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
January 5, 2021 Arts & Culture What Writers and Editors Do By Karl Ove Knausgaard Photo: © BillionPhotos.com / Adobe Stock. The work of the literary editor is conducted in a kind of shadow, cast by the name of the author. A few editors have stepped out of that shadow, becoming perhaps more infamous than famous, for the labels “editor” and “famous” seem like a contradiction in terms, essentially incompatible. An example is Gordon Lish, who became known in the literary world as “Captain Fiction” and whose authors included Raymond Carver. Another is Maxwell Perkins, editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, whose epithet was the “Editor of Genius.” One of the most celebrated editing jobs ever done was carried out by Ezra Pound, not in any formal capacity, but as a friend, his ruthless hand paring down an early version of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into the form in which we know it today. Gordon Lish’s editing was quite as unconstrained and uncompromising, the style we think of as Carver’s being in fact Lish’s work. Carver himself was rather ambivalent about it, though it unquestionably established his name as a writer. This became apparent when Carver’s own manuscript was published after his death, his stories there being quite differently ample and expansive, barely recognizable. There is little doubt that the editor’s Carver was better than Carver’s Carver, and how must that have made the author feel as he stood in the spotlight to receive his accolades, hailed as the great new name of American literature? The example is interesting, for the job of the editor is to exert influence, not for his own good, nor necessarily for the author’s, but for that of the book, and if we can suggest that Lish went too far, we must also ask in relation to what? After all, the book was certainly the better for it. Were the wounded feelings of its author more important? Without Lish, Carver’s books would have been poorer and he would have been a reasonably good writer rather than a brilliant one. This raises the question of what a writer is, and where the boundaries run between the author, the book, and the surrounding world. America has a tradition of strong editors, though the issue is not specifically American. I know of Norwegian editors who to all intents and purposes move their author’s feet, so to speak, in the dance of their literary endeavors, who basically instruct them: left foot here, right foot there, left foot here, right foot there. And I know, too, of Norwegian writers at the exact opposite pole, who deliver print-ready manuscripts to their editors and would change publishers promptly at the suggestion of reworking anything. Read More
January 5, 2021 Arts & Culture My Gender Is Masha Gessen By Jen Silverman Masha Gessen at their apartment in Moscow in the early nineties © Igor Stomakhin Masha Gessen is a bilingual writer, activist, and keen observer of—actually, that isn’t what this is about. Masha Gessen is hot. “I know,” you’re saying, “I have eyes.” No, but bear with me. Other people in this world are hot. Alexander Skarsgård is a tall drink of water, but I’m not moved to write home about it. Masha Gessen’s sex appeal is meaningful to me, and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about (when I’m not thinking about dying from COVID-19). Read More