August 9, 2023 Overheard How the Booksellers of Paris Are Preparing for Next Summer’s Olympics By Jacqueline Feldman Photograph by Jacqueline Feldman. “With a diving suit and helmet,” said Yannick Poirier, the owner of Tschann bookstore on the boulevard Montparnasse, where he has worked for thirty-five years, “and with dark glasses, earplugs, and a plan for survival and retreat to the countryside. I hate sport. That’s personal, but I hate sport, and I have a horror of circus games, and, how to put this. You are American? So you know Jean Baudrillard. For us he was a friend, Jean Baudrillard. So he has The Consumer Society, like Debord has The Society of the Spectacle, and all that sticks to us like shit. No, frankly, the Olympic Games—for me they leave me neither hot nor cold. They leave me totally indifferent.” “There are books about sport,” offered a bookseller at Le Genre urbain, “but they are very distant disciplines, all the same.” “If there are any,” they said at Le Monte-en-l’air, “and if they are good, we have them.” This clerk, like their counterpart at Le Genre urbain, was “against” the Olympics (“in a personal capacity,” they added at Le Genre urbain). Both bookstores, singled out for questioning out of the city’s hundreds, are in the twentieth arrondissement. “We’ll of course have a few books,” they said at Les Traversées, “but in a corner.” “We are not going to decorate the bookstore,” said Anne-Sophie Hanich, managing Les Nouveautés. “The Olympic Games,” said Gildas, his first name, at Les Traversées, which is half-buried in the hill of the rue Mouffetard (“I detest my family name”), “are not the most important thing.” “We have other things to think about,” they said at Le Merle moqueur, on the rue de Bagnolet. “We have other problems right now.” “Literature, first of all,” Gildas went on. “And then, well. Thought, imagination, reflection, beauty, love.” “The problem of getting clients to come in. Social problems.” At Le Merle moqueur, the clerk wrapped a book for gifting. Read More
August 8, 2023 Poetry Watch Jessica Laser Read “Kings” at the Paris Review Offices By The Paris Review On August 3, the poet Jessica Laser visited the offices of the Review in Chelsea and treated us to a reading of her poem “Kings,” which appears in our Summer issue. The poem, which our poetry editor Srikanth Reddy described as a “dreamy, autobiographical remembrance,” includes memories of a drinking game she used to play in high school on Lake Michigan, and is charged with eros: … You never knew whether it would be strip or not, so you always considered wearing layers. It was summer. Sometimes you’d get pretty naked but it wasn’t pushy. You could take off one sock at a time. A perfect poem to read or listen to in the dog days of August, as summer flings might be coming to an end! Read More
August 8, 2023 Studio Visit The Paris Review Print Series: Shara Hughes By The Paris Review Shara Hughes, The Paris Review, 2023, etching with aquatint, spit bit, soft ground, and drypoint on Hannemühle Copperplate bright white paper, plate size 18 x 14″, paper size 27 x 22″. Made in collaboration with Burnet Editions. Photograph courtesy of Jean Vong, © Shara Hughes and Burnet Editions. Earlier this year, The Paris Review released a new print made by Shara Hughes. Hughes, who was born in Atlanta in 1981 and works in Brooklyn, New York, describes her lush, chromatic images of hills, rivers, trees, and shorelines, often framed by abstract patterning, as invented landscapes. The one she invented for the Review is striking in its rich color and vibrant dreaminess. We spoke to Hughes about her work this summer, touching on poisonous flowers, her unusual color palette, and landscape paintings. Read More
August 7, 2023 On Architecture Anti-Ugly Action By Travis Elborough Chelsea Barracks, by Tripe & Wakeham, 1960–62. “An outstanding exposition of the fact that very big buildings can keep their scale without becoming inhuman.” All photographs by Ian Nairn. It seems no less than highly appropriate that when Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London first appeared in 1964 it was purchasable from one of a hundred automatic book-vending machines that had been installed in a selection of inner-London train stations just two years earlier. Sadly, these machines, operated by the British Automatic Company, were short-lived. Persistent vandalism and theft saw them axed during the so-called Summer of Love, by which time, and perhaps thanks to Doctor Who’s then-recent battles with mechanoid Cybermen, the shine had rather come off the idea of unfettered technological progress. