultrasounds, two mammograms before I was thirty-four, a laparoscopy, a laparotomy, a mosquito, a libido—I wrote a book. Several of its central characters are women suffering from chronic invisible illnesses, the kind of women in your collage. It means something to me to be able to produce when something is daily trying to take me out. A chronic illness is a multilayered cruelty, especially when it is invisible. There are trips to the emergency room, to convenient care—which never ends up being as convenient as one might think—there is a lot of waiting around, and after all that waiting, there is a lot of “you’ll have to talk to your primary care physician during regular hours.” The emergency room is kept mausoleum cold. Read More