March 10, 2022 The Review’s Review Do Not Et Cetera By The Paris Review DIY miniature dollhouse, licensed under CC BY SA 4.0. “Living in America during the Reagan years had the same disorientation as a texture dream,” writes David Wojnarowicz in Close to the Knives, “that sense you get at times lying with your face against the sheets with your eye open, millimeters away from the microscopic weave of the linen, and suddenly your body freezes up and your eye is locked into the universe of textures and threads and weaves, and for an extended moment you can’t shake yourself from the hallucination.” The political subterfuge of the Reagan years is the subject, too, of Maxe Crandall’s recent poem-novel, The Nancy Reagan Collection. Published by Futurepoem in 2020, it’s a mercurial archive of the Reagans’ silence on AIDS and the era’s innumerable other devastating failures, among them Iran-Contra and the expansion of the war on drugs. In high-camp imagined encounters with Nancy Reagan, Crandall deftly traces the era’s iconography of concealment—Nancy in her immutable trademark red, her high-necked collar, her tartan blazer, her little nautical blouse, her gloves—as he lists the names of friends and public figures dead from AIDS and its complications. Grief and rage churn at the center of these encounters, each of them shaped by speculative archival work and a biting queer sensibility. It’s a beautifully inventive experiment in historiography and a reminder of the enduring political aesthetics of obfuscation and silence: the particular politeness that meets with mass death. And like everything Futurepoem puts out, as an object it’s gorgeous—bright red, impossible to miss. —Oriana Ullman Read More
March 10, 2022 Eat Your Words Cooking with Dorothy Sayers By Valerie Stivers Photograph by Erica Maclean. Dorothy Sayers’s Strong Poison opens with a description of a man’s last meal before death. The deceased, Philip Boyes, was a writer with “advanced” ideas, dining at the home of his wealthy great-nephew, Norman Urquhart, a lawyer. A judge tells a jury what he ate: the meal starts with a glass of 1847 oloroso “by way of cocktail,” followed by a cup of cold bouillon—“very strong, good soup, set to a clear jelly”—then turbot with sauce, poulet en casserole, and finally a sweet omelet stuffed with jam and prepared tableside. The point of the description is to show that Boyes couldn’t have been poisoned, since every dish was shared, with the exception of a bottle of Burgundy (Corton), which he drank alone. The judge’s oration is another strike against the accused, a bohemian mystery novelist named Harriet Vane, who saw Boyes on the night he died, and had both motive and opportunity to poison him. Looking on from the audience, the famous amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey writhes in misery; he believes Harriet Vane is innocent, and he has fallen suddenly and completely in love with her. Read More
March 9, 2022 The Revel Chetna Maroo Wins This Year’s Plimpton Prize By The Paris Review Photograph by Graeme Jackson. We are thrilled to announce that Chetna Maroo has won the 2022 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, which will be presented at our Spring Revel in April. The prize, awarded annually since 1993 by the editorial committee of The Paris Review’s board of directors, celebrates an outstanding piece of fiction by an emerging writer published in the Review during the preceding year. Previous winners include Ottessa Moshfegh, Emma Cline, and Atticus Lish. Read More
March 8, 2022 Redux Redux: Of Continuous Change 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. ELIAS KHOURY, IN 2007. Elias Khoury began his 2017 Art of Fiction interview with the wry observation that “American reviewers read Arabic literature as if they’re reading the newspaper.” This week, we’re thinking—as we stare, helpless and sore-eyed, at our feeds—about the relationship between journalism and literature, and how artists, writers, and readers might respond to the news. Alongside Khoury’s interview, we revisit a short story by Stephen Minot, a Patricia Smith poem, and a portfolio of works from Peter and Annette Nobel’s collection of “press art.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and 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 Fiction No. 233 Elias Khoury INTERVIEWER How do you continue to write novels when every day seems to bring news of some new atrocity or human calamity in your backyard? KHOURY I’ve lived my life under a state of near permanent war. I was born in 1948 and have vivid memories of the “small” civil war of 1958. The defeat of 1967 brought me to political consciousness. And I began writing novels during the first years of our major civil war. I try not to write about war, but to write from within it. One has to write through these calamities and atrocities. I think it’s good practice—for writing and for living—but it isn’t ever easy. From issue no. 220 (Spring 2017) Read More
March 8, 2022 Re-Covered Re-Covered: Edith Templeton By Lucy Scholes In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photograph by Lucy Scholes. “You are so exquisitely made,” the American Major in Edith Templeton’s 1968 short story “The Darts of Cupid” tells the object of his desire, “I could break every bone in your body.” This predation is unsettling, as is the completeness with which Eve, the young woman who’s being seduced, embraces the role of submissive victim. Entwined in her new lover’s arms, she’s reminded of a Japanese print she once saw, in which a naked female corpse, floating in the sea, is penetrated by the many tentacles of a large octopus. Her physical and emotional surrender is similarly all-encompassing: “I knew that this was the rendering of love as it should be: trapped inescapably, secure and fastened, drowned in bed and water, both cradle and grave.” Read More
March 7, 2022 First Person To the Son of the Victim By Sophie Haigney Santa Rosa–Tagatay Road in Don Jose, Santa Rosa, California. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Santa Rosa, California I met you the day your father was shot and killed. I’d been in Oakland for a pink sunrise, watching police sweep a homeless encampment, gathering what we called “string” from residents who had nowhere—yet again—to go. I felt more outraged than usual and also maybe more useful. This was journalism, I suppose I was thinking, making sure the world knew what was happening right here. I wrote three hundred words for my newspaper’s website in a café and was preparing to drive back across the Bay Bridge in brilliant golden morning light. Then I got a call. Read More