April 22, 2022 On Film We Need the Eggs: On Annie Hall, Love, and Delusion By Sheila Heti TWO ILLUSTRATIONS BY RICHARD KEARTON, 1896. One night, my stand-up comic brother, David, and I were sitting on my couch, talking about the joke that concludes Woody Allen’s 1977 film, Annie Hall. We’d watched the movie together dozens of times growing up, and we’d always assumed that we interpreted the ending—about how people get into relationships because we “need the eggs”—the same way. That night, we discovered we did not, and even after much talking, we found we couldn’t agree on the joke’s meaning. In the weeks that followed, I longed to restage and expand our conversation, and hopefully to answer some of the questions it had raised, so I invited a few other people into the discussion: Zohar Atkins, a rabbi and poet; Nathan Goldman, a literary critic and editor; and Noreen Khawaja, a professor of religion who has written a book on existentialism. Could we, together, get to the bottom of this profound and amazing joke? DAVID HETI The joke came up one night when Sheila and I were talking. SHEILA HETI I think we’d been talking about relationships. Read More
April 19, 2022 Redux Redux: All the Green Things Writhing By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. PHOTO COURTESY OF ANTONELLA ANEDDA ANGIOY. “Spring like a gun to the head,” Dorothea Lasky writes in a poem in our latest issue, “Green how I want you.” It’s been a strange, uncertain season, and now that the weather is turning and the cherry trees are beginning to blossom, we’re revisiting some works that evoke the cruelest month: an interview with the Italian poet Antonella Anedda; a story by Ira Sadoff that makes romancing a florist sound wistful yet thrilling; Elizabeth Brewster Thomas’s poem in which “beneath your feet a thousand spores of ice / blossom in darkness”; and a collaboration between Ben Lerner and the photographer Thomas Demand, featuring a profusion of paper flowers. (And if you pick up a copy of our Spring issue, you’ll also find collages by the late artist Birdie Lusch, who pasted newspaper clippings onto Hallmark catalogues to make her glorious bouquets.) If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and art portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. INTERVIEW The Art of Poetry No. 109 Antonella Anedda ANEDDA The first poem I ever heard was by Aleksandr Blok, on the radio in a small village in Sardinia. It’s an early work that begins, “Carried on the breeze, / the Spring’s music drifted from far, far away.” The poem was about space and wind—how the wind breaks open the clouds to reveal a strip of blue sky. INTERVIEWER What was it that moved you? ANEDDA When I was seven, a member of my family, a person I loved, died in front of me. Suddenly her body was a thing without a voice. Listening to Blok’s poem—I was thirteen or fourteen—I thought that perhaps poetry could create a relationship with absence, with death, transposing the present into another space and time. From issue no. 234 (Fall 2019) Read More
April 15, 2022 The Review’s Review On Thomas Bernhard and Girls Online By The Paris Review From Kati Kelli’s “My tragic homeschooled past.” You’re on that old kick again, rereading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage to refresh and resplendorize the senses, but why not go back to the source? It’s never wrong to read Dyer’s Thomas Bernhard (and, after all, your Bernhard). It’s never bad to sit at Good Karma Café, in Philadelphia, at a little metal table out front, with Bernhard’s novella Walking, reading I ask myself, says Oehler, how can so much helplessness and so much misfortune and so much misery be possible? That nature can create so much misfortune and so much palpable horror. That nature can be so ruthless toward its most helpless and pitiable creatures. This limitless capacity for suffering, says Oehler. This limitless capricious will to procreate and then to survive misfortune. while a person pulls up with a carriage and introduces to the air a baby, a little baby who was born three days ago, and stands there holding this: “Lily.” She explains as much—the three-day thing—and announces the name to inquirers (the nonreaders …). Three days old only! Why is this little baby taking the air so soon? Why promenade now? This merciless tenderness might permeate the whole atmosphere now, while you read “My whole life long, I have refused to make a child, said Karrer, Oehler says, to add a new human being over and above the person that I am, I who am sitting in the most horrible imaginable prison and whom science ruthlessly labels as human,” and laugh at combinations, at the café. —Caren Beilin You can read Sheila Heti’s interview with Caren Beilin on the Daily here. Read More
