September 28, 2021 Redux Redux: Collapse Distinctions 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 His Analysands’ Chair, 2000. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about psychoanalysis and the interpretation of dreams. Read on for Adam Phillips’s Art of Nonfiction interview, an excerpt from Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend, Joanna Scott’s short story “A Borderline Case,” and Mark Scott’s poem “Freudian Tenderness,” as well as selections from a 1984 portfolio of Louise Bourgeois drawings. Interview Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7 Issue no. 208 (Spring 2014) Psychoanalytic sessions are not like novels, they’re not like epic poems, they’re not like lyric poems, they’re not like plays—though they’re rather like bits of dialogue from plays. But they do seem to me to be like essays, nineteenth-century essays. There is the same opportunity to digress, to change the subject, to be incoherent, to come to conclusions that are then overcome and surpassed, and so on. Read More
September 24, 2021 Arts & Culture Wild Apples By Lauren Groff Samuel David Colkett, Landscape with Cottage, 1842, oil on canvas, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The path to the Oracle was best before dawn, past the pond sleepily switching from frogsong to birdsong, through the dark woods fringed with ferns, up the hill so steep that no matter how slowly I went, I was always out of breath when I reached the top. Three years ago, my parents contracted with a logging company to do what they thought was routine cutting of their two hundred and fifty thickly forested acres in New Hampshire. Perhaps they were thinking of men in picturesque plaid shirts with axes and the careful removal of a few choice maples; instead, a machine of murder arrived. It was the size of a two-story house, leaked diesel on the road, relentlessly tore up everything in its path. For hours, my parents sat frozen in their farmhouse, listening to what my father would later describe as the sound of the trees screaming. At last, the sound broke my parents, and they ran outside and up the hill and put their sexagenarian bodies in front of the giant machine, forcing it to stop. They were left with a lawsuit for breach of contract and two acres so apocalyptically chewed up that, the first time I saw them, I wept. Read More
September 23, 2021 The Review’s Review Reproducing Bodies By The Paris Review Linus Borgo, Bed of Stars: Self-Portrait with Elsina and Zip, 2021, oil on canvas, 46 x 68″ (detail). Linus Borgo makes consistently uncanny and gorgeous work, some of which will be featured at Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles this January. My favorite of their self-portraits—deadlocked with Fuzzy FTM Transsexual Amputee Plays with Magic Wand and Poppers (Self Portrait)—is Bed of Stars: Self Portrait with Elsina and Zip, in which Linus lies in a pool of deep blue, star-stamped sheets, an oblique banner of sunlight across his torso and thighs, his body filling the frame, toes nearly poking through the border. It’s a work that questions what it is to reproduce an image, a pet, a body part. Of course, this is the terrain of figurative art. But duplicates also appear within the piece: Linus’s left bionic forearm and its phantom mirror not only each other, but his right forearm; the cat dozing by his ankle complements the stuffed one cradling his elbow; the bedspread underneath him simulates the sky above. The effect is overwhelming, and intensified by meticulousness: blades of hair golden in the sun, creases in the pillowcase, a naval piercing, cursive lettering on a nameplate necklace. In this representation of the self, there is an abundance of selves existing side by side simultaneously. What more could you ask for in a self-portrait? —Jay Graham Read More
September 23, 2021 Bulletin Announcing the Winners of the 2021 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize By The Paris Review In 2017, Honey & Wax Booksellers established an annual prize for American women book collectors, aged thirty years and younger. Our goal, at the time, was to expand the popular perception of who book collectors are (and can be) by highlighting original collections built by young women, often without the knowledge or help of the rare book trade. By celebrating their achievements, we hoped to inspire potential collectors to look at their shelves differently, to identify patterns and projects, to think critically about what aspects of the historical record they might be uniquely qualified to recognize and preserve. In this, our fifth year, it is especially gratifying to award the Honey & Wax Prize to a collector who has applied repeatedly, each time with a stronger and more focused collection. In 2017, as a graduate student at the University of Arizona, Margaret Landis submitted a general collection of books about women in science: a reading list that had inspired her in her scientific career. A well-chosen reading list is a valuable thing, but it is not a book collection: a collector pursues not just texts, but objects with material histories of their own. The 2017 submission did not place. Read More
September 22, 2021 On Books Bezos as Novelist By Mark McGurl The first thing that needs to be noted about the collected works of MacKenzie Bezos, novelist, currently consisting of two titles, is how impressive they are. Will either survive the great winnowing that gives us our standard literary histories? Surely not. Precious few novels do. Neither even managed, in its initial moment of publication, to achieve the more transitory status of buzzy must-read. But this was not for want of an obvious success in achieving the aims of works of their kind—that kind being literary fiction, so called to distinguish it from more generic varieties. In Bezos’s hands it is a fiction of close observation, deliberate pacing, credible plotting, believable characters and meticulous craft. The Testing of Luther Albright (2005) and Traps (2013) are perfectly good novels if one has a taste for it. The second thing that needs to be noted about them is that, after her divorce from Jeff Bezos, founder and controlling shareholder of Amazon, their author is the richest woman in the world, or close enough, worth in excess (as I write these words) of $60 billion, mostly from her holdings of Amazon stock. She is no doubt the wealthiest published novelist of all time by a factor of … whatever, a high number. Compared to her, J. K. Rowling is still poor. Read More