January 17, 2023 Home Improvements A Place for Fire By Elisa Gabbert In our Winter issue, we published Mieko Kanai’s “Tap Water,” a story whose remarkable first sentence spills across more than two pages and describes the interior of the narrator’s new apartment as if it were the architecture of her emotional landscape. Who among us has not resolved to stop obsessing over some small piece of our home, only to fail? Inspired by Kanai’s story, we’re launching a series called Home Improvements, in which writers consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction. We were still in Colorado when we booked a first appointment with a realtor in Rhode Island. In the hour before our video call, my husband suggested we make a list of must-have and nice-to-have features in a house. He wrote “3 BR” in the must-have column on a page in his notebook, because we each wanted our own office, then leaned back in his chair. “Built-in bookshelves would be nice,” he said. We’ve always wanted built-in bookshelves. We didn’t yet know we were going to run out of space in the shipping container we’d rented and would have to throw out all the shelves we owned. “A fireplace,” he added thoughtfully. I went into my strident mode, a part of my bad personality that for some reason I cannot change. “A fireplace isn’t optional!” I said, taking the pen and writing “fireplace” in the must-have column. “I’m not going to buy a house without a fireplace.” We’d spent eleven years in Denver, all in the same apartment, not because we liked the apartment so much, but because every year, when our lease renewal came up, we never felt much like moving. We had moved out there from Boston with eighty or ninety boxes of books, and we didn’t want to pack them up again. We kept hitting that snooze button. Finally John convinced me to move back to New England—he was born in Connecticut, and he never stopped missing it, the trees and the stone walls and all that. What pushed us over was the housing market, which was more reasonable in Providence than in Denver. John kept showing me listings for adorable Colonials with mortgage payments not much higher than our rent. They looked cozy, and I thought I could be happy in New England if we had a little house to settle down in—one last move for us and for the books—if we could cozy up together on a couch and read by the fire. Read More
January 13, 2023 The Review’s Review On Three Plays By The Paris Review MassDOT salt shed, Sandwich, Massachusetts, November 7, 2013. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. In Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House, a group of former theater collaborators reunite at the bar they once frequented together. They’ve since all gone their separate ways, some making good money in TV; others have cobbled together livings from various odd jobs. But when their sad-sack friend Dick (played by Shawn himself in the New York premiere of the play) arrives late to the party, face bruised and crusted with dried blood, the play reveals its insidious side. At first, Dick acts as if nothing has happened, but then, when pressed, he earnestly explains, “I was beaten, rather recently, by some friends, but you see, I actually enjoyed it very much, in the end. Really, it was great. No—I loved it!” Dick does what just about all the play’s characters will go on to do: compulsively excuse horrible ideas and horrible actions. Act like nothing happened. Act like everyone else is making too big a deal out of something. The play glides along so blithely that its evolution into a genuinely frightening horror story might catch you by surprise. A year after it premiered in New York, the ensemble cast, led by Shawn and Matthew Broderick and directed by Scott Elliott, recorded their performances for the podcast Intercepted. It works beautifully as a radio drama, especially since one of the most perverse and hilarious pleasures of this play is to hear those voices argue so pleasantly and so reasonably in favor of cruelty, as if they’re kindly injecting you with a needle full of poison. —Lucas Hnath, author of “Old Actress” Read More
January 12, 2023 At Work An Angle in My Eye: An Interview with Mary Manning By Olivia Kan-Sperling From Ciao!, in issue no. 242 (Winter 2022). Courtesy of Mary Manning and Canada Gallery. Mary Manning’s portfolio for the Winter issue of the Review documents a summer spent in Italy. Their collages are perfect expressions of the special kind of vision you have on vacation, when everything—pizza receipts, sidewalk seating, wildflowers—looks new and exciting, strangely saturated. Manning’s work not only captures but literally incorporates their world in order to rearrange it, ever so gently, at an angle: in Ciao!, there’s a cantaloupe wrapper and a bag from a pharmacy, plus photographs of their friends, of a Nicola De Maria fresco, and of a performance of a Trisha Brown dance. Manning was born in Alton, Illinois in 1972 and lives in New York City. In 2006, they began sharing digital photographs of their everyday life on their blog alongside scans of objects and links to the work of musicians, filmmakers, writers, and other artists they admire. Today, their work appears in print and on gallery walls across North America. The book Manning was preparing last summer, Grace Is Like New Music, a collection of images spanning ten years of their work, will be published by Canada Gallery in February. We talked about looking at images nonlinearly, as well as Italian graphic design, postmodern choreography, and bags (paper and plastic). INTERVIEWER Do you take photos differently when you’re on vacation? MANNING Yes. For better, for worse, you’re changed when you’re on vacation. There can be a long stretch of time in New York City where I’m just not in the flow of being inspired. When you travel, you’re plucked out of the sky and plopped down on the other side of a huge body of water. You get off a plane and it’s a shock to be in a different light. Read More
