January 8, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Marriage, Martinis, and Mortality By The Paris Review Sigrid Nunez. Photo: © Marion Ettlinger. A candid attitude about death and sincere empathy for grief are wrongly put at odds: to speak with frankness is regarded as insensitive, and condolences are meant to come from the heart. But often it is the card-aisle euphemisms that ring false. Sigrid Nunez’s most recent novel, What Are You Going Through, is unflinching on the theme of mortality and thus presents an openhearted honesty so rare it feels thirst-quenching. The two major elements at play: dread about the end of the world, by way of the narrator’s ex, an academic who delivers lectures about what humanity has done to ensure the demise of everything; and the imminent death of the narrator’s friend, either by cancer or (the friend hopes) her own hand. I don’t want to call this a story without hope, because to face inevitability with the dichotomous perspective of hope versus no hope … you may as well be armed with Hallmark. Nunez renders the pain of aging, especially as a woman, with quiet humor and philosophy brought to life by sharp characters. Readers of Nunez’s previous novel, The Friend, will recognize these qualities, but here they feel honed, turned up in intensity. Afterward, I flipped open a book by a young person, about young people, and how silly it all seemed. —Lauren Kane Read More
January 8, 2021 Arts & Culture Beatlemania in Yugoslavia By Slavenka Drakulić Photo: United Press International. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The most popular boy in my freshman class in high school was a certain Zoran. He was neither especially good-looking nor especially smart. But he had that special “something.” He had long hair. Not really long, just a bit over his ears. It was called “bitlsica” (the Beatles cut) and was modeled, of course, after the four band members of the Beatles. The year was 1964 and it was not a look commonly seen in our country. Teachers did not approve of it because it was considered to be a Western craze; parents did not like it either; and even some of the boys in the class bullied Zoran. I guess they were just jealous that he had the eye of all the girls. Zoran did not care much about what the old people thought, he was playing his electric guitar in a garage band and this was how a guitar player should look. We were all fifteen then. The Beatles look and Beatles music were our thing. We could listen to “our” kind of music on the radio. The radio was a magical source of music at a time when most households did not have a record player, that expensive and cumbersome machine for listening to vinyl. I remember that there was a daily program on Radio Zagreb from noon to one called “Listeners’ Choice,” which we always listened to and that’s where I heard the Beatles for the first time. Or we would listen to the legendary Radio Luxembourg, which used to air the latest hits. Later, starting in 1968, every Monday evening Radio Belgrade devoted its so-called “First Program” to rock ’n’ roll music in Yugoslavia. Read More
January 7, 2021 Re-Covered Re-Covered: Bette Howland By Lucy Scholes In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. When I began writing this column two years ago, I initially restricted myself to discussing only titles that were out of print. But over the past year, as publishers continue to increase their efforts to resurrect lost classics, I’ve begun including pieces about previously neglected books that have been rediscovered and repackaged for a new generation. There are many success stories: the unexpected triumph of the Vintage Classics edition of John Williams’s Stoner, a book that sold less than two thousand copies when it was first published in 1965 before falling swiftly out of print, but as a reprint went on to become the Waterstones Book of the Year in 2013; or Lucia Berlin’s unforeseen posthumous literary stardom in 2015 after her selected short stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women (edited by Stephen Emerson for Farrar, Straus and Giroux), became a New York Times best seller. But there’s no more interesting tale of neglect and rediscovery than that of Bette Howland. Howland was a working-class Jewish writer from Chicago who in a single prolific decade published three books—a memoir, W-3 (1974), and two short-story collections Blue in Chicago (1978) and Things to Come and Go: Three Stories (1983)—and won both Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, then all but disappeared from view. She resurfaced briefly, sixteen years later, in 1999, with the publication of what would be her final work, the novella-length story “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” in TriQuarterly, but it garnered scant attention. If it hadn’t been for an editor’s fortuitous discovery in a secondhand bookshop shortly before Howland died in 2017, at the age of eighty, hardly anyone would have been familiar with her name, or her incredible work. Read More
