June 29, 2021 At Work The Momentum of Living: An Interview with Clare Sestanovich By Elinor Hitt Photo: Edward Friedman. Clare Sestanovich’s short story “By Design,” which first appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of this magazine, features the unforgettable Suzanne, a woman facing accusations of sexual harassment, going through a divorce, and struggling to accept her adult son’s independent life. In the opening tableau, she sits across from her future daughter-in-law at a restaurant. Suzanne keeps her criticism of the impending marriage to herself but outwardly betrays a deep, unspoken malaise. She consumes an entire basket of bread by soaking each bite in red wine, as if gorging on the sacrament. In Objects of Desire, which includes the story, Sestanovich revitalizes James Joyce’s style of “scrupulous meanness”—depicting the setting and inhabitants of her narratives in an ultrarealistic, if sometimes unforgiving, light. Moments of epiphany, or at least self-understanding, accompany everyday activities. Suzanne, for example, finds solace not in a major dramatic resolution but in the acquisition of a houseplant. But Sestanovich engages more self-consciously with a matriarchal literary lineage. Her steady hand and bone-clean prose recall such foremothers as Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and Jhumpa Lahiri. She weaves each narrative around universal trials of womanhood. Through hysterectomies, miscarriages, and unstable relationships, her cast of canny protagonists come to terms with their wants and needs. Over the past year, Sestanovich has continued to release new work in Harper’s, The Drift, and The New Yorker, where she is an editor. Her characters provided me companionship throughout the solitude of quarantine, and the publication of her full-length debut this week coincides with our uneasy communal reemergence. Sestanovich’s stories about social encounters—meeting strangers on flights, striking up conversations with bartenders, sitting through dinners with in-laws—feel eerily appropriate for this moment of easing back into the world. Sestanovich and I corresponded by email in the weeks leading up to the publication of Objects of Desire. At the start of our conversation, she reminded me that we had attended the same Quaker prep school. There, students met for worship every week, sitting in silence to await communion with God or one another. This got me thinking about how such veneration of silence might have affected the emergence of Sestanovich’s voice as a writer. Her stories are built around what is waiting to be said—the desires that remain unspoken or held within. INTERVIEWER I loved the piece you wrote for The New Yorker earlier this month about chance encounters. The city is “a cartography of a shared world that does not insist on bringing everyone together,” you write, adding that “in parting ways, we are still imparting something of ourselves.” You structure many of your stories around chance and coincidence as well. What purpose, what friction, do passing encounters bring to a narrative? SESTANOVICH “Don’t insist on bringing everyone together” is actually a pretty good distillation of my views on plot—though when it comes to hosting a dinner party, I promise I’m more conscientious about togetherness! There’s a certain narrative tidiness that coincidence, if used well, can helpfully disrupt. A lot of us have expectations, in both life and fiction, about the hinges on which our stories are going to turn—you know, the moments the Hallmark aisle tells you to commemorate. Births, deaths, all the things you’d throw parties about. Read More
June 28, 2021 Arts & Culture On Baldness By Mariana Oliver Georg Pencz, Samson and Delilah, ca. 1500–1550, engraving, 1 7/8 × 3 1/8’’. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I The ships landed on the beaches of Normandy before dawn. Along eighty kilometers of coastline, amphibious vessels slid out of the water like sea monsters and shook themselves dry, flinging off their damp bodies thousands of men smeared with the same euphoria of war. Insatiable, the beach seemed to devour the troops. Aircrafts helped feed the assault from the sky: one by one, the soldiers surrendered themselves to flight, to the allure of the fall. Their jellyfish silhouettes—ephemeral but perfect for slipping through the air—negotiated gravity until the feel of the sand returned to them the animal weight of their bodies. The landings lasted more than a month and with them the war was near its end. No seaborne invasion has ever equaled that of the Allies on the coast of France. Following the tides of the English Channel, armies from all over the world gathered to free France from Nazi occupation and to contain Nazi control of Western Europe. Besides soldiers, the crew also included spies, nurses, and correspondents. Among them were Robert Capa, J. D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway—their eyes wide open. * Thanks to the work of Robert Capa, there is now a large photographic archive of the Allies’ expedition in France. Many of his photographs capture in detail the textured expressions of civilians and soldiers, whose faces convey everything from the meekness of subjugation to the ecstasy of liberation, from the understanding of survival to the sheen of fear. Among these images that bear witness to the Allies’ victory over the Nazis and shed light on the jubilation that flooded the streets of French towns is a series of photographs taken in Chartres just two months after the Normandy landings. The series is a visual record of the violence deployed against women accused of carrying on relationships with German soldiers or collaborating with them. While men convicted of the same crime were killed, the women were subjected to a different kind of punishment: in a public place, as everyone watched, their hair was shorn down to their scalps. The purpose of their shaved heads was not only to provoke disgust in those who saw them but also to serve as a protracted reminder of the betrayals they were accused of. Read More
