April 7, 2021 In Memoriam Four Memories of Giancarlo DiTrapano By The Paris Review Giancarlo DiTrapano, the fearless founder, publisher, and editor of Tyrant Books, died this past week at the age of forty-seven. Fiercely independent and loyal to his writers through and through, he was an irreplaceable presence in the literary world, a one-man powerhouse of the avant-garde. With New York Tyrant magazine, he championed rising talents such as Rachel B. Glaser and Brandon Hobson, and his record with Tyrant was astounding: over the course of a little more than a decade, he published Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book, Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life, an omnibus of Garielle Lutz’s short stories, Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life (an excerpt from which appeared in the Fall 2014 issue and received the 2015 Plimpton Prize), and plenty of other strange, deeply felt, highly original books. His work was far from finished. In the months preceding his death, he had been cementing plans to launch a new press. Below, four of his writers and friends (with DiTrapano, there was little distinction) remember his generosity, dark sense of humor, and commitment to literature. Giancarlo DiTrapano. Photo courtesy of Chelsea Hodson / MORS TUA VITA MEA Workshop. I was at a reading, looking at a novel for sale on a folding table. A guy walked to my side and said what’s up. I said I wanted to buy the novel but had spent all my money on beer. “Take it,” he said. Looked like somebody I’d work construction with. “Take it.” He put the book in my hand. This was the publisher of the book, Giancarlo DiTrapano. An open person, a kind person. He’d just give a stranger something, no reason. I knew him only five years. Gone way, way, way too soon. Can’t think of anybody cooler. Was more alive than anybody else I knew. I’ve always admired people who dream to do something and then seemingly before they’ve even woken up from the dream, there they are in the midst of it. At a kitchen table in a cramped apartment, launching something beautiful. That’s what he did. There’s a lot of talk about being “punk rock,” about being an individual—how is it even possible to walk one’s own path, by one’s own standards? I don’t know. But all you’d have to do is look at my shelf of releases from Tyrant Books. There they are, twenty of them in a row. Open any one. You can see the answer in there. Authors he deeply loved. Telling stories they had to tell. Each author could explain how passionate Giancarlo was. How when he believed in someone, in something, it was almost impossible to change his mind. You might get in a blowout fight over what the book needed, but in the end, what was birthed into the world was right, was beloved. Was real. Didn’t come out of a boardroom. The opposite. He rooted for the underdog. He helped the underdog come up into brighter light. Read More
April 6, 2021 Redux Redux: A Man Says Yes without Knowing 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. Elizabeth Bishop. Photo: Alice Helen Methfessel. Courtesy of Frank Bidart. This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the release of Poets at Work, our latest anthology of interviews. Read on for work by three of the writers included in the book: Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Poetry interview, Ishmael Reed’s poem “The Diabetic Dreams of Cake,” and Pablo Neruda’s poem “Emerging.” You can also read Paris Review poetry editor Vijay Seshadri’s introduction to the book on the Daily. 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, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off. Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Poetry No. 27 Issue no. 80 (Summer 1981) I can write prose on a typewriter. Not poetry. Nobody can read my writing so I write letters on it. And I’ve finally trained myself so I can write prose on it and then correct a great deal. But for poetry I use a pen. About halfway through sometimes I’ll type out a few lines to see how they look. Read More
April 6, 2021 Arts & Culture The Tarot Is a Chameleon By Rhian Sasseen Leonora Carrington, Playing Tarot, ca. 1995, graphite and gouache on paper, 22 x 36 1/4″. Private collection. © Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, New York. “With a mysterious smile on her lips,” writes the Chilean film director Alejandro Jodorowsky, “the painter whispered to me, ‘What you just dictated to me is the secret. As each Arcana is a mirror and not a truth in itself, become what you see in it. That tarot is a chameleon.’ ” This comes from Jodorowsky’s The Book of Tarot; the painter in question is Leonora Carrington, the British-born, Mexico City–based surrealist famed in life and death as much for her strange, entrancing writings as for her visual art. And this quote appears in another book, Fulgur Press’s The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, which reproduces her newly discovered illustration of the Major Arcana. The tarot is a chameleon, yes, but as Carrington’s vision of it shows, so, too, is it a chance for both the imposition and the abandonment of narrative; in Carrington’s hands, as with her fiction, there is an embrace of the illogical, the fictive, the dream. Read More
