April 16, 2012 On the Shelf Rejections, Slush, and Turkeys: Happy Monday! By Sadie Stein Dora Saint, the (wonderfully named) author of the bucolic “Miss Read” novels, has died at age ninety-eight. Trouble in Riverdale: the New York Times details the battle for Archie’s soul. Unless you want it doused in liquor, don’t have F. Scott Fitzgerald cook your turkey. In light of Günter Grass’s recent clash with Israel, Dave Eggers is declining to travel to Germany and accept an award from the Günter Grass foundation. Not in protest of the author’s poem “What Must Be Said” but, rather, because “in light of the recent debate, he would be forced into commenting, endlessly and needlessly, on Grass and Israel and Iran, when the purpose of his visit was supposed to be about discussing his book Zeitoun, and the plight of Americans during and after Hurricane Katrina,” according to the Wylie Agency. This is controversial. If you want to get the writer’s experience, try the rejection generator. From the other side of the desk? Get a taste of what editors receive in unsolicited slush piles. The eternal question: Kool Keith or James Joyce?
April 13, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Summer Reading; Formatting Horrors By Lorin Stein Dear Paris Review, I’m a second-semester senior in high school and currently find myself with a lot of empty time. I also have an open summer ahead with plenty of time to read books. Do you have any novel recommendations for someone about to enter college? Our friends at n+1 devoted an entire pamphlet to the question, more or less: What We Should Have Known. Our advice is more equivocal: the main thing is to have a whole bunch of books so you can switch if you get bored. With that caveat, and in no special order: To the Lighthouse, Sons and Lovers, Howard’s End, Invisible Man, Brideshead Revisited, Girl in Landscape, Pnin, Rebecca, The Crying of Lot 49, The Broom of the System, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Portnoy’s Complaint, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Transit of Venus, The Death of the Heart, The Tetherballs of Bougainville, Home Land, Cane, As I Lay Dying, The Sun Also Rises, Confessions of a Mask, The Savage Detectives, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Marius the Epicurean, First Love, First Love and Other Sorrows, and Moby-Dick. I recently read Lolita and have since been obsessed with Nabokov. What are other Russian novels, or to broaden the list, European novels that you would recommend? Have you read others novels by Nabokov? My favorite is Pnin (see above). The tricky thing about your question is that no European writes like him—or if they do, it’s in a language I can’t read. The most Nabokovian writer I know is John Updike, but he’s American. Try the Rabbit books. You might also like Javier Marías: start with A Heart So White. And if what you really want is European, magisterial, and ironic, there’s Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary. Nabokov almost certainly wouldn’t approve of the translation—he never approved—but I think he would disapprove less than of the others. Read More
April 13, 2012 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Genet’s Maids, Hockey, and Vivaldi By The Paris Review I recently took out a subscription to National Geographic. I haven’t really looked at the magazine since childhood, and with the very first issue I received a couple months ago, I couldn’t believe I’d been away so long. NatGeo’s known for its photography for a reason: the imagery in these stunning, often unearthly shots seems tangible. My favorite so far is a portfolio by Phyllis Galembo of African and Haitian ritual costumes. These are a long way from your typical African masks. “Just putting one on,” says one art historian, “is a charged event.” —Nicole Rudick It’s the most wonderful time of the year—the NHL postseason! Grantland’s Katie Baker, making predictions for the opening series of the Stanley Cup playoffs, picks Tupac’s “Hit ‘Em Up“ as the representative song for the first-round “hatefest“ between the Penguins and Flyers (which, for those unfamiliar with current hockey events, is a perfect fit). —Natalie Jacoby Dinners for Beginners, written in 1937 and out now from Persephone, is “for people who know nothing about cooking. At the same time, it is intended for all those—whether they can cook or not—who appreciate good food and like to entertain their friends, but cannot afford to spend more than a strictly limited amount of money on housekeeping … The authors have tried to write a cookery book that EXPLAINS EVERYTHING. No knowledge is taken for granted. The beginner is not expected to know by the light of nature how to make gravy, sauces, or pastry; she is told when the lid of a saucepan or fireproof dish ought to be on when it should be off.” —Sadie Stein This weekend I am checking out a new production of The Maids, Jean-Paul Sartre’s alleged “favorite play ever.” Loosely based on the Papin sisters, French servant girls who brutally murdered their employer in 1933, Maids was penned by notorious thief-turned-playwright Jean Genet. Get a taste of the sadomasochistic weirdness in this clip from the 1974 film adaptation. Running through Sunday. —Allison Bulger Vivaldi’s “Spring” while reading The Clouds by William Carlos Williams. An unlikely pair, I admit, but it works: Williams’s images of the forever changing clouds marching across the sky, set to the whimsy and flux of Vivaldi’s classic, which captures so perfectly the feeling of this season—inherently a march of change. Try it. —Elizabeth Nelson Hard as it might be to choose a favorite Dick Cavett interview, I always find myself returning to his talks with movie stars and directors. From the rambunctious episode with Peter Falk, Ben Gazarra, and John Cassavetes to erudite study with Jean-Luc Godard to the relaxed reminiscences of Katharine Hepburn, there’s never a dull moment. —Josh Anderson The Met’s production of La Traviata is live in HD this Saturday. I can’t wait! —S. S.
