December 19, 2023 Car Crushes ’88 Toyota Celica By Sam Axelrod Photograph by Stefan Marolachakis, courtesy of Sam Axelrod. I turned nineteen and moved to Chicago. Three weeks later, Dave and I bought a silver Celica for five hundred bucks, which, even in 1999, didn’t seem like much for an entire car. Dave named her Angie (short for Angelica, inspired by the elica on the grille, the C having gone missing sometime in the previous eleven years). He was a sophomore at the University of Chicago, and I was his deadbeat friend who had moved to Hyde Park to get out of my parents’ apartment and go be a dropout eight hundred miles away. We liked to think Angie resembled a low-rent DeLorean. The headlights opened and closed—creaking up and down like animatronic eyes—but shortly after the big purchase they got stuck in the up position. When we test-drove the car around Ravenswood, the steering wheel felt disconcertingly heavy. Oh, that’s just a minor power-steering leak, said the seller. Easy fix. We didn’t know what power steering was, or that the leak was actually expensive to fix, and that we’d have to refill the fluid on a weekly basis. Plus, the hood stand had broken, or disappeared, or anyway no longer existed, so it was necessary to hold up the hood with one hand and refill the cylinder with the other, which was quite difficult to do. Thankfully, there were two of us. We’d been friends since third grade, and with our easy dynamic, splitting a car didn’t seem odd—only convenient. Read More
December 18, 2023 First Person Madeleines By Laurie Stone A madeleine. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The other day, I graduated from an iPhone 6 to an iPhone 15. The iPhone 6 needed to be plugged in all the time, same as me. The next day, when I woke up with the iPhone 15, I didn’t recognize the house where I lived, or the room where I was sleeping, or the person beside me in the bed. Richard said, “I think you should get the wireless earpods. You’ll like them.” I said, “How do you know?” He laughed. The difference between learning a person and learning an iPhone is that, eventually, you learn the iPhone. You even forget the learning part. Once human beings know something, we think we’ve always known it—like the discovery of irony by a child, it’s a one-way door. Read More
December 15, 2023 The Review’s Review The Paris Review’s Favorite Books of 2023 By The Paris Review Henry Taylor, UNTITLED, 2010. From Untitled Portfolio, issue no. 243. © HENRY TAYLOR, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND HAUSER AND WIRTH. PHOTOGRAPHS BY MAKENZIE GOODMAN. Book that made me cry on the subway: Stoner, John Williams Book that made me miss my subway stop: Prodigals, Greg Jackson Book I was embarrassed to read on the subway: The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis Book someone asked me about on the subway: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty Book I saw most often on the subway: Big Swiss, Jen Beagin —Camille Jacobson, engagement editor My reading this year was defined by fascinating but frustrating books. Reading to explore, reading for pleasure—sometimes the two don’t converge. In January and February, I battled against Marguerite Young’s thousand-plus-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, reading a pdf of it on my computer (why did I do this? I honestly don’t know) and developing a (hopefully temporary) eye twitch in the process. Among other things, the novel is about a bedridden woman in a decrepit mansion experiencing vertiginous opium hallucinations for pages on end. I’m glad I read it but I’m not sure I would recommend it. Speaking of opium, I also finally finished Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, another kind of fever dream (originally written for money, it’s a mishmash of autobiography, philosophy, and outright plagiarism) that is both completely bonkers and a foundation of modern literary criticism—in it, Coleridge coined the term “suspension of disbelief.” One early reviewer of it expressed “astonishment that the extremes of what is agreeable and disgusting can be so intimately blended by the same mind.” Maybe I relate to this more than I’d like to admit. But a primary purpose of these lists is to give people ideas of what they might enjoy, more than what they might profitably suffer through. So, these books gave me pleasure this year: among others, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring, Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Hannah Sullivan’s Was It for This, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining, and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. I learned a lot from all of them, too. —David S. Wallace, editor at large The text that looms largest in my mind this year is Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette. The novel first appeared in the U.S. in 2020, but it reentered the public consciousness this fall when the organization Litprom, citing the war in Gaza, canceled an award ceremony for the novel. Over a thousand authors formally rebuked the decision. Meanwhile, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians continues, abetted by U.S. funds and rhetoric; since October 7, as of this writing, Israel has murdered over 18,200 people in Gaza and the West Bank. Minor Detail is a fictional telling of true events—the documented rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers in the Negev desert, in the summer of 1949. In the first half of the novel, Shibli imagines the day-to-day activities of the commanding officer in the lead-up to and aftermath of the girl’s capture. In the latter half, Shibli fast-forwards to the near-present, narrating from the perspective of a Palestinian woman who has become fixated on the girl’s story and travels out of the West Bank—with a borrowed ID card that will allow her passage through the intervening military checkpoints—to research the crime. I am especially interested in the rote style of the first act, in which acts of violence bleed together with the mundane. Shibli meticulously describes, for example, the officer’s obsessive daily washing routine, including shortly before the execution of the girl: He took the towel, dipped it in the bowl, rubbed it with the bar of soap, and passed it over his face and neck. Then he rinsed it, rubbed it again with the soap, and wiped his chest and arms. He rinsed it, passed the bar of soap over it again, and wiped his armpits. Then he rinsed it, rubbed more soap on it, and wiped his legs, without removing the bandage from his thigh. When he had finished wiping down his entire body, he rinsed the towel once more and hung it where it had been before. The effect is hypnotic. The style makes even brief distraction feel impossible. I admire Shibli’s refusal to abbreviate action, the patience and fortitude with which she illustrates the minutiae that surround and constitute violence. —Spencer Quong, business manager Read More
December 15, 2023 First Person Happy Books By Sophie Haigney From Recent Vases, a portfolio by Francesca DiMattio in issue no. 228. This year I was so happy. I was happy for the main reason that I think people have been happy throughout human history, which is that I fell in love. At least that’s why stories tend to tell us that people are happy—happily ever after, and all that. When people asked how I was, I found myself saying, so happy, almost involuntarily, and then feeling a little ashamed, like maybe I was boring them. The thing is that other people’s happiness is often boring. All happy families are alike, and all that. I read a line in a short story in the recent Fall issue of The Paris Review, in fact: “We were happy on the road, and happiness can’t be narrated.” This felt true to me, and I also wanted to argue with it. Yet whenever I did, the terms seemed to slip away from me—what was happiness, anyway, and what did it mean to narrate it? And was I really so happy, when in fact lots of things in my life were going wrong, when as always there were days when I woke up listless or anxious, despite some undercurrent of feeling like I was terribly, almost frighteningly happy? Could there be such a thing as a narrative of happiness, and—here, I was thinking selfishly—what might it tell me? Read More
December 14, 2023 Car Crushes Mazda Miata By Mina Tavakoli Mazda Miata. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain. The most handsome man at my high school was so beautiful that I would have been happy to watch him plunge a clogged toilet. He had a flourishy name that I both can’t and would rather not remember. Gustavo. Gonzalo. Gianni. Goiter. Something. He ended up falling in love with a Mormon girl with a set of eyes so wide that she reminded me of a parakeet I once had. In the hallways, he would watch her with smile after big, moronic smile, crumpling under the hugeness of the luck that hooped and smothered the two of them. We all knew that he was thinking of proposing to her, which meant that he was about to convert to Mormonism, which is a long way of saying that there was nothing that made my blood jump more than thinking about this miracle couple working through a fatiguing bureaucratic process just so they could have sex. Every day after school, I would pass his car in the parking lot. It was a Maraschino-colored Mazda Miata—a two-door soft-top with a curvy body like a woman’s. For some reason everyone was aware that nineties Miatas were delicate models with a knack for flipping and killing their owners in accidents against even marginally heavier vehicles. My best friend at the time thought this was delicious information. “One wrong sneeze and he’s dead,” she loved saying. Or – selectively stressing any mixture of the following words – “That has to be the stupidest car you could possibly buy.” This crotchety routine was boring before it started, but she made it very hard not to imagine his body getting scraped off the highway by some fabulous road shovel. Read More
