July 6, 2021 Redux Redux: Fireworks Out of Nowhere 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. Harry Mathews in Key West, Florida, 2006. This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the Fourth of July. Read on for Harry Mathews’s Art of Fiction interview, Rachel Kushner’s “Blanks,” and Rita Dove’s “Wingfoot Lake.” 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. Or, choose our new summer bundle and purchase a year’s worth of The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for $99 ($50 off the regular price!). Harry Mathews, The Art of Fiction No. 191 Issue no. 180 (Spring 2007) The ends of my books are also designed in a way that subverts any illusion that what you have become involved in is anything but the book itself … At the end of Tlooth there’s a description of fireworks out of nowhere. This is the conclusion of the book, except apparently nothing is concluded. “The labyrinth of their colors sets a dense clarity against the blankness of the night.” Read More
July 2, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cornets, Collections, and Corn Tempura By The Paris Review James Brandon Lewis. Photo: Diane Allford. James Brandon Lewis has quietly become a legend in edgy jazz circles over the past decade, picking up where Albert Ayler and David S. Ware left off under the sign of John Coltrane and adding his own highly lyrical sense of song into the mix. I hadn’t known about him, but the recent buzz (including this New York Times profile) tipped me off, and I’m deeply grateful. Lewis’s compositions and solos always feel like they are about something, even if that something is veiled or just beyond the reach of words. Lewis’s amazing new record, Jesup Wagon—his first with his Red Lily Quintet—takes inspiration from the work and life of the Renaissance man George Washington Carver. The music is alternately beautiful and jarring, anxious and clear-eyed. I especially enjoy the musical conversation between Lewis and the cornet player Kirk Knuffke. And I’m absolutely in love with the drumming of Chad Taylor, whose sound is paradoxically anxious and steady. William Parker on bass and Chris Hoffman on cello hold down the low end and add plenty of flourishes and surprises. This is a not-unfriendly way into the challenging fringe of the jazz universe, and after a few listens, Jesup Wagon becomes a good friend indeed, a record equally suited to headbanging and meditation. —Craig Morgan Teicher Read More
July 2, 2021 Look Cézanne on Paper By The Paris Review Although he’s best known for his lush, technically miraculous oil paintings, Paul Cézanne held his sketchbook near and dear. In a 1904 letter to the Fauvist painter Charles Camoin, Cézanne wrote, “Drawing is merely the configuration of what you see.” Thousands of his works on paper have survived. More than two hundred fifty of these rarely shown pieces form the basis of “Cézanne Drawing,” which will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art through September 25. A selection of images from the show appears below. Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Blue Pot, 1900–06, pencil and watercolor on paper, 19 × 24 7/8″. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Paul Cézanne, Bathers (Baigneurs), 1885–90, watercolor and pencil on wove paper, 5 × 8 1/8″. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lillie P. Bliss Collection. Photo © 2021 MoMA, NY. Read More
July 1, 2021 Bulletin Announcing Our Summer Subscription Deal By The Paris Review You’ve been inside all year … need a conversation starter? Announcing our summer subscription deal: starting today and through the end of August, you’ll find plenty to talk about when you subscribe to both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for a combined price of $99. That’s one year of issues from both publications, as well as their entire archives—sixty-eight years of The Paris Review and fifty-eight years of The New York Review of Books—for $50 off the regular subscription price. Since the beginning, when former Paris Review managing editor Robert Silvers cofounded The New York Review of Books with Barbara Epstein, the two publications have been closely aligned. With your subscription to both magazines, you’ll have access to fiction, poetry, interviews, criticism, and more from some of the most important writers of our time, from Joan Didion to James Baldwin, Susan Sontag to T. S. Eliot, Hilton Als to Elizabeth Hardwick. Subscribe today and you’ll receive: One year of The Paris Review (4 issues) One year of The New York Review of Books (20 issues) Full access to both the New York Review and Paris Review digital archives—that’s fifty-eight years of The New York Review of Books and sixty-eight years of The Paris Review. If you already subscribe to The Paris Review, we’ve got good news: this deal will extend your current subscription, while your new subscription to The New York Review of Books will begin immediately. PS: Canadian and international readers, this deal is available to you, too—for $109 and $129, respectively!
June 30, 2021 Celebrating N. Scott Momaday Place Determines Who We Are By Julian Brave NoiseCat On April 12, The Paris Review announced N. Scott Momaday as the recipient of the 2021 Hadada Award, presented each year to a “distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” To honor the multifariousness of Momaday’s achievements, the Daily is publishing a series of short essays devoted to his work. Today, Julian Brave NoiseCat places Momaday’s work in conversation with the past half century of Indigenous activism it has paralleled. Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday at his Santa Fe studio with old family photos. Photographed on Thursday, February 6, 2020. Photo: Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Albuquerque Journal/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News. The year was 1968, it was finals season at UC Berkeley, and LaNada War Jack (neé Means) sat in the way back of the auditorium, about two hundred or so students perched between her and her professor, N. Scott Momaday. Momaday was just wrapping one of the last lectures of the quarter in that voice-of-God baritone that could give Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones a run for their money. War Jack always made sure she attended Momaday’s class. A member of the Bannock Nation from Fort Hall, Idaho, she had moved to San Francisco’s Mission District through the Indian Relocation Act and got into UC Berkeley via an economic opportunity program designed for Black students, becoming the school’s first Native American undergraduate in 1968. It was incredibly meaningful to her to have a Native professor in her first year of college. At the end of this particular lecture, Momaday turned his focus to one of the most exemplary final papers of the quarter. Without asking War Jack to stand or otherwise identify herself—Momaday knew she was a shy one—he started reading her essay. Read More
June 29, 2021 Redux Redux: Nothing Is Commoner in Summer than Love 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. Phillips in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 2018. Photo courtesy of Reston Allen. This week at The Paris Review, we’re highlighting the work of queer and trans writers in our archive in honor of Pride. Read on for Carl Phillips’s Art of Poetry interview, Jeanette Winterson’s short story “The Lives of Saints,” Timothy Liu’s poem “Action Painting,” and a selection of diary entries by Jan Morris. 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. Or, choose our new bundle and you’ll also receive Poets at Work for 25% off the cover price. Carl Phillips, The Art of Poetry No. 103 Issue no. 228 (Spring 2019) INTERVIEWER With that book you were part of a watershed moment for gay poetry. PHILLIPS Around the time of my first book, Mark Doty’s My Alexandria appeared. That was a very important book for me. And within a few years were first books from Timothy Liu and Rafael Campo. To write about having sex with someone of the same sex, to write about same-sex love and vulnerability—these were very new things in poetry, as far as I could tell. It’s something that gets taken for granted now, but it’s great that something like this can be taken for granted. Not that any of this means it’s not still very frightening, even dangerous, for many people to speak openly about who they are, and to live openly as they are. For many people of my generation, there was only the hetero model—so what to do when you have the freedom to make your own model? Read More