September 13, 2022 First Person Other People’s Partings By Peter Orner Fall River, Massachusetts. Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress. So many accounts of Chekhov’s death, many of them exaggerated, some outright bogus. The only indisputable thing is that he died at forty-four. That’s etched in stone in Moscow. I like to read them anyway. I’m not alone. Chekhov death fanatics abound. His last sip of champagne. The whole thing about the popping of the cork, I forget what exactly. The enigmatic words he likely never said: Has the sailor left? But wouldn’t it be wonderful if he had said them? What sailor? Where’d he go? His wife, the actress Olga Knipper, wrote that a huge black moth careened around the room crashing into light bulbs as he took his final breaths. Olga was present in the room, of course, but I don’t think she was above creating myths, either. They had only so little time together, less than five years. In 2018, a team of scientists examined the proteins in the bloodstains on Chekhov’s nightshirt, in an effort to determine the precise cause of death. The shirt had been preserved as a relic. Read More
September 9, 2022 The Review’s Review Ben Lerner, Diane Seuss, and Ange Mlinko Recommend By The Paris Review Claude Monet, The Beach at Trouville, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This week, we bring you recommendations from three of our issue no. 241 poetry contributors. This August I read three great books. In Anahid Nersessian’s Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (about to be reprinted by Verso), red life streams again through Keats’s poems. It is a risky, passionate criticism that—in addition to yielding all sorts of insights into the man and his writing—tests what of her own life the poems might hold (and quicken). This is living in and through and with and against poetry, a brilliant and refreshingly unprofessional book. I’ve also been reading and admiring Elisa Tamarkin’s Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance, a beautifully written account of the development of the concept of “relevance” in nineteenth-century Anglo American thought and art. The book says almost nothing about our own century—“the Internet,” for instance, doesn’t appear in the index—but that just makes its relevance to the present more acutely felt. Tamarkin has all sorts of insightful things to say about attention and “attentional communities,” which leads me to a final recommendation: the big strange wonderful In Search of the Third Bird, which describes itself as “the real history”—although much of it is quite fake—“of the covey of attention-artists who call themselves ‘the Birds,’ ” an actual group (or “attentional cult”) of scholars and artists who have been conducting experiments in sustained, collective attention. That James Tate line occurs to me: “Everything is relevant. I call it loving.” —Ben Lerner, author of “The Readers” Read More
September 8, 2022 On Photography Free Dirt By Angella d'Avignon Free dirt. Photograph via Craigslist. For the past three years, I’ve filled a folder on my desktop with pictures of dirt that I found on Craigslist. The dirt in each picture was offered free of charge to whoever was willing to pick it up (“You haul”) or, if you were lucky, a free-dirter might have offered free delivery. Depending on the angle and composition of the images, “free dirt” posts on Craigslist can look like unintentional landscape vistas. Some shots feature calloused hands covered in tawny fill dirt, vignetted by palm trees and paved driveways in postwar cul-de-sacs. There are endless frames of earth spilling onto asphalt, flattened mounds of rich brown soil indented with tire tracks, craggy piles of dirt gathered evenly along the perimeters of blue tarp in driveways. Where I’m from, in Southern California, free dirt is abundant. Read More
September 7, 2022 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Fall Issue By Emily Stokes Several weeks ago, I received an email from a reader named Walter. He asked—very politely (this Walter was Canadian)—why it was that, as of issue no. 238, The Paris Review had decided to list both fiction and nonfiction in the magazine’s table of contents simply under “Prose.” You can read my attempt to answer his question here, but it strikes me now that you can also find a host of other responses, albeit oblique ones, in the pages of our Fall issue, out today. Take the Australian writer Helen Garner, who has been accused by more than one indignant reviewer of trying to pass off her personal diary as fiction, and whom Thessaly La Force interviewed over the course of several months this year. For a while, we agonized over how to categorize their conversation. Weren’t Garner’s enthralling, emotionally astute journalistic accounts of legal trials worthy of an Art of Nonfiction? Wouldn’t her collected journals, which are as immersive as any novel, merit an Art of the Diary? In the end, we went for Art of Fiction, if only as a call to action for anyone who hasn’t yet read The Children’s Bach. (For me, The Spare Room comes in a close second.) Garner herself might well have made a different call: “All those comments I’ve had to cop about my novels not being novels—they rest on that idea that the novel is mightier than every other form,” she tells La Force. “Men tend to care more about those hierarchies than most women writers do.” Read More
September 6, 2022 A Letter from the Editor For the Record, the Review Has Not Abolished Fiction By The Paris Review Subject: Inquiry about a small change beginning with issue 238 Dear Emily, Volume 238 dropped the fiction and nonfiction labels previously attached to prose pieces. I found no rationale for the decision in your editor’s note to that edition, although your reference to “fiction or nonfiction or something in between” may be an allusion to an answer I am not sophisticated enough to understand. Why has The Paris Review dropped the fiction and nonfiction labels? Were the labels always included in past editions (I’ve only been subscribing since 2019)? I ask because perhaps my need to categorize a piece of writing before I begin reading is telling of something about me that I’ve never considered before. And granted some fiction is obviously so and could not be understood to be otherwise, but when I read on page 187 of your latest that “It’s 4:38 P.M., eight minutes after I usually go home, but now I’m rooting around under my chair cushion …” I want to know, was this ever true? Thank you for your time, Walter Yellowknife, NT Canada p.s. I love what you’ve done with The Paris Review in terms of its physicality. The writing continues to awe (for example, the Sterling Holywhitemountain piece was brilliant). Read More
September 6, 2022 First Person Custody By Constance Debré Constance Debré. Photograph by Adam Peter Johnson. Courtesy of Flammarion. Three years ago. We’re at the Flore, sitting outside, rue Saint-Benoît. It’s summer. I’m dipping my black-pepper potato chips in some ketchup. I’ve ordered a club sandwich, he’s having a croque monsieur. He’s my ex. The first man I was with, and until further notice, the last. We’re actually still married because we never got a divorce. We lasted twenty years, he and I. It’s been three years since I left him. His name is Laurent. With our eight-year-old son, with Paul, we do alternate weeks, all civil, we’ve never had any problems. A few months ago I switched to girls. That’s what I want to tell him. That’s the point of this dinner. I picked the Flore out of habit. We met here when we were twenty, it became one of our haunts. I grew up here, I’ve never really lived anywhere else. But I don’t go to the Flore anymore. I quit my job as a lawyer, I’m writing a book, I’ve got the tax people on my back and no cash to my name. It’s a pain, obviously, but it’s not important. So I spit it out, I say, I’ve started seeing girls. Just in case there was any doubt in his mind, with the new short hair, the new tattoos, the look in general. It’s basically the same as before, obviously just a bit more distinct. It’s not as if he never had his doubts. We had a little chat about it, a good ten years ago. I said, Nope, no idea what you’re talking about. I mean I’m dating girls, I say to him now. Fucking girls would be more accurate. He says, All I want is for you to be happy. This, I don’t reply, sounds like a lie but it suits me fine. He’s barely touched his croque monsieur, he lights a cigarette, calls the waiter over, orders more champagne. That’s what he’s drinking these days, he says it agrees with him, that it makes him feel less shitty in the morning. The check comes, he pays, we leave. Instead of going his own way on le boulevard Saint-Germain, he walks me towards the Seine. When we get to my door, he goes to follow me upstairs, as if we hadn’t been separated for three years, as if I hadn’t just told him what I’d just told him. I say no. He says, Have it your way. Read More