May 5, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Amélie Nothomb, Writer, Part 2 By Amélie Nothomb This is the second installment of Nothomb’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. Photograph by Catherine Cabrol. DAY FOUR In the evening we are invited to a huge turn-of-the-century building, with something of the Phalanstère to it, entirely inhabited by artists. This is the Westbeth Center for the Arts, the largest artist’s community in the world, and it is where tonight’s “Literary Safari” is supposed to take place. The name of the event disturbs me: are they going to hunt writers with guns? The organizers reassure me: writers will be chosen by artist-inhabitants of the Phalanstère and invited into their apartments to read from one of their books. My host is Dorothy, former actress of avant-garde theater, eighty-six years old, a tiny, skinny woman of exceptional vivacity and intelligence. The audience and I are invited into her strange apartment with a sinusoidal ceiling, a moving museum of the past. They suggest that I read for fifteen minutes from my most recent novel to appear in English, Hygiene and the Assasin. There is nowhere to hide: American audiences love hearing an author read her work. So I throw myself into it, reading first in French, without sparkle, and then in English. This last exercise proves to be a considerable challenge. The mixture of emotion and effort is so intense that, literally, I liquefy: I perspire so much that I see enormous drops of sweat falling on my text. It’s very annoying. After fifteen minutes have passed, I am nothing but a puddle. The audience, very friendly, asks me questions. With reluctance, I leave Dorothy, who lays all the flowers in her apartment in my arms: I have the impression of being a diva. Read More
May 4, 2011 A Letter from the Editor John Jeremiah Sullivan Wins Prize, Does Paris Review Proud By Lorin Stein Photograph by Harry Taylor.Our Southern Editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, has gone and won himself a Pushcart Prize with his essay “Mister Lytle” from our fall issue. Richly deserved, we say! An excerpt: There had been different boys living at Lytle’s since not long after he lost his wife, maybe before—in any case it was a recognized if unofficial institution when I entered the college at seventeen. In former days these were mainly students whose writing showed promise, as judged by a certain well-loved, prematurely white-haired literature professor, himself a former protégé and all but a son during Lytle’s long widowerhood. As years passed and Lytle declined, the arrangement came to be more about making sure someone was there all the time, someone to drive him and chop wood for him and hear him if he were to break a hip. There were enough of us who saw it as a privilege, especially among the English majors. We were students at the University of the South, and Lytle was the South, the last Agrarian, the last of the famous “Twelve Southerners” behind I’ll Take My Stand, a comrade to the Fugitive Poets, a friend since youth of Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren; a mentor to Flannery O’Connor and James Dickey and Harry Crews and, as the editor of The Sewanee Review in the sixties, one of the first to publish Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. Bear in mind that by the mid-nineties, when I knew him, the so-called Southern Renascence in letters had mostly dwindled to a tired professional regionalism. That Lytle hung on somehow, in however reduced a condition, represented a flaw in time, to be exploited. Click here to read the whole thing and here to order a copy of your own.
May 4, 2011 Events A Big Week! By Thessaly La Force It’s a big week for friends of The Paris Review, one full of readings, parties, and performances that we thought you, our dear readers, might like to attend: Saturday, May 7: FUNraiser for J&L BOOKS Leanne Shapton and Jason Fulford will host a fundraiser for their imprint, J&L books, which dedicates itself to publishing well-designed books of previously unpublished or rarely seen work by contemporary artists. A $10 ticket will get you a letterpressed Mother’s Day card and a raffle ticket, as well as access to a sale of vintage clothes, and original art by J&L artists. Later that evening, J&L will celebrate the launch of Another Ventriloquist by Adam Gilders. Click here for more information. Monday, May 9: David Bezmozgis and Francine Prose The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center will host a conversation between David Bezmozgis and Francine Prose, who are the authors of The Free World and My New American Life, respectively. Tickets are free but must be reserved. Click here for more information. Tuesday, May 10: Geoff Dyer Talks with Lorin Stein At Greenlight Books, Geoff Dyer and Lorin Stein will discuss Dyer’s latest book, a collection of essays called Otherwise Known as the Human Condition at Greenlight Books. Click here for more information. Wednesday, May 11: Pop-Up Magazine + ESPN Magazine What happens when you make a magazine for just one night? Nothing is published, nothing goes online—it’s a live magazine. Join contributors to The New Yorker, This American Life, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and others as they share stories, films, interviews, photography, and much more live on stage. Tickets are $25, click here for more information. And keep up by checking out our events calendar!
