May 7, 2012 Arts & Culture Stillspotting By Jillian Steinhauer I’m sitting in an apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. It’s a nice apartment, with decidedly un-Ikea furniture and mild-mannered art on the walls. It feels well kept but welcoming, gently used. The room I’m in is a classic New York living/dining-room combo, its zones delineated by, on the one hand, a multicolored wood table and, on the other, a sleek white couch. The couch looks surprisingly comfortable, but I have no idea if it is; I’m sitting back-to-back with it, on a triangular block of foam. There’s a semicircle of these foam stools filling the room’s neutral territory and six people sitting with me. As we wait in awkward and anticipatory silence, I notice the sunlight streaming in from the windows. It glosses the shiny floors, which stay that way, I assume, because everyone who enters this apartment has been told to remove her shoes, just like in my home growing up. I don’t know who lives here. According to a map the Guggenheim has given me, this is “Erin’s House.” Erin is nowhere to be found, but she has generously loaned out her living/dining room for a few weekends in April and May, for a project called Stillspotting. As its name implies, the project is a search for still spots—quiet spaces, moments of respite, refuge from chaos—in New York. Read More
May 7, 2012 Bulletin The 1966: Spring’s Smartest Tee By Sadie Stein In celebration of its two-hundredth issue, The Paris Review is proud to present the Winter 1966 T-shirt. Modeled on a nifty shirt that we discovered on the back cover of issue 36, the design is George Plimpton’s own. As he stated in that ad, it’s “the sort of once in a very rare while shirt that makes an editor proud to do his job.” To celebrate the ’66, we took to the street, asking some New York friends to name their favorite Paris Review authors. Watch this space to see their picks. And for a limited time we’re offering a special deal: the T-shirt plus a year’s subscription for $40, giving you access to the greatest writers (and T-shirts!) of today. Printed on American Apparel 50/25/25’s, the shirt comes in men’s (S, M, L) and women’s sizes (M, L). To quote George, we beg you to “share with us the thrill of wearing it.” Offer good for U.S. addresses only.
May 7, 2012 The Revel 8, rue Garancière By The Paris Review On April 3, Robert Silvers accepted the Paris Review’s Hadada Prize for a strong and unique contribution to literature. These were his remarks. When something like this evening happens, you ask how you got here, and I thought back to the autumn of 1954, when I was a soldier at NATO military headquarters—called SHAPE—near Paris. One of the best things about working there was that, by some international understanding, practically everyone had Wednesday afternoon off—you could go to the Louvre, you could go to the Café de Flore. And there, one Wednesday afternoon, at the kiosk in front of the Flore, I bought a copy of The Paris Review and took it back to our international barracks at Rocquencourt and read it in my bunk. I thought I should know more about it. Read More
May 7, 2012 On the Shelf Literary Communes, Literary Parodies: Happy Monday! By Sadie Stein February House, a musical about the famed Brooklyn Heights brownstone that housed Truman Capote, W. H. Auden, Gypsy Rose Lee (left), Carson McCullers, and Benjamin Britten, is being created based on Sherrill Tippins’s 2005 book of the same name. Were4 rt thou Rmo? The Bard in text form. A guide to philosophy in literature. Paulo Coelho will be selling his e-books for less than a dollar. A Florida library has officially banned Fifty Shades of Grey. Meanwhile, Fifty Shames of Earl Grey will be coming to a bookstore near you.
May 4, 2012 Windows on the World Tim Parks, Milan, Italy By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. Do I pull up the shutter before my cappuccino or afterward? That’s the first decision of each new day. I need to see if it’s raining. The cord is worn and the shutter’s slats will jam if yanked too hard. The view scrolls up. “View” is generous. This is an ordinary courtyard in a sixties condo in working-class Milan; my small balcony hangs over the building’s main entrance, looking onto other small balconies above and to the left, some alive with plants, with dogs, cats, canaries, others storing old bikes, buggies, bits of furniture. In the middle of the space, a handkerchief of lawn and a tall hoarse chestnut, golden in midsummer, gaunt in winter, remind us of Nature. Otherwise it’s all cement, stucco, and tiling. Not unpleasant, not oppressive, not exciting. After ten minutes in the café (across the street) where recent Chinese arrivals serve excellent coffee and croissants, I work with my back to the open window which lets in dogs barking, a young man iPhoning on his balcony, some challenged creature who yells sporadically down the street. The portinaia sweeps fallen leaves and cigarette stubs, chatting to all comers with unremitting enthusiasm. But I’m wearing earplugs; her voice is muffled. About ten-thirty the sun hunts me down and a bright boil of light finds out how long it is since I vacuumed the parquet. Too long. I frown and turn up the brightness on this other window I’m typing into. —Tim Parks
May 4, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Job Aspirations; Forgiveness By Lorin Stein I am a student interested in working for The Paris Review one day. What steps would you recommend to get there? Read lots. That’s the main thing. And not just the books they assign you in class. The Daily gives you a pretty good idea of what books and articles we’re reading; at the very least you’ll have something to talk about in the interview. (You should read The Paris Review. Maybe this goes without saying.) Learn to write. I don’t mean “creative” writing, I mean short-form journalism. If your school has a good student newspaper, sign up. Or start sending pitches to your favorite magazines. The main thing is to write for an editor who can help you improve—tightening sentences, taking yourself out of the picture when you don’t belong, that kind of thing. Being able to write short, competent reports is a surprisingly useful skill—and one that we value here. Bump one of us off. The Review has only six full-time employees, so job openings are rare. But we do accept new (unpaid) interns every season: click here for more information on how to apply. We’re honored by your interest! I’m working on a character who is trying to figure out secrets in his family and still hold it intact … I’ve been reading Albert Camus’s The Fall and loving it, but wondered if you might have any other suggestions for literature dealing with themes of forgiveness to help out with some inspiration? Much Obliged Dear Obliged, The first title that pops into my head is Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? Then I hear Henry James: “Yes, and forget her, too.” James wrote lots of novels about forgiveness. The Wings of the Dove, which I have never made it through, The Ambassadors, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Altar of the Dead all turn on acts of forgiveness. If your subject is forgiveness in marriage, you may be inspired by Norman Rush’s Mortals or Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead or Jane Smiley’s The Age of Grief. Then there are Jonathan Franzen’s last two novels, Freedom and The Corrections. Forgiveness is a big subject in Franzen’s work, though critics don’’t often point it out. The Corrections is less about marital forgiveness, more about how hard it can be to forgive one’s parents and kids. Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment has to do with forgiveness in divorce. D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers has to do with forgiveness between mothers and sons; Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage has to do with forgiveness between Geoff and D. H. Lawrence … For some reason everywhere I turn today, I see people asking to be forgiven and trying to forgive. Maybe you can’t go wrong. Have a question for the editors of The Paris Review? E-mail us.