April 12, 2022 Eat Your Words Cooking with Sergei Dovlatov By Valerie Stivers Photograph by Erica MacLean. “Dad did not care about food,” the daughter of the Soviet dissident writer Sergei Dovlatov once told me, vehemently, upon my suggestion that I might cook from her father’s work. I knew what she meant, but I also knew that Dovlatov’s books were full of the everyday food that was still current in Moscow when I first arrived there to live in the nineties, a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Dovlatov’s characters pause during phone conversations to scream that someone not forget to buy the instant coffee (the only coffee available—I grew to like it). They drink—continuously—wine, vodka, beer. They offer each other bowls of borscht or “spear a slippery marinated mushroom” while talking, or order a sandwich, a salad, or a “chopped-meat cutlet” at a café. In one memorable scene near the end of The Compromise, an autobiographical novel about Dovlatov’s time working as a correspondent for the newspaper Soviet Estonia in the seventies, a full spread of delicacies for Communist Party elite comes out: expensive cold cuts, caviar, tuna, and a piped marshmallow dessert called zefir. Read More
April 12, 2022 Redux Redux: Like No One Else By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Detail from Ghost. All drawings by Ed Ruscha. “I styled myself to look like no one else,” Jamaica Kincaid tells Darryl Pinckney in an Art of Fiction interview that appears in our new issue. “And I also knew I didn’t want to write like anyone else.” Tonight, at our first Spring Revel since 2019, we will present Kincaid with our lifetime achievement award, the Hadada, while Chetna Maroo will accept the Plimpton Prize for Fiction. To celebrate, we’re revisiting work by some of the recent prizewinners we were unable to honor in person: Jonathan Escoffery, who was awarded the Plimpton in 2020; Leigh Newman, recipient of that year’s Terry Southern Prize for “humor, wit, and sprezzatura”; and N. Scott Momaday, who accepted the Hadada last year. (And if you missed the story we unlocked last month by Eloghosa Osunde, winner of the 2021 Plimpton Prize, you can always make it right by subscribing.) We’re also including a 1987 portfolio of drawings by the chair of this year’s Revel, Ed Ruscha. If you enjoy these free short stories and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. POETRY Concession N. Scott Momaday Believe the sullen sense that sickness made, And broke you in its hands. Believe that death inhabits the mere shade Intimacy demands. From issue no. 99 (Spring 1986) Read More
April 11, 2022 On Books There Are No Minor Characters: On Jane Gardam By Susan Minot, Alice Gregory, Stephen Sedley, and Sadie Stein JANE GARDAM WITH HER HUSBAND, DAVID, HER SON, TIM, AND FAMILY FRIENDS, 1957. Photograph courtesy of Jane Gardam. You should read Old Filth, someone said to me about ten years ago. I couldn’t for the life of me, in true Gardam fashion, remember who that friend was until just now—it was the writer Nancy Lemann—but I can think of the people—dear friends—to whom I went on to recommend it myself. I adored the book, stunned I had not heard of Jane Gardam before, and immediately read the next two books of the trilogy: The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends. I then taught Old Filth in a seminar so that I could spend more time with Gardam and study more closely how she creates her magic. She improves, as great writers do, upon rereading. And then reading again. I found out more about her life. She published her first book at forty-three, and was a mother of three children. In the next thirty years she published twenty-five books: many collections of short stories and many books for children. She was seventy-six when her masterwork Old Filth was published and eighty-five when Last Friends came out. She says that she wrote to survive, working in a green room overlooking her garden, since during this time both her daughter and husband died, her husband having suffered with dementia for several years. She says that when she first started writing—the morning after she’d dropped her youngest son at his first day of school—she was not interested in what was fashionable or what was publishable. She just wanted to write. She believes that there are no minor characters. Everyone’s as interesting as everyone else. Gardam’s style combines wit, romance, brevity, and enchantment. As the best artists do, she offers hard truths in a pleasurable way. There is no overindulgence. Sensuous details are side by side with a sharp intelligence. She is the master of the quick brushstroke, painting a room, a city, the feeling of an era, or simply a complex-at-one-glance character. Philosophical musings merge into social commentary, but you notice no intrusion because you are mesmerized by the story. The story is everything. An omniscient voice plays alongside a character’s point of view; there is lightness in tragedy and depth in comedy. A description of Betty Feathers, from the trilogy, could very well apply to Gardam: Amazed as she never ceased to be, about how such a multitude of ideas and images exist alongside one another and how the brain can cope with them, layered like filo pastry in the mind, invisible as data behind the screen … Betty was again in Orange Tree Rd standing with … old friends in the warm rain, and all around the leaves falling like painted raindrops. Gardam is interested in the passage of time, in generational shifts and in ecstasy. Over and over she presents to us the surprise of things, the surprise in people, in the world. Over and over we learn the devastation of cruelty and the highest value of kindness. She reminds us that we don’t truly know anything, but it all remains endlessly interesting. —Susan Minot Read More