August 25, 2020 Redux Redux: August’s Wilt 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. August Wilson. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about, well, August, and how the month is drawing to a close. Read on for August Wilson’s Art of Theater interview, Ben Okri’s short story “The Dream-Vendor’s August,” and Lucia Perillo’s poem “Beauty Bark.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or, better yet, subscribe to our special summer offer with The New York Review of Books for only $99. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more. August Wilson, The Art of Theater No. 14 Issue no. 153, Winter 1999 INTERVIEWER Can you say what first drew you to the theater? WILSON I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it. And also I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. A novelist writes a novel and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling. Read More
August 25, 2020 Arts & Culture Mark Twain’s Mind Waves By Chantel Tattoli ©Ellis Rosen In February, in our family iMessage group, my brother asked our mother to indulge his craving for egg salad sandwiches. “That is so weird,” I replied. “I dreamt of mom’s egg salad two days ago.” It had been years since I had eaten it, but chewing in my dream, I realized the crunch of the celery that my mother added was the secret. “I had the same epiphany!!!” Dustin texted back. “The celery!!!” He went on: Maybe this was the chemo he was doing, but Chinese and BBQ from spots we liked out of state were also appealing. He beat—by half a second—a message I was in the midst of sending about how I longed for food from those exact places. We exclaimed at the chances. Dustin joked that my two-month-old had “given us magical powers,” or that our family dog was controlling our minds. “THE LIMIT DOES NOT EXIST,” he said. When my brother passed away at twenty-nine from complications of leukemia some weeks later, I livestreamed his funeral in Florida from under lockdown in France. The distance between us was imponderable, as great as it could ever be. We’d both wanted the egg salad. That the connection between us would be cut did not follow. Grief breaks your heart; also, it breaks your brain. While we keep the people we love in our hearts, it began to seem that Dustin was in my head more than anywhere else. Mark Twain, though he did not go for spiritualism or immortality, would have agreed that siblings could tune into each other from opposite sides of the ocean. He believed, he once wrote, that a mind “still inhabiting the flesh” could reach another mind at great remove. There was an inciting incident in the spring of 1875 (before Twain’s red hair went gray), which he recollected as “the oddest thing that ever happened to me.” Read More
August 25, 2020 Inside the Issue A Story in One Sentence By The Paris Review To showcase the variety of the short stories published in the Summer issue, we asked the five writers to select a single sentence that marked the moment they first knew what story they were writing. This sentence struck me because it is delivered completely innocently, almost boastfully. It tells us that the narrator has learned about sex in a way that occludes the danger of pedophilia. “Men” shouldn’t kiss “girls,” obviously. Girls are children. Men are adults. —Ottessa Moshfegh, “I Was a Public Schooler” Read More
August 24, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 23 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 pieces below. “It was early in the pandemic and our Art of Distance newsletters that I mentioned my daily ambulations through Alphabet City with my pooch, Willow. Then, daffodils were blooming along the East River, seemingly oblivious of the sirens racing up FDR Drive. These days, in that same stretch of park, we’re waiting for the trees that were uprooted in Isaias to be cleared, but we’ve also found a rogue clutch of sunflowers. The city is quieter, by dint of lower viral rates and a certain amount of road-tripping neighbors, and there are picnic blankets dotting the lawns of the park. I used to complain about August here: it was sweaty and stinky and felt like the city went on hold. Everyone who could quit New York did, leaving the rest of us to brave that particular funk of the subway platform when the tunnel temperature crept above 90. But this year, as we brace for the fall’s uncertainty, viral and political, the dog days of summer are particularly welcome. Willow and I are walking slower, longer, and trying to hold on to this pause, this small peace.” —Emily Nemens, Editor There have been few bright spots through the ordeal of COVID-19, but for the staff of The Paris Review, one of them has been welcoming some new wolves into the pack: two colleagues have acquired pandemic puppies (Cashew and Penny). In celebration of our canine companions, here are some selections from the archive: “The dog was not demanding, it was modest in its requirements, although it drank a lot of water; it liked its water. It could square itself off like a package in a chair, it could actually resemble a package.” In Joy Williams’s “Substance,” Louise is delivered an unexpected furry gift. Read More
August 24, 2020 Arts & Culture A Collision with the Divine By Helen Macdonald © Jana Behr / Adobe Stock. The deer drift in and out of the trees like breathing. They appear unexpectedly delicate and cold, as if chill air is pouring from them to the ground to pool into the mist that half obscures their legs and turning flanks. They aren’t tame: I can’t get closer than a hundred yards before they slip into the gloom. I’ve been told these particular beasts are fallow deer of the menil variety, which means their usual darker tones have been leached by genetics to soft cuttlefish and ivory, and they’re the descendants of a herd brought here in the sixteenth century as beasts of venery, creatures to be pursued and caught and cooked. The look of the estate hasn’t changed much since then. It’s still an extensive patchwork of pasture and forest—except now the M25 runs through it, six lanes of fast-moving traffic behind chain-link fence threaded with stripling trees. The mist thickens, the light falls, the deer appear and disappear, and the deep roar of the motorway burns inside my chest as I walk on to the bridge that spans it. This bridge is grassed along its length, and at dusk and dawn, I’ve been told, the deer use it as a thoroughfare from one side of the estate to the other. I know my presence will dissuade them from crossing so I don’t want to stay too long, but I linger a little while to watch the torrent of lights beneath me. For a while the road doesn’t seem real. Then it does, almost violently so, and at that moment the bridge and the woods behind me do not. I can’t hold both in the same world at once. Deer and forest, mist, speed, a drift of wet leaves, white noise, scrap-metal trucks, a convoy of eighteen-wheelers, beads of water on the toes of my boots, and the scald of my hands on the cold metal rail. Deer occupy a unique place in my personal pantheon of animals. There are many creatures I know very little about, but the difference with deer is that I’ve never had any desire to find out more. They’re like a distant country I’ve never wanted to visit. I know the names of different deer species, and can identify the commonest ones by sight, but I’ve always resisted the almost negligible effort it would take to discover when they give birth, how they grow and shed their antlers, what they eat, where and how they live. Standing on the bridge I’m wondering why that is. Read More
August 21, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Dictators, Deep Souls, and Doom By The Paris Review Lyonel Trouillot. Photo: Georges Seguin. CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0). A sense of unease pervades the Haitian writer Lyonel Trouillot’s Street of Lost Footsteps, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale, as does a sense of political hopelessness. The novel charts, over the course of a single night, a violent uprising in Port-au-Prince against the dictator Deceased Forever-Immortal, told from the perspectives of three characters: a taxi driver, a madam in a brothel, and a post office employee. Central to the story is the problem of how one should approach the subject of political violence in a work of art. In language that does nothing to prettify—in fact, the poetry of Trouillot’s sentences serves to better underscore the horrors he describes—the characters navigate lives lived in a moment of grim uncertainty. “How could we have made love,” the postal worker asks his lover, “when we were perhaps already dead, uncertain of our own existence, even incapable of imagining the point of existence? … What do such pretty phrases have to do with the paralysis of terrified flesh, already absent from its own desires?” These are salient questions, questions that have no answers. “In the silence,” he continues, “the dream flowered in her eyes. In some way or another, we had led the night to us.” —Rhian Sasseen Read More