February 23, 2023 Bulletin The Review Wins the National Magazine Award for Fiction By The Paris Review Illustration by Na Kim. We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won the 2023 ASME Award for Fiction. The Review is also nominated in the category of general excellence, with the winner to be announced on March 28. Read the three prizewinning stories—“Trial Run” by Zach Williams, “Winter Term” by Michelle de Kretser, and “A Good Samaritan” by Addie E. Citchens—unlocked this week in celebration.
February 23, 2023 Fiction The Curtain Is Patterned Gingham By Mark Chiusano Illustration by Na Kim. Fictional wall texts, with thanks to the object labels at the Brooklyn Museum. A fight over pumpernickel bread results in tragedy. Quinto’s use of burgundy paint for the dried blood on the tip of the foreground figure’s machete is related to the shortage of crimson in the nineteenth-century pallet. Quinto died in Brooklyn in 1901. Gallup Trenton’s wife of forty-two years, Anne Grace Bellington, was his muse and model for works that range from photography to poolside performance. But it was a Memorial Day weekend encounter with his mistress, Pierra de la Fucci, that led to this joyous exploration of romance, foreplay, and the artistic possibilities of plaster of Paris. An artist herself, de la Fucci gifted this sculpture to the Museum after Trenton’s death. The monumental scale of the nude, including its commitment to puckered lips and seductive eye roll, is the embodiment of female power. The wood used to construct this early Dutch cabinet, including its secret compartment, comes from a genus of tree, Quercus, that is native to 10 percent of New York’s sixty-two counties. The latches are crafted from rose gold. Read More
February 22, 2023 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Peter Mishler on “My Blockchain” By Peter Mishler All images courtesy of Peter Mishler. For our new series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Peter Mishler’s “My Blockchain” appears in our Winter issue, no. 242. How did you come up with the title for this poem? Were there other titles you thought about? When “What even is a blockchain/an NFT?” was the subject of conversation everywhere you went, I got interested in the technology’s claim that it creates an “immutable record” of each transaction along the chain of a digital asset’s ownership. I wanted to write a series of personal statements that could not erase what preceded them. Then I noticed this idea was also connected to a certain type of statement—made by a certain type of man—that we’ve seen often, recently: a public apology by someone whose behavior grossly outweighs their supposed contrition. No matter how much they try to distance themselves from themselves, the mea culpa still contains something that can’t be undone: it’s an “immutable record” of all the actions that preceded their apologies, which sound far more like launching an asset than sincerity. So, I thought I would write in the voice of a corrupted consciousness that mirrors the workings of this new bro-corrupted mechanism of capitalism. I often save my drafts under file names that function as little code words or reminders about a feeling I was having during that day’s writing. “My Blockchain,” though, remained the official title, even as I played with other ways of reminding myself what I was writing. Read More
February 21, 2023 First Person A Hall of Mirrors By Gary Indiana Gary Indiana with Ashley Bickerton, circa 1986. Courtesy of Larry Johnson. Do Everything in the Dark was the last of three novels I wrote while mostly living in houses in upstate New York or at the Highland Gardens Hotel in Los Angeles. It began as a collaborative book project with a painter, my extraordinary friend Billy Sullivan: I was to write very brief stories to appear beside portraits of his friends and acquaintances, many of whom were also friends of mine. The stories would not be directly about the portrait subjects, but fictions in which some quality or characteristic of a real individual was reflected, stories about characters they might play in a film or a theater piece. This project was never entirely certain, the prospective publisher having had an opacity comparable to that of Dr. Fu Manchu, and somewhere in the summer of 2001, Billy and I realized our book was never going to happen. By that time I had written most of what appears as the first third of this novel, though, and in this instance I had written past Kafka’s “point of no return” much sooner than I normally did. (I have abandoned many more novels than I’ve ever published, usually realizing after 50 or 60 excited pages that they were heading nowhere I wanted to go.) Read More
February 17, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “Estoy Aquí” By Ana Karina Zatarain Shakira. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed Under CCO 2.0 This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. Romance and heartbreak are promised before they are experienced. As a child I was filled with a sort of yearning that preceded any actual object of desire. It was a desire for desire itself, one that, like many girls who grew up speaking Spanish in the late nineties and early aughts, I conjured by listening to Shakira’s 1995 album, Pies Descalzos. The first song was my favorite. “Estoy Aquí” begins with a teenage Shakira’s lilting voice over an acoustic guitar: “I know you won’t return,” she sings with quavering melancholy, and then the song explodes into a saccharine tempo unbefitting of a lovelorn person. But how would I have known that? I sang along in my room, imagining that one day I would love someone but also one day I would lose them, and that was even more thrilling. To be alive! And drowning amid “photos and notebooks and things and memories.” I could hardly wait. Read More
February 17, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “Slow Show” By Nathan Goldman Matt Berninger. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0. This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. In her 1993 memoir Exteriors, drawn from seven years of journal entries, Annie Ernaux describes overhearing a familiar pop song at the supermarket. She is struck by the pleasure she experiences—and by a “feeling of panic that the song will end.” This prompts her to consider the relative emotional effects of books and music. While certain novels have left a “violent impression” on her being, the impact hardly compares to the “intense, almost painful” feeling produced by the song. “A book offers more deliverance, more escape, more fulfillment of desire,” she writes. “In songs one remains locked in desire.” The structure of pop music is inherently erotic; the repetitions of rhythm and melody continually summon and satisfy aching anticipation. Love songs bring this otherwise sublimated longing to the surface: some through grand, theatrical gestures, others by drawing out the dialectic of desire embedded in everyday life—say, the feeling of being alone at a party, sad and self-conscious, desperately missing someone. This is the premise of “Slow Show,” a somber but rousing midtempo track from The National’s 2007 album Boxer. The narrator spends the verses separated from his lover, surrounded by people but unable to reach them, confined to the claustrophobic quarters of his own mind. Guitars flutter frenetically over foreboding squalls of feedback, while Matt Berninger’s mumbling baritone evokes the narrator’s recursive, dead-end thoughts: “Standing at the punch table, swallowing punch”; “I leaned on the wall, the wall leaned away”; “I better get my shit together, better gather my shit in.” In the choruses, an atmospheric sweetness swells as he briefly spans the distance, if only in his imagination: “I want to hurry home to you,” Berninger croons, “put on a slow, dumb show for you and crack you up / so you can put a blue ribbon on my brain.” His halting syntax smooths out into the simple, fluid choreography of a fantasized intimacy, which disrupts his anxious solitude. Read More