April 5, 2021 Arts & Culture The Making of Billy Wilder By Noah Isenberg Portrait of young “Billie” Wilder, ca. 1926. Courtesy of the Film Archiv Austria. Long before the award-winning Hollywood screenwriter and director Billy Wilder spelled his first name with a y, in faithful adherence to the ways of his adopted homeland, he was known—and widely published, in Berlin and Vienna—as Billie Wilder. At birth, on June 22, 1906, in a small Galician town called Sucha, less than twenty miles northwest of Kraków, he was given the name Samuel in memory of his maternal grandfather. His mother, Eugenia, however, preferred the name Billie. She had already taken to calling her first son, Wilhelm, two years Billie’s senior, Willie. As a young girl, Eugenia had crossed the Atlantic and lived in New York City for several years with a jeweler uncle in his Madison Avenue apartment. At some point during that formative stay, she caught a performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West touring show, and her affection for the exotic name stuck, even without the y, as did her intense, infectious love for all things American. “Billie was her American boy,” insists Ed Sikov in On Sunset Boulevard, his definitive biography of the internationally acclaimed writer and director. Wilder spent the first years of his life in Kraków, where his father, the Galician-born Max (né Hersch Mendel), had started his career in the restaurant world as a waiter and then, after Billie’s birth, as the manager of a small chain of railway cafés along the Vienna-to-Lemberg line. When this gambit lost steam, Max opened a hotel and restaurant known as Hotel City in the heart of Kraków, not far from the Wawel Castle. A hyperactive child, known for flitting about with bursts of speed and energy, Billie was prone to troublemaking: he developed an early habit of swiping tips left on the tables at his father’s hotel restaurant and for snookering unsuspecting guests at the pool table. After all, he was the rightful bearer of a last name that conjures up, in both German and English, a devilish assortment of idiomatic expressions suggestive of a feral beast, a wild man, even a lunatic. “Long before Billy Wilder was Billy Wilder,” his second wife, Audrey, once remarked, “he behaved like Billy Wilder.” Read More
April 2, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bars, Balzac, and Buses By The Paris Review Vanessa Springora. Photo courtesy of HarperVia. “For many years I paced around my cage, my dreams filled with murder and revenge,” writes Vanessa Springora toward the beginning of her book Consent (translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer), which details the abusive relationship she endured at the age of fourteen with the writer Gabriel Matzneff, then fifty. “Until the day when the solution finally presented itself to me, like something that was completely obvious: Why not ensnare the hunter in his own trap, ambush him within the pages of a book?” Consent is that elegantly laid trap, a memoir that asks sharp questions about desire, literature, and a culture that fetishizes female youth and inexperience over female art. Springora is merciless in her portrayal of how easily Matzneff—referred to in the book only as “G.M.”—was able to prey upon her and other young girls and boys in plain sight, how he used her letters and likeness in his work without her consent and wrote celebrated paeans to sex tourism with children in the Philippines and affairs with barely teenage girls in Paris. It’s immensely upsetting to read about how seemingly every adult in Springora’s life turned a blind eye to all of this (at one point, a doctor snips Springora’s hymen to allow Maztneff to penetrate her; the philosopher Emil Cioran tells a crying Springora that it is an “honor” to have been chosen by Matzneff), but there are also moments of real catharsis as she grows older and begins to analyze what happened. In the end, Consent is as much an indictment of how writing and literature—from fairy tales to love letters to classic works like Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet—can betray girls and women as it is a cool-eyed deconstruction of a particular moment in time. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
April 2, 2021 On Poetry A Continuous Musical Delight By Vijay Seshadri Published earlier this week, Poets at Work is the latest release from Paris Review Editions, the book imprint of The Paris Review. The anthology gathers thirteen Art of Poetry interviews from the magazine’s nearly seven decades of history. In the book’s preface, which appears below, The Paris Review’s poetry editor, Vijay Seshadri, explains the process by which he selected this baker’s dozen, as well as the particular pleasures of the magazine’s Writers at Work interview series. The Paris Review’s first Art of Poetry interview was with T. S. Eliot, and was published in issue no. 21, Spring–Summer 1959. As the magazine had been publishing interviews since its inception, in 1953, transforming in the process a commonplace American journalistic feature into something like an art form, it isn’t unreasonable to ask why it took so long to get around to a poet. (Robert Penn Warren had been interviewed, but about his fiction, and an early attempt to corral Robert Frost had failed.) Poets sensitive about the prerogatives of their art should be reassured, though, just by the nature of the Paris Review interview itself—a natural-seeming object that is actually delicate and labor intensive and involves the intersection of many serendipitous elements, not the least of which is the rare sympathy between interviewer and subject that brings a conversation to life. Also, along with the usual chances and mischances of publishing, when it came to a magazine that saw itself as canonical (in an era when there was such a thing as the canonical) and at the same time improvisational, secular, hip, casual, and cosmopolitan, editorial choices must have been made under multiplying, contradictory pressures. Whatever the reasons, once the interviews of poets got going, they sprinted along, energized perhaps by the editors’ coming to recognize that poets are very good at talking about themselves. The resulting hundred-plus conversations from which this selection was made are rich and various, and so satisfying across the board that choosing just a baker’s dozen was an excruciating job. Even limiting the set to poets born before the historical watershed of World War II left over sixty to choose from—interviews with fathers of civilizations (Frost, William Carlos Williams, Eliot, W. H. Auden), poets unfairly neglected or forgotten (Conrad Aiken, Charles Tomlinson, May Sarton, Amy Clampitt, John Hall Wheelock, Karl Shapiro), masters outside the anglophone tradition (George Seferis, Yevgeny Yevtushenko), and several of the most celebrated poets of the Silent Generation (Seamus Heaney, Gary Snyder, Charles Wright). Read More