May 2, 2012 Fiction An Event in the Stairwell By Clancy Martin The Milan Review—or, to give it its proper title, The Milan Review of the Universe—is an egregiously handsome literary magazine published in English, in Milan, under the editorship of the improbably named Tim Small. The second issue includes work by some of our own favorites, among them Amie Barrodale, Chiara Barzini, Francesco Pacifico, Lynne Tillman, and, not least, Clancy Martin, whose story the Milanese have kindly let us reprint below, in a spirit of international fraternità, and in light of the patchy trans-Atlantic distribution that our two journals have in common. Auguri! —Lorin Stein Randy knocked on my door and when I opened it I expected he would attack me with the tennis racket in his hand. I had only bought pot from him before. He had no reason to hate me. But in his mind I am a rich white person. “Emily’s not home,” I said. Emily is my girlfriend and I suspect, though do not know, that she has had sex with Randy at least once, or perhaps lots of times. He is younger and lither than I am. Probably better hung. “She’s not home?” “Right.” I kept my eyes on the racket. Also on his eyes, because you can anticipate a blow that way. Everyone narrows his eyes and looks where he’s going to hit you before he strikes. This is the first lesson of boxing. “She promised she’d buy this racket from me. I got this racket special. From my daughter.” Randy, Emily had told me, had a high school–age daughter who was expected by many people to be the next Serena Williams. She lived with her mother in the Bronx and was sponsored by Puma. I noticed the tennis racket had a broken string. Emily was hiding in the bedroom all this time and had instructed me to tell Randy that she was out. I could not decide whether that was reassuring or suspicious. Emily had had her infidelities. “How much does she owe you for the racket?” I took the racket from his hand which he gave me without hesitation, although he looked down and away from me when he said, “Thirty dollars,” which meant he was lying. Probably he had told her he would give her the racket for free. But who knew what more tangible price she had promised to pay. Perhaps eagerly. I briefly considered beating Randy on the face, head and shoulders with the very light and surely durable racket. We have tile in our stairwell and blood would mop up easily without staining. Randy was not the type to come back with a gun. That would be the last we’d ever see of him. I should have done it. Read More
May 2, 2012 Arts & Culture Literary Paint Chips: Gallery 2 By Leanne Shapton and Ben Schott Paint Samples, suitable for the home, sourced from colors in literature. As seen in our two-hundredth issue. See Gallery 1 here. Havisham’s Complexion Anti-Sex Scarlet Plum Purple Closed Eyelid Green Paste Rain Stone Nothing Esther’s Sauce Anthracite Brazier Dove Encrimsoned Foul Mood Snot Eyes Aschenbach’s Youth Saffron Silk Elm Shadow Paris Paper Smell England Rat Brown 20,000 Dorian Scarlet Lilac Ocean Basking Pear March Morning Sour Apple Gulag
May 2, 2012 On the Shelf ‘Bartleby,’ ‘Star Wars,’ and Animal Authors By Sadie Stein May Day viewed through the prism of Bartelby the Scrivener. In Afghanistan, women are risking their lives for poetry. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s wall text will now reflect Gertrude Stein’s complicated war record. Controversial almost-ran New Yorker covers. The Star Wars cookbook. Last but not least, books authored by famous animals.
May 1, 2012 Arts & Culture Subway Photography By Blake Eskin Working with words is how I’ve made my living, but becoming a photographer has been a longtime fantasy, fed by the vinaigrette smell of the chemistry in the college darkroom, the monographs in the library upstairs, and all the museums and galleries and bookstores I’ve visited in the decades since. The more amazing work I saw, the more shy I became about picking up a camera, so this fantasy was sublimated into writing about photography, even writing about writing about photography. The pictures that speak to me most are street photographs. I wanted to be a surreptitious chronicler of urban life, like Henri Cartier-Bresson or Helen Levitt or Elliott Erwitt. Street photography took off with the Leica, a groundbreaking portable camera introduced in 1925 that used the same 35-mm film manufactured for motion pictures. By the time I became aware of street photography, its golden age—its culturally decisive moment, so to speak—was behind us. To practice street photography at the end of the twentieth century seemed like nostalgia. Read More
May 1, 2012 Arts & Culture Bookitecture By Sadie Stein Kansas City Public LibraryIt was Thomas à Kempis who wrote, “I have sought rest everywhere, and have found it nowhere, save in a little corner, with a little book.” Would Flavorwire’s slideshow of book edifices have provided the ultimate in serenity, or the reverse? What if the corner were itself a book? Whatever else your reaction, we imagine awe will figure in somewhere. Below, a few of our favorites. Argument #2, by Tom Bendtsen Marta Minujin's collaborative Tower of Babel Matej Kren’s Scanner Book Igloo, by Miler Lagos
May 1, 2012 At Work Something Out of Something: Talking with Etgar Keret By Rebecca Sacks In 2006, the great book-blurber and novelist Gary Shteyngart called Etgar Keret’s The Nimrod Flipout “the best work of literature to come out of Israel in the last five thousand years—better than Leviticus and nearly as funny.” Keret may indeed be the most loved and widely read Israeli writer working today. He is known for his very short short stories, which are often described as “surreal” and “absurd.” It’s certainly the case that they do not adhere to the laws of the physical universe. In his most recent collection, Suddenly, a Knock at the Door (published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a talking fish grants wishes; a woman unzips her boyfriend to reveal the German gentile inside; a middle-aged man is kidnapped and taken to his childhood. But at the heart of Keret’s writing is a deep compassion. His characters may be enmeshed in paradoxes unique to Israel—with its fraught borders, fragmented populations, and newly ancient language—but it’s always their humanity that shines through. Keret is also a filmmaker. With his wife, Shira Geffen, he directed Jellyfish (2009), which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes, and has had his work adapted to film, including Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006). Over the course of two weeks, during which his father passed away from cancer (he has written about his father for Tablet), Keret generously corresponded over e-mail for this interview. Read More