August 14, 2023 First Person The Animal of a Life By Laurie Stone Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 4.0. Saturday was Richard’s birthday, and we drove to Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, where we met seventeen years ago. We hadn’t been back to the artists’ colony together since. Standing on the lawn, looking up at the great mansion, we were a bit like bears on the wrong side of the zoo. When we were residents, we were free to roam the grounds, walking so close our coats swished together as we circled the four small lakes that dot the rich people’s estate. You don’t even notice there are visitors, welcome only on some woodland trails and in the rose gardens, laid out like those at a French palace. Whatever memories were stirred as we retraced our steps weren’t sharp. It was like rewatching a movie with different actors in the parts. Even if we’d entered the buildings now and the rooms where we’d talked, I doubt it would have made much difference. The movie I watch is in my head, and I run it more or less all the time. Read More
August 11, 2023 The Review’s Review Sharon Olds and Rachel B. Glaser on Reality TV By The Paris Review Texas Lane, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Over the past few years, Korean reality TV has been a source of inspiration for my writing. Reading the subtitles is an amazing lesson in dialogue. The random casts of participants are a fun study of group dynamics. These shows allow me to witness tender, precarious moments between lovers and strangers. They prove that the mundane and dramatic often go hand in hand. Watching them, I’ve cried, laughed, and shouted at the screen. I’ve become more aware of how we are all living a life of scenes, surrounded by and involved in a seemingly never-ending narrative. Recently, my husband and I watched Single’s Inferno, a reality show in which young men and women glamp on a desert island. If they “match” with each other, or win challenges (like mud wrestling), they get to helicopter away to a fancy hotel for an overnight date. The stragglers cook together and end up bonding. These conversations encouraged me to write scenes in a less plot-centric way. Often in fiction, it can feel like there is no room to just “hang out.” Change Days, meanwhile, is a show about couples at an impasse trying to decide whether they should stay together or break up. When the participants go on dates with new people, the viewer knows their backstories and partners, which gives added layers of context and raises the stakes. Watching the couples argue felt more relatable and expansive than watching shows whose participants have left their lives behind and are presented as clean slates ready for new futures. Getting this private peek into the complicated, painful, confounding, beautiful, terrible tangle of long-term relationships felt thrilling and sometimes overwhelming. Scrolling around on KOCOWA (Korean-language Netflix, basically), I discovered His Man, a show in which eight single gay men live with one another and date one another. His Man felt groundbreaking to me. It showed me personalities and a kind of camaraderie that I’d never seen on TV before. One man sometimes did makeup for the others. There was a date on which both men wore flowers behind their ears. The show had a bizarre, funny rule: every night, the men were summoned one by one to a phone booth on the roof to call one of the others on his cell phone for a minute, without revealing his own name. Sometimes, a man would call his roommate on the show, and have to sheepishly return and face him after the call. Some men would receive many calls every night. Others never received any. By the end of the show, they’d all become great friends, even though some hearts were broken along the way. —Rachel B. Glaser, author of “Dead Woman” Read More
August 10, 2023 Happenings August 14–20: What the Review’s Staff Is Doing Next Week By The Paris Review Matt Berninger of the National. Photograph by Andy Witchger, licensed under CCO 2.0. Tonight, the sun will begin to set before 8 P.M. once again, a milestone that always fills us with some low-level dread. This is all the more reason to participate in summer fun of all varieties. Here’s what the Review’s staff and friends are looking forward to next week: Wine & Water Lilies at the New York Botanical Garden, August 17: Between 3 and 6 P.M. next Thursday, come to the New York Botanical Garden for a drink with a side of plants! This recommendation comes from our new intern Izzy Ampil; you can have a water lily–themed cocktail, a glass of wine, or a brownie with marshmallows while wandering among the lotuses. There will also be music. The National at Madison Square Garden, August 18: Are you feeling vague malaise for no particular reason, which seems to sort of seep into everything, but is also not entirely unpleasant and in fact maybe kind of nice? If you’re not, and you want to be, you should join our web editor, Sophie Haigney, and go see The National, the prolific, excellent, low-grade-sad band whose new album includes a song that goes: “And there you are, sitting as usual / with your golden notebook …” Annie Baker’s Infinite Life at the Atlantic Theater Company, opening August 18: This new play, an excerpt of which first appeared in the Review’s pages, features five women in chaise longues at a fasting clinic discussing life, sex, and chronic illness. Their exchanges are unforgettable: “You had great sex with him but you left him because he was a screamer,” one woman says. “No he left me,” her friend responds. “He left me. And I was a wreck.” Their conversations probe the connection between physical pain and sexual desire, and much else; they show, in a sense, where conversation can lead. In partnership with the Review, the Atlantic is offering tickets to shows between August 25 and September 10 at a 30 percent discount if you use the code PARIS online at checkout. Read More
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