April 13, 2012 On the Shelf Jack London Advises; Baboons “Read” By Sadie Stein Slate weighs in on the e-book case: “The DoJ’s action effectively robs publishers of the ability to price their own products and robs other retailers of any hope of competing effectively with Amazon. Hence the DoJ has all but guaranteed a future in which readers end up with fewer well-edited books—both physical and electronic—and in which writers feel less free to speak against concentrated power.” Here is an igloo made of books. Baboons reading … remedially. We have a title: J. K. Rowling’s adult debut will be titled The Casual Vacancy. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul Museum of Innocence (which started as a novel) opens later this month. The challenge of culling books. Jack London did not sugarcoat it for a young writer. David Sedaris: “Throughout my 20s and early 30s—my two-books-per-week years—I did most of my reading at the International House of Pancakes.”
April 12, 2012 The Revel Revel Yell By Sadie Stein When people hear that one works at The Paris Review, they often assume it’s a glamorous affair: parties, champagne, stories of the magazine’s early days in France, and famous writers as far as the eye can see. Last Tuesday, they were right. The Spring Revel isn’t just our big fund-raiser. It’s also a chance for the old guard to meet the new kids and vice versa. This year, former editor Mona Simpson presented newcomer Amie Barrodale with the Plimpton Prize, and young Adam Wilson—winner of the Terry Southern Prize for humor—paid tribute to Southern himself. Robert Silvers, now in his fiftieth year helming The New York Review of Books, was toasted by the freshest face in the magazine business: Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, who bought The New Republic a month ago. Zadie Smith described what it’s like being a new kid at The New York Review, and Bob remembered being a new kid under George Plimpton. Read More
April 12, 2012 Arts & Culture Exit Art, 1982–2012 By Hua Hsu Jeannette Ingberman and Papo Colo in front of the gallery's 578 Broadway location. Papo Colo and Jeanette Ingberman founded Exit Art in 1982 as a space for “unusual” art, which is saying a lot given that this was a time when artists were bisecting public plazas with giant panels of unfinished steel, using subway trains as canvases, and performing year-long pieces that consisted of never going indoors. That February, Papo and Ingberman curated their first exhibition, “Illegal America.” The show explored the ways in which the practice of art had occasionally run afoul of the law, from Charlotte Moorman playing cello in the nude to Chris Burden ordering his assistant to shoot him in his arm. The catalogue consisted of a series of artists’ statements housed in a box, which was sealed shut. In order to open it, you had to tear through a dollar bill glued across the flaps—an illegal act, albeit of the mildest kind. Exit Art’s mandate was clear from the very beginning: the brash claim that they represented an “exit” from the traditional art world; a neck-and-neck passion for politics and aesthetics; that gag of a catalogue, the kind that implicates gallerygoers as more than passive collectors of names on placards. Yet their remarkable, thirty-year existence on the fringes will soon come to an end. Read More