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
June 1, 2012 Contests Tote Contest: Now Extended! By The Paris Review As readers of this space will recall, we’ve put out an open call: our next tote bag, a collaboration with the Strand Bookstore, will be designed by … you! And due to overwhelming demand, we’re extending the deadline by a week. The deadline is now: Friday, June 8. Get in touch with your inner graphic designer/illustrator and design a tote bag that features the original Paris Review logo (as seen on our homepage and the cover of the magazine) and remember to leave room for the Strand oval, too. You can incorporate old cover art, go all graphic, or dream up something completely your own. (For further inspiration, check out our current totes!) We want to know what the Review means to you! Submission deadline: Friday, June 8, 2012 Find both logos here Artwork maximum size: 10 inches by 10 inches EPS vector format preferred; 300 dpi acceptable Send your entry to [email protected] The winning design will be revealed at the inaugural event at the Strand on June 13, 2012. Top entries will be posted on the Paris Review Daily. The grand-prize winner will receive a Strand shopping spree and a year subscription to The Paris Review. Plus, of course, your tote.
June 1, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Sundry Practices, New Order, Flower Power By The Paris Review The enthusiasms of our Southern editor (plus a fact-checking query from issue 201) have sent me back to Urne-Buriall, Sir Thomas Browne’s 1658 essay on the “sundry practises, fictions, and conceptions, discordant or obscure” surrounding funerals and the afterlife: “Why the Female Ghosts appear unto Ulysses before the Heroes and masculine spirits? Why the Psyche or soul of Tiresias is of the masculine gender; who being blinde on earth sees more than all the rest in hell; Why the Funerall Suppers consisted of Egges, Beans, Smallage, and Lettuce, since the dead are made to eat Asphodels about the Elyzian medows? Why since there is no Sacrifice acceptable, nor any propitiation for the Covenant of the grave; men set up the Deity of Morta, and fruitlessly adored Divinities without ears? It cannot escape some doubt.” —Lorin Stein “If beauty is defined as a composite quality encompassing both extraordinary sensoriality and exemplary human behavior, then possibly the most beautiful flower shop in the world is located in Vienna’s low-key-but-hip 4th District.” So begins The Flower Shop: Charm, Grace, Beauty & Tenderness in a Commercial Context, which is a little hard to describe to those unfamiliar with the work of author Leonard Koren. It’s a profile of Vienna’s Blumenkraft, told through sepia-toned photographs and text, but it’s also more than that. You learn how a flower shop functions, from the selection of the wares to caring for flowers to arranging, and you get to know the staff and experience the challenges and triumphs of running a small business and of trying to bring something beautiful, unique, and ephemeral into the world. It ends up being a much bigger story than that of one florist, however lovely. —Sadie Stein New Order, “Leave Me Alone.” I’m not sure how I’ve never discovered this masterpiece of new wave mellow-dee. Perhaps it’s been sitting on the toadstool of my mind, elbow on knee, hand on chin, waiting for the perfect moment to ring out. As a fan of New Order’s calmer music—“Regret,” “Love Vigilantes,” “Ceremony (Single Version)”—“Leave Me Alone” ranks high in its moody solitude. Bernard Sumner rolls the song along slow at first, but the urgency in his voice picks up as his “character” becomes more frustrated in his inability to escape the company of others. The lyrics keep in line with New Order’s usual sexual despondence: From my head to my toes To my teeth, through my nose You get these words wrong You get these words wrong Everytime You get these words wrong I just smile. —Noah Wunsch There are so many reasons to be excited about art this year—great gallery and museum shows all around the country. Lucky Chicagoans are catching the tail end of a Claude Cahun exhibition and are a month into the Art Institute’s display of their newly acquired Dawoud Bey collection. The twenty-five black-and-white photographs are comprised by Bey’s “Harlem, U.S.A.” series, which was first shown more than thirty years ago at the Studio Museum in Harlem. If you’re not in Chicago, I recommend the handsome catalogue—the photographs are worth extended viewings, and his images of the Manhattan neighborhood’s denizens stand alongside the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and James Van Der Zee as definitive American portraits. —Nicole Rudick My favorite movie of the last five years is probably Reprise, by the Norwegian director Joachim Trier. I loved its sense of humor and its sense of possibility. Trier used the devices of the nouvelle vague, not with irony or nostalgia, but as if they were brand new—as if Oslo today were Paris circa 1964. Most of all I loved Anders Lie’s performance as a brilliant writer in the grip of a life-threatening depression. Oslo, August 31, which was released last week in New York, has all of these things, too, including Lie as a recovering addict who thinks he will never piece his life back together. Despite the similarities, Lie’s performance in Oslo is full of surprises. I can’t think of a movie actor my age who is more fun to watch. —L.S.