December 22, 2020 Redux Redux: In This Version of Our Lives 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. J. G. Ballard. Photo: Fay Godwin. This week, The Paris Review is in a holiday kind of mood. Read on for J. G. Ballard’s Art of Fiction interview, Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Dancing in the Moonlight,” and Judy Longley’s poem “Brushfire at Christmas.” 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!). J. G. Ballard, The Art of Fiction No. 85 Issue no. 94, Winter 1984 I have a sense of certain gathering obsessions and roles, certain corners of the field where the next stage of the hunt will be carried on. I know that if I don’t write, say on holiday, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream. Read More
December 22, 2020 Best of 2020 The Eleventh Word By Lulu Miller We’re away until January 4, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2020. Enjoy your holiday! The sky was a slate of electric indigo. We were sitting in the bath, my year-and-a-half-old son and I. My wife popped her head in the door. He looked at her, giving her a smile I will never get, and then pointed to the painting of a magenta fish on the wall. “Sheesh,” he said. “Fish?” She said. “Sheesh!” He said. It was, perhaps, his eleventh word. He had dog and ball and duck and bubble and mama and (mysteriously in our lesbian household) dada and nana (for banana) and vroom vroom (for cars) and hah-hah (for hot) and (the root of so many of our evils) what’s dat? What’s dat? What’s dat? And then, there it was: fish. Read more >>
December 22, 2020 Best of 2020 From Woe to Wonder By Aracelis Girmay We’re away until January 4, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2020. Enjoy your holiday! Gwendolyn Brooks, in a 1977 interview, describes an ongoing argument with her husband about the fate of a running Black child: Once we were walking down a road and we saw a little Ghanaian boy. He was running and happy in the happy sunshine. My husband made a comment springing from an argument we had had the night before that lasted until four in the morning. He said, ‘Now look, see that little boy. That is a perfect picture of happy youth. So if you were writing a poem about him, why couldn’t you just let it go at that? Write a poem about running boy-happy, happy-running boy?’ […] So I said if you wrote exhaustively about running boy and you noticed that the boy was black, you would have to go further than a celebration of blissful youth. You just might consider that when a black boy runs, maybe not in Ghana, but perhaps on the Chicago South Side, you’d have to remember a certain friend of my daughter’s in high school—beautiful boy, so smart, one of the honor students, and just an all-around fine fellow. He was running down an alley with a friend of his, just running and a policeman said ‘Halt!’ And before he could slow up his steps, he just shot him. Now that happens all the time in Chicago. There was all that promise in a little crumpled heap. Dead forever. * For every sorrow I write, also I press my forehead to the ground. Also I wash the feet of our beloveds, if only in my mind, in the waters of the petals of the flowers. I cross my arms and bow to you. I cross my arms in armor wishing you protection. Read more >>
December 21, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 38 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive selections below. “ ‘O winter closing down on our separate shells,’ Diane di Prima writes in her poem ‘Rondeau for the Yule.’ As many of us have been ensconced in our separate shells for most of this year—and as many East Coasters got a white shell of snow to cap that of the pandemic—Di Prima’s closing line struck a loud chord in this reader. With the year winding down, I felt another peal at Eavan Boland’s ‘Inscriptions,’ a poem that begins in ‘holiday rooms’ but cannot ignore ‘the deaths in alleys and on doorsteps, / happening ninety miles away from my home.’ Beyond their prescience, these poems are notable in that both of these poets passed away in 2020. In this time of incalculable loss, I wanted to conclude the year’s Art of Distance with work from some Paris Review contributors to whom we said goodbye this year. Whether you’re spending the holidays with family or with a good book, I hope this reading, and remembering the remarkable work of these writers, brightens the weeks ahead. We’ll be back in January.” —EN George Steiner. Marvin Bell: “Then it is dark. The great streak of sunlight / that showed our side of snowy peaks has gone ahead.” Read More
December 21, 2020 Best of 2020 On John Coltrane’s “Alabama” By Ismail Muhammad We’re away until January 4, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2020. Enjoy your holiday! John Coltrane. Photo: Hugo van Gelderen for Anefo. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. The first thing you hear is McCoy Tyner’s fingers sounding a tremulous minor chord, hovering at the lower end of the piano’s register. It’s an ominous chord, horror movie shit; hearing it you can’t help but see still water suddenly disturbed by something moving beneath it, threatening to surface. Then the sound of John Coltrane’s saxophone writhes on top: mournful, melismatic, menacing. Serpentine. It winds its way toward a theme but always stops just short, repeatedly approaching something like coherence only to turn away at the last moment. It’s a maddening pattern. Coltrane’s playing assumes the qualities of the human voice, sounding almost like a wail or moan, mourning violence that is looming, that is past, that is atmospheric, that will happen again and again and again. What are we hearing? Read more >>
December 21, 2020 Best of 2020 Losing Smell By Shruti Swamy We’re away until January 4, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2020. Enjoy your holiday! My mother, a classically trained dancer, didn’t stop dancing all at once. When she moved to America, she still performed, still taught. She stopped teaching when I was little. Still, she would sometimes be called into action, choreographing dances for the school plays my brother and I were in. A couple decades later, she stopped doing even that. Now, I know, she doesn’t even dance by herself, in her kitchen, as I remember her doing when I was a child. “I could give up dancing,” she told me once. “It wasn’t as if I was going to die. Only, it felt like the color went out of the world.” Read more >>