July 20, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Dear Paris Review, Where Do I Publish? By Lorin Stein Dear Editors: Have made writing full time. Have novel and short essays. Attended NYU’s Summer Writer program last year. Would you have a good list of places for submissions beyond The Paris Review, The New Yorker and The New York Times? Thank you for reaching out via Twitter and offering some of us (hopefully lovable) newbies some guidance. Dear Newbie, We get asked this a lot. It’s a reasonable question, but it always makes our hearts sink. Here’s the thing: no matter how many classes you take, no matter how much time you spend at the keyboard, you cannot write seriously unless you read. And that means, partly, reading your contemporaries. Their problems are your problems; you can’t write—that is, you can’t write for serious readers—until you know what the problems are. Read More
July 20, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: High Fashion, Arabian Nights, and Field Mice By The Paris Review Image via Synchrodogs The genre of the 1,002nd night is one few storytellers can resist. Poe wrote one, so did R. L. Stevenson, Jospeh Roth, and Naghuib Mahfouz. Some of these sequels are orientalist camp; the better ones concentrate on The Nights’ true drama: that of a woman talking to save her life. I’ve been reading an advanced copy of Tales of a Severed Head, a collection of poems by the Moroccan poet Rachida Madani. Her Scheherazade, a voice that Madina breaks into many different voices, angrily laments the history of modern Morocco and particularly the fate of its leftist intellectuals. It is as much a critique of the legend as a continuation of it. Madina’s poet is even willing, at times, to stop talking: She is silent so she can breathein the empty cannonslift and weigh the sacks of gunpowderand take aim. Marilyn Hacker’s translation from French is scrupulous and lively. —Robyn Creswell Read More
July 20, 2012 On the Shelf Book Mazes, Ugly Covers, Hauntings By Sadie Stein Brazilian artists Marcos Saboya and Gualter Pupo have made a maze out of books. Beautiful books, ugly covers. Sure, e-books are huge, but are they heirlooms? Regardless, Penguin has acquired self-publishing platform Author Solutions. And the British government is looking into the whole public-library-e-book-lending situation. In other news, a haunted bookstore? [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
July 19, 2012 On Food The Original House of Pies: SoCal Comfort By Aaron Gilbreath When the waitress set the slice of strawberry pie in front of me, I tried to contain my excitement. This moment was the culmination of two years’ worth of waiting, two years of longing and imagining my order and relishing memories of the last time I ate here at the Original House of Pies. I had first learned of the place from a song. There are no lyrics in the Friends of Dean Martinez’s “House of Pies.” Instead of vocals, an electric guitar plucks the melody in sync with a heavy-bottom bass. It isn’t a catchy melody. There isn’t much to it. The tune mostly sets a mood. Under the guitar, brushes make slow circles across a snare drum, and a high lap steel whines its laconic counterpoint, casting a spell, like when heat and blinding sunlight make everything slow and heavy. Although it was recorded by a Tucson, Arizona, group, the song sounds the way summer in Los Angeles feels. The guy who wrote it, Joey Burns, was raised in L.A. and drew the song’s title from an East Hollywood restaurant. I thanked the waitress, and she left me to savor my pie in private. Read More
July 19, 2012 Books Character Studies: Lady Brett Ashley By Stephanie LaCava “Damned good-looking” is how Ernest Hemingway—or, rather, his antihero Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises—describes Lady Brett Ashley when she appears at a Parisian club with a mob of pretty boys. “Damned good-looking” is better than pretty. It’s better than the colloquial “hot,” better than beautiful, even. Damned good-looking, it is. Imagine Hemingway, the great economist of words, deciding just how he would introduce perhaps his most enduring siren. Original drafts of the novel open with the character Ashley (better known as Brett), though she would eventually come to play a smaller role. Hemingway was bewitched, at the time of writing, by the self-possession of the real-life Lady Duff Twysden, and she—rather than his wife, Hadley—would serve as the partial inspiration for The Sun Also Rises’s heroine. (Indeed, he would dedicate later editions of the novel to her.) Read More
July 19, 2012 On the Shelf Erotic Classics, Christian Colleges, Dealbreakers By Sadie Stein Yup: e-books outsold hard copies in 2011. Out of the mouths of babes: a six-year-old judges classics by their covers. Speaking of classics: a British publisher adds sex scenes to them. Erotic rewrites include Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Written a great opener? Call the first graf hotline. The C. S. Lewis Foundation plans to open a college based on his Christian teachings. Dealbreaker books . [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]