December 17, 2021 Best of 2021 Our Staff’s Favorite Books of 2021 By The Paris Review In which we tell you some of the things we most enjoyed reading this year. Rhian Sasseen’s reading log. Maybe this is unsurprising for an audio producer, but I like listening to people talk: about their job, their bad childhood, their love life, the bigots living next door. People are funny, especially when discussing things that aren’t. Here are some of the books I read this year that felt like listening. In Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Belarusian oral historian Svetlana Alexievich sits at kitchen tables across the former USSR and records people’s stories. Not for the faint of heart. Or if you are, I recommend taking frequent breaks to watch dogs at the dog park. In the seventies, right before computers would change almost everything, Chicago radio interviewer Studs Terkel walked the streets and asked people “what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.” Every single one-and-a-half-page testimony in Working feels like a novel. For The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson picked just three people to tell the story of the Great Migration: a sharecropper from Mississippi, a labor organizer in Florida’s orange groves, and a doctor from Louisiana. It’s filled with such great details, it makes me weepy with gratitude that someone saved them from the dustbin. A set of ocher silk sheets, her mother’s death, her electric bike, the time her father was imprisoned in South Africa—Deborah Levy treats every morsel of her living autobiography (Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living, Real Estate) with equal aplomb. It’s like listening to someone’s mind. Minus the repetition. —Helena de Groot Read More
December 17, 2021 The Moon in Full Long Night Moon By Nina MacLaughlin In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Harald Sohlberg. Månesskinn (Moonlight), 1907. Photo © O. Vaering, Norway The birds have gone. Off to pull worms from softer earth, drawn by the magnetic force alerting them each year to leave. Their shadows slid across the fields, reflections shivered over the dark surfaces of rivers and ponds. Each month has flown away, leaving a year’s worth of shadows and reflections on the surface of the mind. We’ve landed in December. Night is at its longest now. Read More
December 15, 2021 Poetry Two Poems By Kathleen Ossip Illustration by Anna Bak-Kvapil Henry Hudson Wood is a masculine substance. Witness the Arts and Crafts movement, the men at the helm of it. Witness, for that matter, this room: Oak floor, oak walls, oaken ceiling. The air-conditioning grate ersatz oak. The slats of the ceiling fan oak veneer. The table I write on, particleboard with no pretense to oak, oak’s sad cousin. And the craftsman-style light fixtures, triangles, right angles, dreamed up in the minds of geometers. What does geometry illuminate? I’m the sad cousin of a mind. Read More
December 14, 2021 Notes from Paris By Your Name By Madeleine Schwartz In her monthly column Notes from Paris, Madeleine Schwartz records some unexpected aspects of everyday life in France. Photo: Madeleine Schwartz Not long after I moved to Paris from the United States, in 2020, I began to hear reports of women disappearing. It happened at the bank, at the doctor’s office, when they were picking their children up from school. They were there and, suddenly, they’d been erased. Read More
December 14, 2021 Redux Redux: Naked Lightbulb 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. In the seventies, Gary Indiana found himself swept up in the experimental film and theater scenes of West Germany and New York City. “When I performed I had—and this maybe had something to do with how much I drank—a quality of demonic abandon,” he recalls in his Art of Fiction interview in our Winter issue, in which he describes the influence of directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Schroeter on his novels. Of course, the page, the stage, and the screen have always been bedfellows. To celebrate these intimate relationships, we’re unlocking August Wilson’s Art of Theater interview, James Salter’s short story “The Cinema,” Charles Simic’s poem “Mystery Theater,” an excerpt from Claudia Rankine’s play Help, and a portfolio of work by Ken Lum inspired by TV. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Interview August Wilson, The Art of Theater No. 14 Issue no. 153 (Winter 1999) I don’t write for a production. I write for the page, just as I would with a poem. A play exists on the page even if no one ever reads it aloud. I don’t mean to underestimate a good production with actors embodying the characters, but depending on the readers’ imagination they may get more by reading the play than by seeing a weak production. Read More
December 10, 2021 Best of 2021 Our Contributors’ Favorite Books of 2021 By The Paris Review Bud Smith’s “To Read and Reread” fridge list. Some Paris Review contributors—from across our print issues, our website, and our podcast—give us a peek into their reading habits. I still got that list of books on my fridge that I’m working through (one of the first pictures on my Twitter). Made it a few years ago. Classics and famous books I hadn’t read yet. When I finish one I circle it on the list and whenever I wonder what to read next and feel stumped, I just walk over to the fridge. This year I read The Brothers Karamazov, which amazed me. It was hairy and funny and, as always with the books I love, not what I expected. Easily one of the best pieces of art added to the little thing called my life. I’d read other Dostoyevsky novels and didn’t connect with them on that same crazy level I felt connected to Brothers Karamazov. The copy I had was 776 pages and I couldn’t imagine cutting it down at all. Read More