June 25, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Dopamine, Magazines, and Exhaustive Guides from A to Z By The Paris Review Hazel Jane Plante. Photo: Agatha K. Courtesy of Metonymy Press. Just as there are an infinite number of stories to be told, there are an infinite number of ways to tell a story. Take Hazel Jane Plante’s Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) as case in point. When the narrator’s best friend dies, she decides to write an encyclopedia about her friend’s favorite television show. While Plante’s novel takes the form of an A-to-Z guide to the fictional one-season TV series Little Blue, it also tells the story of a queer trans woman mourning the loss of her straight trans best friend, for whom she felt an overwhelming, unrequited love. Through her thorough examination of the show, the narrator creates a beautiful, holistic homage to Vivian’s life. At the end of Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), I found myself in awe of the book’s author. Not only has Plante imagined an incredibly complex TV show from scratch, she’s written an entire encyclopedia about said show, and somehow told a deeply heartfelt story of mourning, love, and friendship in the process. —Mira Braneck Read More
June 25, 2021 From the Archive The List as Body: A Collection of Queer Writing from The Paris Review By Mira Braneck Photo: Charlotte Brooks. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. RL Goldberg’s 2018 essay “Toward Creating a Trans Literary Canon” offers up a list of phenomenal trans writing: Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride, a truly life-changing book; Leslie Feinberg’s utterly devastating Stone Butch Blues; and one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing, Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. But it is Goldberg’s explanation of the ethos behind the list to which I keep returning: “It’s not a canon exactly, but a corpus. It’s something more like a body: mutable, evolving, flexible, open, exposed, exposing. It’s the opposite of erasure; it’s an inscription.” To celebrate Pride in my capacity as intern here at The Paris Review, I’ve been reading works by the queer authors in the latest issues of the magazine. The archive contains a myriad of fantastic queer writers, but I wanted to recognize some of our contemporary contributors, folks whose work has appeared in our most recent pages. As I read, I thought a lot about Goldberg’s notion of inscription and the list as body: mutable, evolving, flexible. What resulted is a corpus nowhere near complete, final, or comprehensive—and I don’t want it to be. Rather, it’s meant to pay tribute to the diversity of art created by our queer contributors, each of them offering something distinct to readers of the Review. Some of the work is about sexuality, some of it is about sex, and some of it is about war, about gender, about eggs in a hot pan. Many of these writers hold identity at the center of their work; the particularities of each piece demonstrate the various (and incredibly individual) meanings of “identity” itself. Lydia Conklin’s “Rainbow Rainbow,” a coming-of-age story published in the Summer 2021 issue, depicts two queer suburban teenage girls, one out and one coming to terms with her burgeoning sexuality, as they venture to Boston to meet an internet crush. In “Token,” Jericho Brown ruminates on the privilege inherent in invisibility: … I want the scandal In my bedroom but not in the mouths of convenience- Store customers off the nearest highway. Let me be Another invisible, Used and forgotten and left To whatever narrow miseries I make for myself Without anybody asking, What’s wrong. … Read More
June 25, 2021 Bulletin The Winners of 92Y’s 2021 Discovery Poetry Contest By The Paris Review For close to seven decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers—John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mary Jo Bang, and Solmaz Sharif, among many others—have gone on to become leading voices in their generations. This year’s competition received close to a thousand submissions, which were read by preliminary judges Julia Guez and Timothy Donnelly. After much deliberating, final judges Rick Barot, Patricia Spears Jones, and Mónica de la Torre awarded this year’s prizes to Kenzie Allen, Ina Cariño, Mag Gabbert, and Alexandra Isles. The runners-up were Walter Ancarrow, Hannah Loeb, Dāshaun Washington, and JinJin Xu. The four winners receive five hundred dollars, publication on The Paris Review Daily, a stay at the Ace Hotel, and a reading at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center in the fall of 2021. We’re pleased to present their work below. Read More
June 24, 2021 The Moon in Full Strawberry Moon By Nina MacLaughlin In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Watercolor illustration from Aurora consurgens, a fifteenth-century alchemical text. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Summer now, and the petals are wet in the morning. The moon was born four and a half billion years ago. It’s been goddess, god, sister, bridge, vessel, mother, lover, other. “Civilisations still fight / Over your gender,” writes Priya Sarukkai Chabria. Dew is one of its daughters—or so the Spartan lyric poet Alcman had it in the mid-seventh-century B.C.: “Dew, a child of moon and air / causes the deergrass to grow.” Cyrano de Bergerac, twenty-three hundred years later, imagined a dew-fueled way of getting to the moon. “I planted myself in the middle of a great many Glasses full of Dew, tied fast above me,” he writes in his satirical A Voyage to the Moon, published in 1657. If dew rises to the sky, evaporating into the atmosphere, he reasons, enough ought to take him, too. He lifts off, but “instead of drawing me near the Moon, as I intended, she seem’d to me to be more distant than at my first setting out.” He smashes a few dew vials and drops back to earth. A firework rocket gets him where he wants to go, and on the moon he meets a Spaniard who’d arrived there pulled by birds. This figure, the space archaeologist Alice Gorman points out, alludes to a text published a few decades before de Bergerac’s work. Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone tells the story of a Spanish soldier who’s pulled to the moon by twenty-five swans. He launches on his lunar adventure at the moment in the year when the birds fly south. But Godwin didn’t know that south was where the birds went. Sometimes we forget to think of what we know. In the seventeenth century, Europeans had no idea where the birds went in winter. Every year a mystery. One November morning, off they flew, only to drop out of the sky again come spring. In 1684, Charles Morton—a “renegade physicist,” according to Gorman—wrote a pamphlet arguing that storks spent winters on the moon. Read More