June 5, 2012 Bulletin Four Ties, and Counting By Lorin Stein A few months ago our friend Kirk Miller, of Miller’s Oath, made a small batch of Paris Review ties–twenty-four, to be exact. I bought one. Several members of our board did the same. We have four ties left—one of each! So, as you see, this is a true limited edition. Give one of them to your dad for Father’s Day. Each comes with a free subscription to The Paris Review. Buy one today! While supplies last.
June 5, 2012 On Film Sad Young Literary Men: The Pleasures of Oslo, August 31st By Elisabeth Donnelly The best films scramble your brain, changing you slightly. You emerge from the dark with new, blinking eyes, adjusting to a different world. It’s why for many of us a good movie is a small miracle, worthy of devotion. So far, Norwegian director Joachim Trier has made two such small miracles, Reprise and Oslo, August 31st. Two sharp films that, when I saw them, settled down into some small part of me, changing the way I thought about youth, ambition, and the meaning of life, if only for a night. I suspect the films of Trier speak particularly to anyone with literary ambitions, anyone who knows what it’s like to be besotted by a work of art and anyone who wants to create something strong and beautiful and true. The director has an uncanny eye for the worries of sad young men afflicted with dreaminess about art and ideas, the same sort of disease written about in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer or Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter. His exuberant, French New Wave–influenced debut, Reprise, is the story of two boyish twenty-something writers wrestling with literary ambitions and madness. Reprise is charming, formally daring, and focused on youthful folly; in Oslo, August 31st, the folly is over, and it’s time for the morning after. Read More
June 5, 2012 On the Shelf Dr. Seuss, Tintin, and a Really Late Library Book By The Paris Review A 1932 original Tintin in America cover sells for a record-breaking 1.3 million euros at auction. American Pastoral, coming to a multiplex near you. (Okay, maybe an art house.) Definitely coming to the multiplex, Guy Richie’s Treasure Island. The name really says it all: Haruki Murakami Bingo. Dr. Seuss’s politically charged World War II cartoons. An honorable patron returns a book to an Irish library … eighty years past its due date.
June 4, 2012 Listen Flannery O’Connor Reads, 1959 By Sadie Stein It wasn’t until Open Culture shared this 1959 recording of Flannery O’Connor reading the title story of A Good Man Is Hard to Find that we realized we didn’t know what her voice sounded like. The thirty-four-year-old author’s Georgia accent is pronounced, and she puts over the story with a deadpan panache that brings out its full humor and horror. Truly a treat for a gray day.
June 4, 2012 On the Shelf Thefts, Maps, and the Return of Oprah By The Paris Review A rare, first-edition Book of Mormon has been stolen from an Arizona store. The Atlantic presents a slideshow of images from the “graphic canon,” in which artists take on the classics. Will 2012 be the biggest Book Expo ever? An interactive map of the UK’s literary destinations. The return of Oprah’s Book Club.
June 1, 2012 Windows on the World Francisco Goldman, Mexico City By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. My desk is snugly ensconced in a front corner of the living room, facing wall and bookshelves, a wide window overlooking a park in Colonia Roma to the right and, on my left, the narrow side window drawn by Matteo. I’m sharing the apartment with my friend Jon Lee, who is almost always traveling, but he needed a Latin American base for his work. We only moved in a month ago. It’s the biggest apartment I’ve ever lived in. The living room is so immense that I bought a football (not a futbol) just to prove you can play catch in it, and now I am looking for a wiffleball batting machine, which I think would be a great way to manage the persistent physical restlessness that often makes it so hard for me to sit still at a desk. In the mornings I go down to a café facing the park for breakfast. They have terrific coffee. I usually have the waitress tell me about the chilaquiles, the enfrijoladas, molletes, and omelettes just so that I can savor her descriptions, and then I order the fruit and granola, and she makes fun of me for that. I work in the café for two or three hours and then go back to the desk in my apartment. Apart from a break for lunch, I try to work until seven in the evening, and then usually head to the gym. We’re right around the corner from one of Mexico City’s greatest cantinas, one I’d been coming to for years from more distant neighborhoods. They have a funny ritual there. A waiter will ring a bell to catch everyone’s attention, shout out a name, and then the cavernous room will resound with raucous shouts of ¡Pendejo! (it means, more or less, “asshole!”). You have to pay the waiter to do that. Once a good friend, a writer from Ireland, was visiting, and he paid the waiter to shout out the name of another Irish writer who’d given him a nasty review, and the waiter, though he could barely pronounce the name, shouted it out, and everyone in the cantina, the old men playing dominoes, the Mexican and foreign hipsters, and literary types who also hang out there, et cetera, joyously shouted “¡Pendejo!” —Francisco Goldman