May 4, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Amélie Nothomb, Writer By Amélie Nothomb Photograph by Catherine Cabrol. DAY ONE Backstage at the Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers, I meet about a dozen prestigious writers, among them Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi. They seem to have known each other for years, chatting and laughing together. I am so awed that my deep-sea-snail nature gains the upper hand and I hide in the corner with my mouth clamped shut. The proximity of admirable men and women has always had this effect on me: what can I say to them beyond a very sincere “I admire you,” of which they have no need? And so I crawl into my shell and stay quiet. At 7:30, we take our seats for the Opening Night of the PEN World Voices Festival. Each writer steps up to the podium to read a selection from his or her work in front of a full house. I am ninth on the list, which leaves me ample time to panic. The eight writers who precede me are remarkable and read their unforgettable selections with such talent. I am feeling worse and worse by the minute. Then it is time for me to take the stage. I feel like I’m representing Belgium in the Vancouver Winter Olympics, where my country didn’t bring home a single medal. I chose a very short text because I knew that I would read without stopping to breathe, thus very badly. While reading it, though, it still seems too long, and I swallow the majority of my words. It is a test. When it’s finished, I run to hide myself away. Next, we all go to celebrate. I drink lots of wine to forget the reading, and, suddenly, I feel fine, and very happy to be in New York. Read More
May 3, 2011 At Work Francisco Goldman on ‘Say Her Name’ By Lila Byock Aura Estrada and Francisco Goldman at their wedding in 2005. Photograph by Rachel Cobb. “Esto es tu culpa,” Francisco Goldman was told by his mother-in-law, as his wife, Aura Estrada, lay dying in a Mexico City hospital. This is your fault. Goldman and Estrada had been vacationing on the Pacific Coast when Estrada was fatally injured by a freak wave. She was thirty years old, a writer on the brink of a promising career. Goldman is also a writer; his latest novel, Say Her Name, centers on Estrada’s death. The narrator, also named Francisco Goldman, is grappling with his mother-in-law’s accusation of murder. The book is part mystery, part biography, part meditation on grief, and, finally—mostly—a love story. Goldman’s writing has astonished me in the past (notably his underread 2004 novel The Divine Husband), but Say Her Name is powerful and surprising and even funny in ways that feel unique. He has, in a sense, invented a form. Goldman met me for drinks recently at a bar not far from the Brooklyn apartment he and Estrada shared. This is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. How long after Aura’s death did you start working on the book? I started working on the book in December. She died in July. Those ensuing months after Aura’s death were so horrible and I was probably drunk for almost all of it. In December—I was dreading being alone in our apartment over the holidays—Chloe Aridjis, the writer from Mexico City who was living in Berlin, offered me her apartment. It was this very literary apartment with a very nice writing desk, and it was good to be someplace where I didn’t know anybody. And the city itself—it seemed cold, gray, a rainy drizzle coming down every day that almost made nighttime seem like daytime—it somehow matched my mood perfectly. I started it there, and in a way the book accompanied me through my mourning. It was like my indispensable other self. Read More
May 3, 2011 Arts & Culture Her Voice in My Head By Emma Forrest When I was old enough to know better, I ate a bar of soap in the shape of the Muppets’ Fozzie Bear, because I loved him so much I wanted to consume him, even if doing so made me ill. I didn’t yet know the word foreshadowing. Fozzie was the only first of many pop-culture icons I feel shaped by. I’ve held longest to Kate Bush, the singer-songwriter who conjures Millais’s 1852 painting of Ophelia come to life, a beautiful young girl, singing to herself as she drowns, her pure, high upper register both childlike and demented. I was nine, in 1985, when Bush’s Hounds of Love unseated Madonna’s Like a Virgin from the top of the UK pop charts, presenting a different kind of sexuality. Hopping across New York in a Day-Glo tank top, Madonna was livin’ for the city, fueled by wolf whistles. Bush was fueled by dreamscapes, by her inner emotional life. That’s a good option, I thought. I could just live inside my head forever. Bush emerged at the same time as Debbie Harry, but your punk-rock Grace Kelly was nothing like our prog-rock Ophelia. Never had one felt so worried for a pop star. “Hold me down! It’s coming for me through the trees!” she sang on Hounds of Love’s title track. In “Running Up That Hill” she was ready to “make a deal with God.” I memorized the accompanying dramatic dance moves (to the lay observer they look like Martha Graham, but they’re actually Lindsay Kemp, whose interpretive dance classes Bush spent her original record advance on). Read More