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its malevolent supercomputer HAL 9000, after all, lay only a few months away. And so too, did the partial collapse of the Ronan Point high-rise (a space-age monolith of sorts) in Canning Town, East London—an event widely credited with helping to turn the general public against modernist architecture. State House, Holburn, by Trehearne and Norman, Preston & Partners, 1956–60. “State House is a brave failure.” As it was, Nairn’s book was published in the middle of a general election campaign that saw the Labour Party’s Harold Wilson become prime minister on the promise of building “a new Britain” forged in the “white heat” of a “scientific revolution.” And Modern Buildings in London is, for the most part, optimistic, or least vaguely hopeful, about what the future might bring—or definitely far more so than much of Nairn’s subsequent output. This is an observation rather than a criticism. In many respects, his growing disillusionment with the quality of new buildings in Britain was not unjustified. Modern Buildings in London finds Nairn at the peak of his powers; it is a book studded with as many pithy observations and startling thoughts as cloves in a ham. Not unlike D. H. Lawrence in his essays and travel books, Nairn’s sentences appear almost to jump-start, as if landing halfway through, punchy opinions falling instantly in quick-fire lines shorn of any unnecessary preamble or padding. Like in Lawrence, there is rage here, much of it directed toward the London County Council and their municipal architects and planners. Of the LCC’s handiwork in the Clive Street neighborhood of Stepney, he bluntly states: “I am too angry to write much about it,” before going on to argue that the old streets by comparison had “ten times more understanding of how people live and behave.” Read More
August 4, 2023 Happenings August 7–13: What the Review’s Staff is Doing Next Week By The Paris Review Perseid Meteor Shower. Licensed under CCO 2.0. This week, the Review‘s staff and friends are enjoying a drop in temperatures in New York City and the beginning of the August slowdown. Here’s what we’re looking forward to around town: “Not Tacos” at Yellow Rose, August (6 and) 7: The downtown restaurant Yellow Rose is known for, primarily, tacos. (And really good frozen drinks.) But friend of the Review and meat purveyor Tim Ring recommends their upcoming collaboration with the Vietnamese food pop-up Ha’s Đặc Biệt that will explicitly not be tacos. Or will it? Their event poster features the words “Esto no es un taco” in Magritte-like font below what might or might not be a taco, depending on your definition. Mark Morris Dance Group at the Joyce Theater, August 1–12: August is normally a quiet month for dance in New York City—for professional dance, at least. (We like to imagine that many people are dancing on their own.) But with the American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet on hiatus, our engagement editor, Cami Jacobson, recommends seeing the Mark Morris Dance Group at the Joyce. This series will include some of Morris’s lesser-known pieces and be set to live music, in what Jacobson describes as an “unusually small, intimate theater” for seeing dance. An overnight trip to the Irish Pub in Atlantic City, anytime: The Review’s Pulitzer Prize–winning contributor, friend, and Atlantic City expert Joshua Cohen writes in: “The Irish Pub, in Atlantic City, is the best bar I’ve ever slept at. But really, you can use their rooms for anything. At fifty dollars a night, the only thing cheaper is the beach, which is down the block.” Read More
August 4, 2023 The Review’s Review The Restaurant Review, Summer 2023 By The Paris Review Flora season at Gem, photograph courtesy of the restaurant. The dessert landscape in New York is generally defined by extremes—by how far flavors can be taken from their origins. ChikaLicious, the East Village dessert bar that opened in 2003 and is run by the chef Chika Tillman, is good for the opposite reason: its success comes from its dishes’ almost extreme subtlety of taste. I ordered a three-course menu centered around the bar’s star dish, the Fromage Blanc Island Cheesecake, a kind of cheesecake mousse that’s served (ascetically) in the form of a mound, on a bed of ice, atop a pile of white dishes. It was preceded by an ice cream appetizer with kiwi syrup, and followed by a plate of small cubes that felt like what eating (delicious) chocolate-flavored air might be like. Unfortunately for the subtlety, every flavor was also mixed with the taste of my own blood, which continually seeped into my mouth due to a post-tooth-extraction wound I’d suffered the day before. Surprisingly, the best dish wasn’t even a dessert but the Very Soft French Omelet, which had the texture of omu rice without the rice. It came topped with truffle butter, was served with an herb biscuit, and was so good that it made me question why Chika was making desserts at all. Our final dish of the night—which, as with the omelet, we ordered in addition to the three-course cheesecake menu—was a plate of pink peppercorn ice cream that I found disturbing only because of how much it literally tasted like peppercorn. But the food, bloody or otherwise, didn’t even really matter: the cuteness of the bar ultimately took precedence. The entire space could fit about twenty people comfortably, with most of the seats lining the bar, which doubled as an open kitchen. Chika Tillman, a kind of silent spectacle, prepared every dish herself there, while wearing a signature bonnet that she’d had specially made from the pattern of a baby’s hat, while her bow-tied husband (a former jazz musician) served the food on an assortment of heavily patterned china (he let me come to the storage space in the back to handpick my teacup). During the hours I sat at the bar, multiple regulars came to check in with Chika, among them a former sous-chef from Bar Masa who insisted, graciously, that I take a picture of his dessert (something served in a tiny Crockpot). If it wasn’t for my deep-seated fear of intimacy, I imagined, half-delirious from the wound in my mouth, that I would like to become one of them someday—a regular. —Patrick McGraw Read More