September 30, 2021 The Review’s Review Strangers and the Moon By The Paris Review 17776 (screenshot), by Jon Bois. Four years after its first chapter was published on SB Nation in 2017, Jon Bois’s serialized multimedia novella 17776: The Future of Football is still my favorite (and some of the only) “new media” lit online. Told through text interspersed with video and graphics that mix satellite imagery, newspaper clippings, and Telestrated sports-field diagrams, the story follows the sentient space probe Pioneer 9 as it flies over the United States of the future: a land in which no one dies any more, but everyone still loves football. With their newfound immortality, Americans have developed more and more baroque constellations of rules for their favorite game, sending their players on elaborate, millennia-long scavenger hunts across the country. An epic reminiscent of Infinite Jest, it’s a dazzlingly idiosyncratic work of art that is equal parts exercise in speculative game design, history of a dying empire, and fable about the meaning of play, humanity, and technology. But 17776 isn’t just an experiment with form; Bois is a startlingly sensitive writer, and scrolling through his simple, color-coded dialogue feels like looking at the 1967 photo of Earth taken by an astronaut on the Apollo 8 mission: lonely, but awe-inducing. —Olivia Kan-Sperling Read More
September 30, 2021 Arts & Culture The Curlews of Galloway By Patrick Laurie Frank Southgate, Autumn. Waders on the Breydon muds–little stint, curlew, dunlin and curlew-sandpiper, 1904, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Galloway is unheard of. This southwestern corner of Scotland has been overlooked for so long that we have fallen off the map. People don’t know what to make of us anymore and shrug when we try and explain. When my school rugby team traveled to Perthshire for a match, our opponents thumped us for being English. When we went for a game in England, we were thumped again for being Scottish. That was child’s play, but now I realize that even grown-ups struggle to place us. There was a time when Galloway was a powerful and independent kingdom. We had our own Gaelic language, and strangers trod carefully around this place. The Romans got a battering when they came here, and the Viking lord Magnus Barefoot had nightmares about us. In the days when longboats stirred the shallow broth of the Irish Sea, we were the center of a busy world. We took a slice of trade from the Irish and sold it on to the English and the Manxmen who loom over the sea on a clear day. We spurned the mainstream and we only lost our independence when Scotland invaded us in the year 1236. Then came the new Lords of Galloway and the wild times of Archibald the Grim, and he could fill a whole book himself. The frontier of Galloway was always open for discussion. Some of the old kings ruled everything from Glasgow to the Solway Firth, but Galloway finally settled back on a rough and tumbling core, the broken country which lies between tall mountains and the open sea. This was not an easy place to live in, but we clung to it like moss and we excelled on rocks and saltwater both. We threw up standing stones to celebrate our paganism, then laid the groundwork for Christianity in Scotland. History made us famous for noble knights and black-hearted cannibals. You might not know what Galloway stands for, but it’s plain as day to us. Read More
September 29, 2021 Re-Covered Re-Covered: The Fortnight in September by R. C. Sherriff By Lucy Scholes In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. “The man on his holidays becomes the man he might have been, the man he could have been, had things worked out a little differently,” writes R. C. Sherriff in The Fortnight in September, his unassuming but utterly beguiling tale of an ordinary lower-middle-class London family during the interwar years, on their annual holiday to the English seaside town of Bognor Regis. “All men are equal on their holidays: all are free to dream their castles without thought of expense, or skill of architect.” Read More
September 29, 2021 At Work Allowing Things to Happen: An Interview with Tyshawn Sorey By Craig Morgan Teicher Tyshawn Sorey. Photo: Sharif Hamza. Tyshawn Sorey is a remarkable figure in contemporary music. For the past twenty years, he has been among the most highly regarded and in-demand drummers in avant-garde jazz, playing with major contemporary figures such as Steve Coleman, Kris Davis, Vijay Iyer, and Steve Lehman, as well as veterans like Marilyn Crispell, Myra Melford, Roscoe Mitchell, and John Zorn. On albums like Alloy, The Inner Spectrum of Variables, and Verisimilitude—the trilogy of trio records he released between 2014 and 2017—he blurs the boundaries between jazz and classical music, exploring sound textures and patches of silence as well as driving rhythms. Over the same period, Sorey, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017 and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, has been developing his oeuvre as a classical composer. Read More
September 28, 2021 First Person Three Letters for beyond the Walls By Caio Fernando Abreu Caio Fernando Abreu. Photo courtesy of Adriana Franciosi. First Letter for beyond the Walls Something happened to me. Something so strange that I still haven’t figured out a way to talk about it clearly. When I finally know what it was, this strange thing, I will also know the way. Then I’ll be clear, I promise. For you, for myself. As I’ve always meant to be. But for now, please try to understand what I’m trying to say. It is with significant effort that I write you. And that’s not just a literary way of saying that writing means stirring the depths—like Clarice, like Pessoa. In Carson McCullers it hurt physically, in a body made of flesh and veins and muscle. For it is in my body that writing hurts me now. In these two hands you cannot see on the keyboard, with their swollen veins, wounded, bursting, with wires and plastic tubes attached to needles inserted into veins inside which flow liquids they say will save me. Read More
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