November 2, 2021 Arts & Culture Games of Taste By David Kurnick Diego Delso, Interior of the Vasconcelos Library in Mexico City , 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons A few years ago, I attended an academic conference where a prominent scholar of Latin American literature announced that he hated The Savage Detectives, a novel he considered overwritten and overrated. The statement provoked enthusiastic hooting from the back of the room, as if in glee at a taboo being broken. At the coffee break, I approached the critic and confessed I was a fan of the novel. Bolaño is a one-trick pony, he replied, and his trick is to parody and empty out the genres of Latin American literature—the dictator novel, the novela negra, the novel of testimony, and so on. This trick organized his writing at the level of the sentence, the chapter, and the novel. I said this sounded like an interesting trick, at least; he conceded that it was true Bolaño was a master at this exercise—but once you saw the trick there was nothing else, and hispanophone writers were no longer interested in his work. He claimed, happily, that the Latin American sales of Bolaño’s books were down. I asked him why he thought U.S. readers, who mostly lacked familiarity with these Latin American literary traditions, had embraced Bolaño. This, he told me, was the result of a clever marketing campaign: Bolaño’s big books had been released alongside new editions of Kerouac, and American readers were encouraged to understand the Chilean writer as a Southern Cone Beat. I expressed skepticism: Did anyone remember that marketing campaign? Was Kerouac selling well? My interlocutor was losing patience. Critics love Bolaño, he said, because they can pour whatever theory they please into his work. He told me Bolaño’s work was an excuse for American readers not to read any other Latin American literature. When you read The Savage Detectives you’re not enjoying yourself, he said, as much as you think you are. Read More
November 2, 2021 Redux Redux: Weird Ghost 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. COURTESY ROLLIE MCKENNA COLLECTION. This week at The Paris Review, we’re telling scary stories. Read on for James Merrill’s Art of Poetry interview, Joy Williams’s short story “Tricks,” William Faulkner’s ghost story “The Werewolf,” and Bhanu Kapil’s poem “Three Ghost Stories: 1944–48,” paired with photos from Flavia Gandolfo’s portfolio “Masks.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Interview James Merrill, The Art of Poetry No. 31 Issue no. 84 (Summer 1982) INTERVIEWER The Ouija board, now. I gather you use a homemade one, but that doesn’t exactly help me to imagine it or its workings. An overturned teacup is your pointer? MERRILL Yes. The commercial boards come with a funny see-through planchette on legs. I find them too cramped. Besides, it’s so easy to make your own—just write out the alphabet, and the numbers, and your yes and no (punctuation marks too, if you’re going all out) on a big sheet of cardboard. Or use brown paper—it travels better. On our Grand Tour, whenever we felt lonely in the hotel room, David and I could just unfold our instant company. He puts his right hand lightly on the cup, I put my left, leaving the right free to transcribe, and away we go. We get, oh, five hundred to six hundred words an hour. Better than gasoline. Read More
October 29, 2021 The Review’s Review Organic Video By The Paris Review Shigeko Kubota’s Berlin Diary: Thanks to My Ancestors. 1981. Cathode-ray tube monitor, crystal, ink, and twine. 9 × 8 × 11″ (22.9 × 20.3 × 27.9 cm). “Everything is video,” the Japanese-born, New York–based artist Shigeko Kubota remarked in a 1975 interview. “[We] eat video, shit video, so I make video poems … Part of my day, everyday, the memory—I like to put in video.” Overlooked compared to some of her other Fluxus-associated peers (including her husband, the pioneering video artist Nam June Paik), Kubota’s work is now the subject of a small but brilliant exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Liquid Reality, which spans her artistically fertile period from 1976 to 1985. In Kubota’s hands, video abandons its cold, sleek pretense, instead taking on a wild quality, with inverted color schemes and pulsating time warps akin to an overgrown garden. “Film was chemical, but video was more organic,” she told The Brooklyn Rail in 2007, eight years before her death at the age of seventy-seven. In her work, mountains stand tall, water seeps, and, in 1979’s River, a literal stream babbles over three neon-colored monitors, like some magic rivulet snatched from an old mythology and transported to our technological age. Read More
October 29, 2021 Eat Your Words Cooking with Mary Shelley By Valerie Stivers Photo: Erica Maclean This year, I suggest a sad and lovelorn Halloween, tender and tolerant of monsters. The book for the mood is the 1816 novel Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (1797–1851), a classic of gothic literature whose pages inspired foraged-fare acorn scones, a cocktail, and a bread pudding—not weird science, but foods of love. Readers, critics, and biographers have long sought the key to Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s life, which had all the tragedy and plot twists of a good gothic novel. Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the early feminist text A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and William Godwin, a radical political writer as famous as Wollstonecraft in his time. When Mary was sixteen, she fell for a young poet on the make, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and ran off to France with him, along with her fifteen-year-old stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who also later had a sexual relationship with Shelley. The ménage ran out of money and returned to England, but stayed together, perennially short of cash and living according to the principles of free love. Their conduct ostracized Godwin despite his radical reputation, and most of Mary’s circle of friends. Read More
October 28, 2021 On Writing Skinning a Cat: On Writer’s Block By The Paris Review Yesterday, we launched Season 3 of our podcast, with an episode that includes Yohanca Delgado reading her story “The Little Widow from the Capital.” To mark the occasion, we asked Delgado what allows her to begin writing again when nothing else has worked: When I struggle to write, I shrink my expectations: two words a day. No more, no less. The part of my brain that seeks narrative shyly re-emerges. Maybe day one is easy: a first and last name. But even as I close my laptop, I don’t want to stop there. Beatriz Ortiz wants something. And word by word, the exposed brick wall in Beatriz’s office emerges, the smell of the tangerine she’s peeling… It becomes an Oulipian exercise, a game of Pass the Story. In A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders describes the construction of a story as a gradual process, in which different versions of the writer slowly build the best possible draft through small revisions. The version of me who has just watched Viy has access to a different set of narrative links than the version of me who has just re-read a story from Christine Schutt’s Pure Hollywood or Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s Heads of the Colored People, or who has just spent an hour googling “is shrink-wrap recyclable.” Each day, a version of myself floats a decision about where the story might go, and I relearn that by putting one word in front of another, I can make my way to places I’ve never been before. Read More
October 27, 2021 Bulletin The Paris Review Podcast Returns By The Paris Review With our acclaimed podcast, The Paris Review gives voice to the sixty-eight years of our archives. Season 3 launches today, with the release of episode 19, “A Memory of the Species.” We open with a recording of the literary critic Richard Poirier in conversation with Robert Frost for the poet’s 1960 Art of Poetry interview, from issue no. 24. Next, the Italian poet Antonella Anedda and her translator Susan Stewart discuss Anedda’s poem “Historiae 2,” published in issue no. 231. The American vocal ensemble Tenores de Aterúe then reimagines the poem as a song in the folk tradition of Anedda’s native Sardinia. And Yohanca Delgado reads her story “The Little Widow from the Capital,” from issue no. 236, in which a chorus of Dominican women living in a New York apartment building gossip about their new neighbor’s talents for embroidery and witchcraft. Listen now at theparisreview.org/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will arrive every Wednesday in November. And don’t forget to catch up on Season 1 and Season 2. The Paris Review Podcast is produced in partnership with Stitcher.