April 13, 2021 Redux Redux: Come, Be My Camera By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Suzan-Lori Parks. Photo courtesy of Parks. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about writing for the screen and stage versus the page. Read on for Suzan-Lori Parks’s Art of Theater interview, James Salter’s short story “The Cinema,” and Claribel Alegría’s poem “Documentary.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off. Suzan-Lori Parks, The Art of Theater No. 18 Issue no. 235 (Winter 2020) I love the process of writing. Whether it’s a TV script or a play, novel, song, or a film script, writing is all the same process. Just the rhythms are different. And where you have to begin and end is different. And how much you can see of a scene is different. What details you need to make a scene. In the novel, there are more words in those details. You can’t just say, “She’s tall and good looking.” You’ve got to let us know how so! Give me specifics. You’ve got to let us know how good looking she is. Read More
April 13, 2021 At Work On Memory and Motorcycles: An Interview with Rachel Kushner By Cornelia Channing Photo: Gabby Laurent. One morning last week, while sitting at my desk attempting to make headway on various writing assignments, I went on Craigslist and bought a motorcycle—a banana-yellow 1969 Honda CT90 Trail. It was something I had been thinking about doing for a while. I’ve been interested in motorcycles since I was a kid, and a few years ago, I took a course and got my license. But if I’m being honest, the decision to finally bite the bullet and get a bike was at least partially influenced by the opening essay of Rachel Kushner’s new collection, The Hard Crowd. Kushner, the author of the novels Telex from Cuba (2008), The Flamethrowers (2013), and The Mars Room (2018), wrote the essay in question, “Girl on a Motorcycle,” in 2001 for an anthology titled She’s a Bad Motorcycle: Writers on Riding. Describing her first bike, a 500cc Moto Guzzi, Kushner’s voice has all the confidence, wisdom, and cool of her later work. “Motorcycles didn’t enter my own life as gifts from men or ways to travel to men,” Kushner asserts, “but as machines to be ridden.” The piece goes on to describe something called the Cabo 1000, an illegal and dangerous thousand-mile motorcycle race on the Baja California peninsula, much of which takes place on dirt roads that weave precipitously through desert mountains. Kushner participated in the race when she was twenty-four, the age I am now. The parallels between Kushner and me end here. Next to the bikes she and her friends rode, my motorcycle would look like a tricycle. At one point during the Cabo 1000, Kushner clocked 142 miles an hour. At its very fastest, my bike won’t go much over 50. Still, something about the self-possession and sheer high-octane energy of Kushner’s writing—and her descriptions of the pleasures of the road, where she feels “kinetic and unfettered and alone”—took hold of my imagination and propelled me to pursue my own, albeit more modest, thrills. Not all the essays in The Hard Crowd are automotive in nature. Kushner also writes elegantly about Italian film, prison reform, sea captains, and Marguerite Duras. There is a remarkable and heartbreaking piece about a crowded refugee camp for Palestinians inside Jerusalem. There are sensitive and expansive considerations of Denis Johnson, Clarice Lispector, Cormac McCarthy, and Jeff Koons, among others. The critic James Wood uses the term “serious noticing” to describe the kind of looking that great novelists do, the revelatory and incisive attention to detail that “rescues the life of things.” Kushner does a lot of serious noticing in this book, of people, places, images, and texts. She also reflects on the various “hard crowds” she has been a part of, conjuring the San Francisco of her youth—a grungy haven populated by bikers, skaters, punk rockers, poets, and dropouts—with vivid, transporting detail. She recalls the friends she had in those years, when she was waitressing and hanging around in bars in the Tenderloin, as some of “the most brightly alive people” she ever knew. Many parts of this book read like a love letter to them, as well as to her younger self and to the places and experiences that shaped her. This interview was conducted via email in late March. Throughout our exchange, Kushner was funny, thoughtful, and generous with her responses. And while I will not, of course, divulge the author’s email address, I can report that it is among the cleverest I have encountered. INTERVIEWER The Hard Crowd is a collection of essays from 2000 through 2020. What was it like to revisit your past work? Have any of the essays taken on new meaning for you as they’ve aged? KUSHNER For years I’ve toyed with the idea of putting together a collection of essays, as they’ve piled up—I’ve been writing them since before I published any fiction—but I wasn’t in a hurry. I needed to find the right through line, an organizing principle that would seem appealing and deliberate. It was only when this phrase “the hard