January 6, 2021 Look Inside the Order Is Always Something Wild By Elizabeth Alexander Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Tie the Temptress to the Trojan, 2018. Collection of Michael Bertrand, Toronto. © Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. We stand before each other and look. Who are you? What do we see in each other? Perhaps our eyes meet this first time. Perhaps we tilt to the side, resist directness. We make a first assessment. Then we keep looking, and more is revealed in every glance, tilt, moment, and we come deeper into knowing. Each Lynette Yiadom-Boakye painting is like looking into a story or an entire life. They call to mind vignette collections such as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), and Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings (1964), wherein poems like “Mr Bleaney” imagine all that is behind the faces of the sometimes lonely people we see in our day to day, if we pause to look and consider. There are entire lives inside one frame, one poem, entire souls and stories inside the singletons and groups in these paintings. Read More
January 6, 2021 Melting Clocks Reality Is Plasticine By Eloghosa Osunde In Eloghosa Osunde’s new column, Melting Clocks, she takes apart the surreality of time and the senses. My memory of my childhood is a black hole, save for the moments and ages marked by revelations and miracles. Take age six for instance, the year I learned to call things that are not (yet) as though they are (already.) It’s a biblical lesson, this, and my brothers were born from inside it, after years of waiting. Leaning on those words from the mouth of my mother, I prayed nightly for twin siblings, and soon started to talk about them like I knew them already. In a sense, I did. One, because they were real before their bodies were formed, and two, because my requests were already cool wax on the inside of God’s ear. I was taught things about holding hope unswervingly, about manifesting with laser focus, and the veracity of those lessons raised the hairs on the back of my neck even when there was no one there. I sealed prayers with amens and had them delivered swiftly; fleshed wishes out in my heart that stumbled into my life, already breathing. The pattern begins in my first name, directly translated to mean “it is not hard for God to do.” As in, nothing is. That name leads my head. My family took my dreams seriously, because God put the future behind my eyes often, but when the seeing got too heavy, I gave one of my many eyes back to God—the one that got visions, that put the weight of knowing on me—saying, This one is too much. Age thirteen, I believe, the year I learned that God understands consent, that They will never force anything on me for the sake of it. The spiritual controls the physical, so everything breathes there before it ever lands here. I’ve never lost this lesson, which is also an inheritance, as in drooling through the genetic code. A gift, as in given freely. I did hide it though, so as not to look unhinged. For a long time, there was nothing I wanted more than to be normal, to be as a person should, to be young, to unknow things. It still takes work to release the weight of normal, of should. Time isn’t real, that’s true, but years are time capsules in a sense. This year just gone shook the ground, took people in numbing numbers and cost some of us more than others, because nothing is equal. At points, I experienced consistent blocks of happiness, despite the world. A big part of that was made possible by safety and the privilege of a home with a roof and walls that disconnected me from nearly everything, but the other part was a dogged refusal to believe the world I want to see isn’t born yet. It is. That’s not hope; it’s faith, which Hebrews 11 defines as the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” Twenty-twenty turned me six again, treating stories like my life, the future like the present, the present like the past; stacking surreal on top of real, time on top of time. I don’t know what it looks like from the outside. But it feels a lot like peace if you’re wearing my skin. I’ve been wearing my skin. Read More
January 5, 2021 Redux Redux: All of This Was Out of Season 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. Boris Pasternak. Portrait: Auenkoff, 1960. This week at The Paris Review, we’re looking out the window to the snow and cold outside. Read on for Boris Pasternak’s Art of Fiction interview, Annie Proulx’s story “The Wamsutter Wolf,” and Donika Kelly’s poem “Dear—.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!). Boris Pasternak, The Art of Fiction No. 25 Issue no. 24 (Summer–Fall 1960) I remember coming to Pasternak’s house from the railroad station at dusk, taking a shortcut I had learned near the cemetery. Suddenly the wind grew very strong; a snowstorm was beginning. I could see snow flying in great round waves past the station’s distant lights. It grew dark very quickly; I had difficulty walking against the wind. I knew this to be customary Russian winter weather, but it was the first real metol—snowstorm—I had seen. It recalled poems by Pushkin and Blok, and it brought to mind Pasternak’s early poems, and the snowstorms of Doctor Zhivago. To be in his house a few minutes later, and to hear his elliptical sentences so much like his verse, seemed strange. Read More