December 12, 2023 At Work An Excerpt from our Art of Poetry Interview with Louise Glück By Henri Cole TUCSON, ARIZONA, 1978. PHOTOGRAPH BY LOIS SHELTON, © ARIZONA BOARD OF REGENTS, COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA POETRY CENTER. In remembrance of Louise Glück, we wanted to take the special step of sharing the beginning of her Writers at Work interview from the new Winter issue, conducted by Henri Cole, on the Daily. We hope you’ll read it, along with her poems in our archive and the reflections on her life and work that we published after her death this fall. (And to read the rest of this conversation, subscribe.) In early March of 2021, Louise Glück visited Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, where I teach. Because of COVID, she was afraid to fly on a small plane to our regional airport, so I drove her myself from Berkeley, where, for some years, she rented a house during the winters. She packed pumpernickel bagels, apples, and cheese for our six-hour road trip, and she brought CDs of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and the songs of Jacques Brel, a Belgian master of the modern chanson. Long ago Glück and her former husband had listened to operas on road trips, but this was her first car trip in many years. She knew the musical works backward and forward, pointing out Maria Callas’s vocal strengths and clapping her hands while singing along with Brel. The magnificent almond orchards of central California had just begun to blossom and gleam beside the rolling highway. At the farmers’ market in Claremont, she bought nasturtiums and two baskets of strawberries while talking openly about her girlhood and how she’d weighed only seventy pounds at the worst moment of her anorexia. “But you love food, like a gourmand, Louise,” I said, and she replied, “All anorexics love food.” The hotel where she was staying seemed dingy, but she did not complain. Sitting on the bed cover, she propped herself up with pillows and responded to the endless emails arriving on her mobile phone. Some months earlier, Glück had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. When the Swedish Academy phoned her quite early in the morning with the marvelous news, she was told that she had twenty-five minutes before the world would know. She immediately called her son, Noah, on the West Coast, and he was joyful after overcoming his panic at hearing the phone ring in the night. Then she called her dearest friend, Kathryn Davis, and her beloved editor, Jonathan Galassi. Reporters quickly appeared on her little dead-end street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Soon she was exhausted from replying to the journalists’ questions, like “Why do you write so frequently about death?” Because of the lockdown, her Nobel medal was presented in the backyard of her condominium. Gray clouds blocked the sun. A light snow and frost covered the yard. The wind gusted. A small folding table was set up in the grass with an ivory cloth that made the gold medal shimmer. I watched the ceremony from Glück’s back patio, on the second floor. She wore black boots, black slacks, a black blouse, a black leather coat with big shearling lapels, and fingerless gloves. A cameraman asked her several times to pick up her medal, and she obeyed, as the wind blew her freshly cut hair across her face. The Swedish consul general explained that normally Glück would have received her medal from the king of Sweden, but that she was standing in for him. The consulate had sent a large bouquet of white amaryllis, but Glück thought they looked wrong in the austere winter scene, so they were removed from the little table. The ceremony took no longer than five minutes, and she shivered silently until she finally asked if she could go inside to warm up. From the beginning, Glück cited the influence of Blake, Keats, Yeats, and Eliot—poets whose work “craves a listener.” For her, a poem is like a message in a shell held to an ear, confidentially communicating some universal experience: adolescent struggles, marital love, widowhood, separation, the stasis of middle age, aging, and death. There is a porous barrier between the states of life and death and between body and soul. Her signature style, which includes demotic language and a hypnotic pace of utterance, has captured the attention of generations of poets, as it did mine as a nascent poet of twenty-two. In her oeuvre, the poem of language never eclipses the poem of emotion. Like the great poets she admired, she is absorbed by “time which breeds loss, desire, the world’s beauty.” The conversations that make up this interview mostly took place during the days of Glück’s visit two years ago, which included a rooftop seminar—with the San Gabriel Mountains as a backdrop—and a standing-room-only reading at the Marion Minor Cook Athenaeum, during which she dined with students, an experience that evidently gave her pleasure. She had no desire to undertake a cradle-to-grave interview, but she was happy to converse about her new book, teaching, and craft, and read the version of the interview that I sent her as a work in progress. After her unexpected death on Friday, October 13, 2023, I shared our pages with the Review, since there would be no further conversations. INTERVIEWER Am I correct in thinking that you write two kinds of books—one a collection of disparate lyric poems and another that has some of the characteristics of prose, with a narrative thread? GLÜCK Yes, and I seem to rotate between the modes. I also think of my books as either operating on a vertical axis, from despair to transcendence, or moving horizontally, with concerns that are more social or communal, the sort of material you might expect to show up in a novel rather than a poem. Averno (2006), for instance, is a book quintessentially on a vertical axis. And A Village Life (2009) is utterly the opposite—with different speakers coming from different times of life, living in some unspecified little seemingly Mediterranean village, though the model was Plainfield, Vermont, where I lived for many years. You make substitutions to keep yourself inventing. Read More