November 21, 2011 Bulletin The Winter Issue: Naughty and Nice By The Paris Review The Paris Review sends you holiday cheer—and our Winter issue! Naughty or nice, it’s got something for everyone: a portfolio of women by women, curated by our art editor, Charlotte Strick; fiction by Clarice Lispector, Paul Murray, and Adam Wilson; the English-language debut of French literary sensation Valérie Mréjen; and the conclusion of Roberto Bolaño’s lost novel The Third Reich, with original illustrations by Leanne Shapton. The Winter issue also contains long-awaited interviews with— Jeffrey Eugenides: I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to. and Alan Hollinghurst: I was very excited by the idea of telling truths that hadn’t been told before and breaking down literary categories. Descriptions of gay sexual behavior had until then tended to be restricted to pornography, and the presence of gay lives in fiction had been scant. So I had the great fortune of being given this relatively unexplored territory. Plus … poems by David Wagoner, Jonathan Galassi, Dorothea Lasky, Ange Mlinko, Gottfried Benn, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Subscribe now!
November 18, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Well-Read Lovers; Constant Rejection By Angus Trumble This week we asked our friend Angus Trumble to give us the benefit of his wisdom—and received an embarras de richesses. Thanks to all for your questions and to Angus for his answers; there was none we could bear to cut. By day Angus is the senior curator of paintings and sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art. By night, and sometimes also by day, he blogs on such topics as the euro crisis, the Ladies of Bethany, and his own globe-trotting adventures. Dear Angus, Do the best readers make the best lovers? Would you be more likely to break up with someone if they never read, or read all the time? I am flattered that you feel I have the necessary qualifications to provide an accurate answer to this question. In my experience, the well-read can be excellent lovers, although there are times when a specific literary prompt may inhibit the natural flow, as for example when one’s partner genuinely believes himself to be some sort of Vronsky, when in fact he lacks the magnificent build, military bearing, disposable income, or even the remotest capacity to smolder. I can quite confidently say that it is unlikely that I would ever commence a relationship with a person who never read, which removes the need to break up with him. My parents’ marriage survived a period in the late fifties, when my mother read the complete works of Sir Walter Scott, evidently led in his direction by a genetically encoded taste for the lowering mist, gloomy crags, and bloodstained crofts and glens of the Highlands of Scotland. On the whole, therefore, I am for readers—although it is also true that I would immediately eject anyone whom I caught in bed with a romantic novel by the late Dame Barbara Cartland. Have you ever had a story accepted for publication through a slush pile? As a matter of fact I have, although it was a book review and not a story. My first long article for The Times Literary Supplement was entirely unsolicited and dealt with what struck me at the time as a wholly new and remarkable historical analysis of, of all things, the epidemiology of the Black Death. To my astonishment, in due course this offering propelled me onto the front cover, together with an enormously magnified photograph of a plague-carrying flea. So there is hope. What should you do if you don’t like a book halfway through? How do you know when you should give it up? For years, far too many years, I fell into the dangerous trap of being determined to finish a book despite having reached the conclusion half way through—or at the very least having become deeply suspicious—that in all probability this would not give me pleasure or profit. Yet essentially I am an optimist, and therefore, I suppose, when faced with undeniable evidence that a novel in which I am immersed is, for example, a bleak and depressing saga of frustrated sexual longing and entirely populated by characters of scarcely conceivable dullness, part of me hopes that twenty pages hence there awaits bright flashes of comic genius that may yet salvage the experience. Optimistic though I continue to be, from the vantage point of comfortable middle age I can now say that this is never true and that certainly the healthiest, most sensible, and efficient strategy is to abandon ship. Read More
November 18, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: ‘The Doll,’ Minaudières By The Paris Review Daphne du Maurier. I was thrilled when a copy of The Doll—Daphne du Maurier’s early short stories, some “lost”—arrived in the office. They’re not all amazing, but when she’s good, she’s great. There’s the same sense of cold dread that pervades Don’t Look Now and Rebecca, and the title story presages the latter’s themes of obsession. (Not to mention, the object of obsession is named … Rebecca.) —Sadie Stein Olympia Le-Tan’s world! I dream of carrying my MetroCard and keys inside one of her handmade books, or minaudières, as they say in France. —Jessica Calderon “I often feel that the scenes in Edward Hopper paintings are scenes from my own past” writes Mark Strand in Hopper, which pairs the artist’s paintings with Strand’s prose ruminations on them. It’s a little like meandering through a gallery with the poet. In it, “we feel the presence of what is hidden, of what surely exists but is not revealed … It weighs on us like solitude.” —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn I’ve been reading and rereading the lovely long poem “The Blue Book” from Anna Moschovakis’s I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone. Its circuitous logic, in which one line feeds off the one before it, is mesmerizing. Each section describes the progression of an idea as a kind of mathematical equation, proving itself even as it calls itself into question. —Nicole Rudick
November 17, 2011 Bulletin Congratulations to Jesmyn Ward By The Paris Review The Paris Review congratulates Jesmyn Ward, whose novel Salvage the Bones won the National Book Award last night. We spoke with Ward in August about Southern rappers, Medea, Hurricane Katrina—and the book that brings them together.
November 17, 2011 Look Cosmic Geometry By Lauren O'Neill-Butler Triangle and Square, 2008, mirror, reverse-glass painting, and plaster on wood, 39 2/5 in. x 63 in. Born in a small town in northwest Iran in 1924, Monir Farmanfarmaian studied fine arts at the University of Tehran for only six months before deciding to move to Paris. But, with World War II raging, the ambitious young artist was denied entry in France; she opted instead for the United States, landing in New York City in 1944. “She traveled to the right place at the right time,” argues her old friend Frank Stella in Cosmic Geometry, Farmanfarmaian’s first and much-anticipated monograph, a testament of her continuing importance to contemporary Iranian art. Stella goes on to describe her facility with Abstract Expressionism’s “flatness” and “imagelessness”—her childhood home was filled with stained glass and wall murals—but neglects to mention all the other juicy details of her first decade in New York: how she rubbed elbows with the great artists of the day, including Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko, at the Cedar Tavern and at the Arts Students League; how she worked as an illustrator for Bonwit Teller under Andy Warhol. “I wasn’t bad looking,” she says, “so everyone invited me to their parties.” In 1957, she moved back to Tehran, married a young, American-educated lawyer named Abolbashar Farmanfarmaian, and began working with broken glass and mirrors in her studio—materials that became her hallmarks. She recounts traveling in 1966 to the Shāh Chérāgh mosque in Shiraz, Iran, a shrine “filled with high ceilings, domes, and mirror mosaics with fantastic reflections.” “We sat there for half an hour, and it was like a living theater,” she notes. “People came in all their different outfits and wailed and begged to the shrine, and all the crying was reflected all over the ceiling … I said to myself, I must do something like that, something that people can hang in their homes.” Read More