April 27, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Light and Diabolical; Coming Off the Beats By Lorin Stein Dear Paris Review, I’ve just finished Dr. Zhivago and am on the hunt for a palate cleanser. I’ve been left with romance on the mind and would like to stay in this vein. I don’t want to go too lowbrow, like toward trashy romance novels, but something as light and diabolical but still classy and well written would be nice. Any suggestions? Thanks, Olivia Romantic, diabolical, and light—it’s a tall order. But Ivan Turgenev’s First Love rises to the challenge. So does Terry Castle’s long story-essay “The Professor” (the whole collection is a knockout), ditto the title story in David Bezmozgis’s collection, Natasha (ditto the collection). You might also want to see my staff pick for this week, Goodbye, First Love. In case you’re still jonesing for epic: Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus isn’t exactly light, but it clips along, and it’s romantic with darkness. Then there’s the book that Sadie and I seem to recommend more than any other, not (in my case) because it’s my favorite, but because it’s excellent and so often fits one bill or another, as indeed it fits this one: Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. As a nineteen-year-old writer, struggling against ego and literary giants that marked an era (the Beats), sick of the droning whir of academia, and thirsting for life. What should I read to have me excited about life, about writing. Thank you, Connor Goodwin Ah, to be nineteen and coming off the Beats … I’m tempted to recommend the work of our Southern editor, as for example his collection, Pulphead. There’s a book that knows the Beat tradition, that knows academia, that knows the myth of the great author and quietly steers its own path through those perilous straits. It may give you encouragement. The same is true of The Savage Detectives. Or, if you want a more classic antidote to literary machismo, To the Lighthouse. Or for sheer life affirmation and prose descriptions that make you burst out laughing, they’re so good: Death Comes to the Archbishop or The Adventures of Augie March. Read More
April 27, 2012 This Week’s Reading Things We Love: Vallejo, Factory Records, and ‘The Lonely Doll’ By The Paris Review Trilce, by the Peruvian modernist César Vallejo, is a book of poems I’ve read (the verb is probably too strong) with much enjoyment and little comprehension. Vallejo’s Spanish has almost nothing in common with the language I learned at school, but its obscurity is addictive: I keep going back to the poems. So far as we know, Vallejo gave only one interview; it has now been translated, for the first time, into English by Kent Johnson. Vallejo’s repartee isn’t as baffling as his poems, but it’s almost as enjoyable. —Robyn Creswell The lost César Vallejo interview should be paired with Paul Muldoon’s translation of “Piedra negra sobre una Piedra blanca,” which is probably the best English version of Vallejo’s most famous poem. Muldoon calls it “Testimony”: I will die in Paris, on a day the rain’s been coming down hard, a day I can even now recall. I will die in Paris—I try not to take this too much to heart— on a Thursday, probably, in the Fall. It’ll be like today, a Thursday: a Thursday on which, as I make and remake this poem, the very bones in my forearms ache. Never before, along the road, have I felt more alone. César Vallejo is dead: everyone used to knock him about, they’ll say, though he’d done no harm; they hit him hard with a rod and, also, a length of rope; this will be borne out by Thursdays, by the bones in his forearms, by loneliness, by heavy rain, by the aforementioned roads. —John Jeremiah Sullivan Read More
April 27, 2012 On the Shelf Poems, PEN, and Poe By Sadie Stein The restored Edgar Allan Poe cottage in the Bronx has won the “Preservation Oscars,” a Lucy G. Moses Preservation Award. Guests of the PEN World Voices Festival will get a gift bag of books hand-selected by Jennifer Egan. The art of the toast. A roundup of literary curmudgeons. Celebrate poem in your pocket day. Jason Epstein: “The revolutionary process by which all books, old and new, in all languages, will soon be available digitally, at practically no cost for storage and delivery, to a radically decentralized world-wide market at the click of a mouse is irreversible.”
April 26, 2012 Arts & Culture Capote’s Typewriter By Sadie Stein Eight thousand dollars might seem high for a Smith Corona—even a vintage one—but when you consider it belonged to Truman Capote, and during the period in which he wrote In Cold Blood, the surprising thing is that the eBay auction only drew two bidders. Quoth the seller, an acquaintance of the author’s: All of these personal things were given to me by Mr. Capote. I picked him up from the airport in Kansas City, Missouri, several times and drove him to Holcomb, Kansas. Mr. Capote was getting information on a crime that took place there for a book he was writing. And compared to his house, this is downright affordable! Of course, as Capote noted in his 1957 Paris Review interview, No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand.
April 26, 2012 Arts & Culture Literary Paint Chips: Gallery 1 By Leanne Shapton and Ben Schott Paint Samples, suitable for the home, sourced from colors in literature. As seen in our two-hundredth issue. City Fingers Delta Khaki Navy Rayon Limpopo Mapp’s Silence Nightclub Lycra Alleline’s Pink Gin Lydia Montdore Mink Rothko’s Forearm Moth Mrs. Jones Green Elephant Hills Camel Cashmere Glimpse Gray Samsa Juice Anne’s Shoes Mossy Trout Lipstick Smack Ocean Heart Mediterranean Cock Rebecca’s Smalls Dock Green Fair Fuzz Gosling Random Dandelion Violet Hour Golightly
April 26, 2012 Arts & Culture Black and White and Red All Over By Sadie Stein Last year, Benjamin Marra released a series of zines based on the 2000 American Psycho film adaptation. Now, the artist, along with Portland’s Floating World Comics store, is reproducing American Psycho as a limited-edition broadsheet. From paper to celluloid to paper and now newsprint! (To say nothing of the remake.) And given protagonist Patrick Bateman’s seemingly routine existence, a newspaper feels especially apropos. (To say nothing of Christian Bale’s work in Newsies.) It’s all especially striking given the novel’s initial reception: as Bret Easton Ellis says in his recent Paris Review interview, Read More