December 9, 2021 Poetry Two Self-Portraits By Tove Ditlevsen Illustration by Na Kim Self-Portrait 1 I cannot: cook pull off a hat entertain wear jewelry arrange flowers remember appointments send thank-you cards leave the right tip keep a man feign interest at parent-teacher conferences. I cannot stop: smoking drinking eating chocolate stealing umbrellas oversleeping forgetting to remember birthdays and to clean my nails. Telling people what they want to hear spilling secrets loving strange places and psychopaths. I can: be alone do the dishes read books form sentences listen and be happy without feeling guilty. Read More
December 7, 2021 Studio Visit Reading Upside Down: A Conversation with Rose Wylie By Emily Stokes Rose Wylie, Hold the Right Rail, 2021, oil on canvas in two parts, 184 x 311 cm. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner. Rose Wylie, whose watercolor Two Red Cherries appears on the cover of the Review’s Winter issue, lives in a cottage in Kent, England, that smells of firewood. A treacherous, narrow staircase leads up to a small studio. (“Hold the rail!” Wylie warned me.) Her large, funny, vibrant figurative paintings—made on unprimed, unstretched canvas—cover the walls and floor. When I visited on a recent Saturday afternoon, as Storm Arwen brewed outside, she told me she had spent the first years of her life in India, where her father worked as an engineer. The family moved back to England during the Second World War. Wylie studied at an art school in Kent and then a teacher-training program at Goldsmiths where, at nineteen, she met her husband, the painter Roy Oxlade. She put her own professional ambitions aside to raise their children, channeling her artistic energies, she said, into “soups, jam, clothes, curtains, and Christmas cards.” In her forties, she completed a degree at the Royal College of Art, and worked in relative obscurity until eventually, in her late seventies, her career started to take off, with solo exhibitions at Tate Britain and elsewhere. We talked at her kitchen table, drinking Lapsang tea. The mince pies I’d brought from London had crumbled on the journey, which seemed to delight her. Read More
December 6, 2021 Redux, Uncategorized Redux: In Honor of Jamaica Kincaid 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. Cover art by Jonathan Borofsky. In our Winter 1981 issue, The Paris Review published an early story by Jamaica Kincaid. Titled “What I Have Been Doing Lately,” it follows the narrator’s recursive, dreamlike journey in search of home. (You can listen to her reading it on the inaugural season of The Paris Review Podcast.) The story was included in Kincaid’s 1983 debut collection, At the Bottom of the River, which drew from her early life in Antigua and marked her as a singular voice in American letters. Kincaid has gone on to publish five novels and five books of nonfiction—she was a prolific New Yorker Talk of the Town columnist—as well as many other stories. In 2020, the Daily published two of her essays, “I See the World” and “Inside the American Snow Dome.” It’s our pleasure to announce that on April 12, 2022, The Paris Review will present the Hadada, our annual lifetime achievement award, to Jamaica Kincaid at our Spring Revel. To celebrate, we’re highlighting the work of previous Hadada winners in this week’s Redux. Read on for the Art of Fiction no. 223 with Joy Williams, Kincaid’s short story “What I Have Been Doing Lately,” N. Scott Momaday’s poem “Concession,” and a series of collages by John Ashbery. 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. Eleven Collages by John Ashbery. Interview Joy Williams, The Art of Fiction No. 223 Issue no. 209 (Summer 2014) The Keys were still kind of strange and unspoiled in the eighties. I went around the state and wrote things down, but nobody talked to me. Nobody! I’d limp into these bed-and-breakfasts and people would snarl at me and not want to talk. I mean, honestly, it was terrible and I had no idea what I was doing. And it wasn’t edited, nobody edited it. Read More
December 3, 2021 The Review’s Review Telegraphic, Incandescent By The Paris Review Still from Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) courtesy of the Criterion Collection. Years ago, I went to go and watch the Mike Leigh movie Another Year at a cinema in Bristol. It is a typical Mike Leigh film in that it is just about matchless in its emotional acuity, punctuated by shots where the camera lingers for about ten seconds more than is tolerable on the face of a character who has either had a shit life or is going to go on to have a shit life; it’s funny; it has an overall aesthetic atmosphere that makes you think of allotments even when an allotment never appears on screen; and it’s hellbent on presenting the most unglamorous vision of London that could possibly exist. Read More
December 2, 2021 Bulletin Jamaica Kincaid Will Receive Our 2022 Hadada Award By The Paris Review Jamaica Kincaid. Photo: Kenneth Noland Save the date: on April 12, 2022, The Paris Review will present the Hadada, our annual lifetime achievement award, to Jamaica Kincaid at our Spring Revel. In our Winter 1981 issue (no. 82), the Review published a short story by Kincaid, then thirty-two, titled “What I Have Been Doing Lately.” The story follows the narrator’s recursive, dreamlike journey in search of home, and was later included in Kincaid’s debut collection, At the Bottom of the River (1983), which drew from her early life in Antigua and marked her as a singular voice in American letters. The book won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Also in the collection is the indelible “Girl,” a 650-word sentence of practical instructions uttered by a mother to her daughter on how to avoid becoming “the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread.” Read More