crowd” came to me as a title that I sat down and looked at everything and started pulling out pieces I thought could sit next to one another in a sequence. I excluded most of my writing on contemporary art, because the discourse of visual art is somewhat specialized—maybe someday I’ll make a book of those pieces. For The Hard Crowd, I was looking for a certain kind of resonance. The idea was to make a proper book that is meant to be read in order, from beginning to end, each essay “passing the torch.” When I got to the end, I wrote the title essay and realized this book was some kind of statement about who I am and what I value. This took me by surprise. I thought this was a side project, but the book has as much to do with who I am as my novels do. Read More
April 12, 2021 Bulletin N. Scott Momaday Will Receive Our 2021 Hadada Award; Eloghosa Osunde Wins Plimpton Prize By The Paris Review Every year, the Paris Review Board of Directors gives awards to recognize remarkable contributions to literature. This year, the directors are celebrating two extraordinary writers and taking special steps to ensure the future of exceptional writing. Read on to learn about the ways we are celebrating this year. Read More
April 9, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Comma Splices, Nice Zones, and Ladies Alone By The Paris Review Nona Fernández. Photo: Sergio Lopez Isla. Courtesy of Graywolf Press. There is an incantatory quality to Nona Fernández’s The Twilight Zone, a feeling of walking, as though under a spell, and then accidentally tripping into the murky unknown. Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, the novel traces the reverberations of Pinochet’s dictatorship throughout Chilean life from the eighties to the present day, using pop culture—in particular the television series The Twilight Zone, though Ghostbusters, Billy Joel, and the Avengers movies are also invoked—as a jumping-off point. This is a brilliant move: when reality features frequent disappearances, torture, and televised interviews with the military members who committed these atrocities, it becomes its own kind of dark fiction. “I wonder how we’ll tell ourselves the story of our times,” the narrator thinks at one point. “Who we’ll leave out of the Nice Zones in the story. Who we’ll entrust with control and curatorship.” —Rhian Sasseen Read More
April 9, 2021 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Carrie Fountain Reads Maya C. Popa By Carrie Fountain National Poetry Month has arrived, and with it a second series of Poets on Couches. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across distances. “Letters in Winter” by Maya C. Popa Issue no. 236 (Spring 2021) There is not one leaf left on that tree on which a bird sits this Christmas morning, the sky heavy with snow that never arrives, the sun itself barely rising. In the overcast nothingness, it’s easy to feel afraid, overlooked by something that was meant to endure. It’s difficult today to think clearly through pain, some actual, most imagined; future pain I try lamely to prepare myself for by turning your voice over in my mind, or imagining the day I’ll no longer hug my father, his grip tentative but desperate all the same. At the café, a woman describes lilacs in her garden. She is speaking of spring, the life after this one. The first thing to go when I shut the book between us is the book; silence, its own alphabet, and still something so dear about it. It will be spring, I say over and over. I’ll ask that what I lost not grow back. I see how winter is forbidding: it grows the heart by lessening everything else and demands that we keep trying. I am trying. But oh, to understand us, any one of us, and not to grieve? Carrie Fountain is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Life, and serves as poet laureate of Texas.
April 8, 2021 Look Untitled, No Date By The Paris Review As is the case with far too many artists, the multitalented Frank Walter (1926–2009) did not receive his due during his lifetime. By all accounts a polymath—his second cousin recalls that “as a child, he’d sit us down under a fruit tree, and while he’s typing on one subject matter, he’s lecturing us on other matter”—Walter spent much of his life in relative solitude on Antigua, with his ideas and memories to keep him company as he painted, drew, wrote, sculpted, captured photographs, made sound recordings, and fashioned toys. He brimmed with a restless creativity; he left behind some five thousand paintings, two thousand photographs, fifty thousand pages of writing across various genres, and much more. A new exhibition featuring a fraction of this work will open at David Zwirner’s London gallery on April 15. A selection of images from the show appears below. Frank Walter, LANDSCAPE Untitled (Airplanes over boats in harbor), n.d. © Courtesy Kenneth M. Milton Fine Arts. Image courtesy of Kenneth M. Milton Fine Arts and David Zwirner. Frank Walter, Untitled (Watermelon), n.d. © Courtesy Kenneth M. Milton Fine Arts. Image courtesy Kenneth M. Milton Fine Arts and David Zwirner. Read More