January 11, 2023 Syllabi Relentlessness: A Syllabus By Colm Tóibín Photograph by Sophie Haigney. In our new Winter issue, Belinda McKeon interviewed Colm Tóibín, the author of ten novels, two books of short stories, and several collections of essays and journalism. “In the autumn of 2000,” he told her, “I taught a course at the New School called Relentlessness, and I chose to teach translations of some ancient Greek texts, and Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Ingmar Bergman, Sylvia Plath. The class was very useful because it gave me a bedrock of theory about what this sort of work was doing. … Once you have that certain authority, you can actually write a plainer prose.” We asked Tóibín for his syllabus from that class, along with a short introduction, as the first in a new series we are launching called Syllabi. I am interested in texts that are pure voice or deal with difficult experience using a tone that does not offer relief or stop for comfort. Sometimes, the power in the text comes from powerlessness, whether personal or political. Sometimes, death is close or danger beckons or violence is threatened or enacted. Sometimes, there is a sense of real personal risk in the text’s revelations. Sometimes, there is little left to lose. All the time, the tone is incantatory or staccato or filled with melancholy recognitions. Read More
January 10, 2023 In Memoriam In Remembrance of Charles Simic, 1938–2022 By The Paris Review A page from Simic’s manuscript for “The One to Worry About.” Charles Simic, a former Poet Laureate and a giant of life and literature, died on Monday at the age of eighty-four. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and countless other accolades, and a longtime teacher at the University of New Hampshire, Simic was also a beloved poetry editor of the Review, alongside Meghan O’Rourke, from 2005 to 2008. Born in 1938, Simic was a prolific writer of both poetry and nonfiction. He wrote often about war-torn Belgrade, where his childhood was overshadowed by the Nazi invasion. (He immigrated to the United States in 1954.) But Simic also pondered the quotidian, the mundane, and even the miniscule. He liked insects, and told Mark Ford in 2005, for his Art of Poetry interview, that he thought ants were “pretty cool.” When he was starting out, he said, he often wrote not for editors but for friends, who enjoyed his “epics about toothpicks and dripping faucets.” Read More
January 10, 2023 Home Improvements My Rattling Window By Sophie Haigney My window. Photo by Sophie Haigney. In our Winter issue, we published Mieko Kanai’s “Tap Water,” a story whose remarkable first sentence spills across more than two pages and describes the interior of the narrator’s new apartment as if it were the architecture of her emotional landscape. Who among us has not resolved to stop obsessing over some small piece of our home, only to fail? Inspired by Kanai’s story, we’re launching a series called Home Improvements, in which writers consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction. I moved into an attic room in a tall house last March. It is a lovely house on a pretty street. The offer of the room seemed to have fallen into my lap at a time when I needed it badly. It was not too expensive, and it was in a redbrick old-fashioned neighborhood I would come to love; it seemed too good to be true, and it would not in fact last, because the rent would soon go up. But for the time being I even have a little balcony with a view of the highway and of a billboard reading “Kars4Kids.” My room is oddly shaped and small but in a way I like—someone who once stayed there compared it to a ship’s cabin and I thought yes, that’s right, my little cabin. There was only one real problem, which I noticed on my second night sleeping there. The window next to my bed rattled. At first I thought it was typical highway noise, just amplified, but soon it became clear that the glass was flapping, wobbling, shaking. The sound it made was a strange stuttering, occasionally high-pitched, almost verging on whistling. I asked my roommate to talk to the landlord, and the landlord failed, for weeks and then months, to appear. I took a video of the noise in the middle of one sleepless night and sent it to my roommate for validation. He responded, “OMG that’s like a horror film.” The window didn’t rattle all night long, or even every single night—it was intermittent, which made the experience even more strange and like a fever dream, because I would wake up at odd times and then drift back to sleep and then wake up again and in the morning feel like perhaps I was exaggerating the problem to myself. Sometimes for a few days I would think the rattling had resolved itself, but then it would come back, loud as ever. I was not sleeping very much or very well, but my window wasn’t the only reason for this. Read More