August 12, 2013 On the Shelf Flannery O’Connor’s Peacocks, and Other News By Sadie Stein Anonymouth is a computer program designed to strip text of stylistic markers and, in the words of The New Republic, “turn famous writers into anonymous hacks,” should this be your desire. Meanwhile, libraries are increasingly dependent on computer games to keep the kids coming. Salman Rushdie: “Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look … He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts, and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.” Since 2009, there have been three replacement peacocks at Andalusia (sadly, not actually descended from Flannery O’Connor’s flock): Manley Pointer, Joy/Hulga (who appears to have two working legs), and Mary Grace. The New York Times visits the Chekhov Museum, a testament to dedication.
August 9, 2013 Windows on the World Andri Snær Magnason, Reykjavik, Iceland By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. This is my window. Or my windows—the view from my living room, where I sit and write. Might not seem very inspiring. I wish I could offer green mossy lava, roaring waves, a glacier mountain top. I do have other spaces—in an abandoned powerstation, a favorite fisherman’s cafe by the harbor, a summer house on the arctic circle—but this is my honest view, what I really see most of the days. This house was built in the 1960s when people were fed up with lava and mountains; they were migrating to the growing suburbs to create a new view for themselves. The young couple who dug the foundation with their own hands dreamed of a proper garden on this barren, rocky strip of land. They dreamed of trees, flowers, shelter from the cold northern breeze. What is special depends on where you are, and here, the trees are actually special. They were planted fifty years ago like summer flowers, not expected to live or grow more than a meter. The rhododendron was considered a miracle, not something that could survive a winter. It looks tropical, with Hawaiian-looking pink flowers; Skúli, the man who built the house and sold it to me half a century later, took special pride in it. I am not a great gardener. We are thinking of buying an apple tree, though they don’t really thrive in this climate. I would plant it like a flower, not really expect it to grow, and hope for a miracle. —Andri Snær Magnason
August 9, 2013 Listen Emma Cline’s “Marion” By Lorin Stein In the first three years that I edited The Paris Review—a reader pointed out last spring—we never published a short story from a child’s point of view. This wasn’t a matter of principle. I just like stories in which the narrator knows as much as possible. I like to see a writer stretch to represent a consciousness as big, as clued-in, as grown-up as the reader’s own mind. What’s called dramatic irony—where the writer and reader sort of conspire together over the narrator’s head—doesn’t interest me. Except every once in a while, when it does. From the first sentence of “Marion”—“Cars the color of melons and tangerines sizzled in cul-de-sac driveways”—Emma Cline takes us inside the thoughts of an eleven-year-old girl who does not always understand the adults around her, or the sexual desires of her older best friend, but who intensely feels their heat. The language is so vivid, Cline registers her confusion so exactly, that she creates the same confusion in the reader. Part of us knows what’s going on between these girls, part of us is lost and needs the story to take us by the hand. Which it brilliantly does, as you will hear in this excerpt read by Cline herself. Read the full story in our Summer 2013 issue.
August 9, 2013 Look Under Cover By Sadie Stein Seattle artist James Allen creates “Book Excavations” by cutting away layers of pages.
August 9, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Roller Skates, Arson, Eliot By The Paris Review Just this morning, I read eagerly through Sam Anderson’s profile of Gary England, Oklahoma’s “benevolent weather god,” in a preview from this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. I’ve heard a lot about England—chief meteorologist for Oklahoma City’s Channel 9—over the years from my husband, a native of that lonely corner of the state where the panhandle begins (his hometown of Woodward was hit in 1947 by one of the state’s worst tornadoes). England’s a hero in that part of the country. “It’s Friday night in the big town” is how he would start his end-of-the-week broadcasts, and though I wish Anderson’s article had given us a bit more of England himself, it’s a bittersweet, if subtle, encomium to a bygone time in which weather forecasters weren’t entertainers as much as they were, well, weather forecasters. —Nicole Rudick It sounds pretty soft, doesn’t it, a book about reading Middlemarch. Might as well write a book about loving the Beatles, or how Proust can change your life. But Rebecca Mead is tough-minded and has a reporter’s impatience with mush. In My Life in Middlemarch, she gives us several unlikely things at once—a lively reading of George Eliot’s novel, an intimate portrait of Eliot herself, and a book about the consolations of getting older. As Mead shows, this is one of Eliot’s great themes, for as Eliot told her diary, “Few women, I fear, have had such reasons as I have to think the long sad years of youth worth living for the sake of middle age.” —Lorin Stein Read More
August 9, 2013 On the Shelf Wretched Writing, and Other News By Sadie Stein “I draw a hot sorrow bath in my despair room.” This quote, by Keanu Reeves, is part of an anthology called Wretched Writing. Herewith, the Kill Your Darlings trailer, featuring Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg. Meet idiosyncratic Houston-area used bookstore Good Books in the Woods. A beautiful missed connection electrifies the Internet; the author is revealed.