July 28, 2025 At Work Ten Questions for Joy Williams By The Paris Review WITH ROBERT STONE IN KEY WEST, CA. 1995. “Forgive me for the things I have done and for the things I have left undone,” Joy Williams said in 2014, in her Paris Review Art of Fiction interview. “I may very well write out of a sense of guilt.” Her new story “After the Haiku Period,” which appears in the Review’s Summer 2025 issue, is a story of guilt askew, which centers on a pair of twins in their sixties, the daughters of a coal-bed-methane-drilling-company tycoon (“We called Daddy Midas,” one sister says. “Everything he touched turned into some ghastly energy source”) and their devoted “sage,” Jimmy, who knows just what to pack for their picnics. Fueled by white wine, lemon squares, and family shame, Camilla and Candida make a pastime of hatching dramatic plots to make the “destroyers and despoilers and death dealers” pay—until finally, one night, they take the plunge. Williams—who has published twelve stories in The Paris Review, dating back to 1968—is hesitant to talk about craft. (“I do believe there is, in fact, a mystery to the whole enterprise that one dares to investigate at peril,” she said in her interview.) Still, we couldn’t resist sending her a few questions about the mysterious enterprise of this particular story, which she responded to over email. THE EDITORS Will you tell us about where you’re writing to us from, and set the scene? WILLIAMS The desert, where it’s 110 degrees. Read More
July 25, 2025 Letters Letters from Claude McKay By Claude McKay James L. Allen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. To Langston Hughes April 24, 1926 Nice, France My dear Langston I had the book alright and beg your forgiveness for not thanking and congratulating you too before. But for three months I’ve been going around with your letter in my pocket (that nice racy one about your party at [Carl] Van Vechten’s) with the intention of writing you a real letter. But I have been so worried and unsettled I could not settle down to the job. I picked up a hundred francs here, a dollar there, trying to live in a way you can’t imagine. With me, trying to live became a job, a problem. I moved from Juan-les-Pins to Cagnes from Cagnes to Nice from Nice to Menton and back again to Nice, wherever I heard of a cheap room I hunted it up. But you can live cheap when you have the teensiest bit of sure money coming to you. When you haven’t, it’s stupid to bother. When I came out of hospital I found a job as valet-butler to a civilised cracker doctor and his Russian wife. I stayed with them a month. The experience was so interesting I kept a diary of it. When I say civilized I mean it in the typical cracker sense. I couldn’t stay over the month and I stayed it out simply because I’d lose my 200 francs if I hadn’t. It gave me an insight into what the French “bonne a tout faire” has got to do. You work from 7–10 at night without any letting up. You get indifferent food, a bed etc. That is, it’s little different from what a slave domestic was doing in Virginia a hundred years ago. I quit it to work on a building—(but I had almost forgotten to tell you that the old cracker told me that if I were a good boy and stayed with him I could have all his clothes when he was finished wearing them! That would be a part of my wages. I used to hear of that in America but I had to come to France to prove it for myself!) Read More
July 24, 2025 On Books Modernist Blondes By Marlowe Granados Earle K. Bergey’s cover painting for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Before I read Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the 1953 Howard Hawks film had already influenced my existence as a young girl in the form of a Marilyn Monroe VHS box set. It wasn’t the glitz and glamour that attracted me (though it helped) but the gleeful mischief of two women putting one over on a world of men. A femme fatale without anything too fatal. At its core, there was an idea of using one’s feminine wiles for good, if not for society then at least for oneself— and maybe a girlfriend or two. By twenty, reading the novel helped contextualize my own mischief within a lineage of women. Perhaps getting a man to buy you gifts wasn’t feminist vigilantism, but it was indeed fun. At that age, there are so few opportunities to test one’s power and charm. It taught me the valuable lesson that laughter at the expense of powerful men was not so expensive after all. Read More
July 21, 2025 At Work The Guts of the Russian Brontosaurus-Cow: A Conversation with Vladimir Sorokin By Joshua Cohen Vladimir Sorokin. Photograph by Maria Sorokina. My problems started much earlier than the night before deadline—they started in my childhood, when I completely failed to learn Russian, and though an inability to function in a writer’s original language has never stopped me and shouldn’t stop anyone from pronouncing upon a translation, I admit that in my maturing years I ran into compounding difficulties, including the facts that I’ve never lived and written in a country that proscribes me, that I’ve never had to leave the country of my language and gone to settle abroad, that I’ve never had to live up to or live against a new identity projected onto me in exile as something of an artist-spokesman for political opposition, and—believe it or not—that I’ve never been mistaken for a one-man repository or symbol-embodiment of my literary culture, which happens to be one of the foremost literary cultures in the history of the world. It’s so much easier, I’m realizing now, to introduce a book by a writer who stayed at mediocre home, surrounded by his more-or-less admiring publishers who publish him, and his more-or-less admiring readers who read him; it’s so much easier, in other words, to introduce a book by a writer who is dead, which is admittedly how I feel sometimes, in my shut-into-my-apartment-and-English existence. Read More
July 18, 2025 On Psychoanalysis For a Little Fresh Air … By Jamieson Webster James Webster flying over Mount Fuji. In a dream someone says to me, “You have been left in the dust.” An idiom for being left behind, outdone, but I hear it literally. I’m covered in dust and left there. It’s in my lungs. I am allergic to dust mites. I also remember its biblical twin: “Dust you are, and to dust you will return.” Another one bites the dust. “Let me remind you that the word pollution, with its religious and medical origin, first meant desecration of places of worship by excrement, and later the soiling of sheets by ejaculation, usually from masturbation,” the philosopher Michel Serres writes. I’ve been wondering about the relationship between dreams and trash lately as I listen to patients. What parts of ourselves do we leave lying around? Lacan was increasingly preoccupied by the residue, or waste, excreted by our will to representation. Our excessive mental efforts score the earth in both senses of stain and scratch. This thought seems to go along with the increasing volume of pollution, of trash, of civic ill will, that marks the extension, as Serres writes, “of appropriated space … and also the increase in the number of subjects of appropriation—individual, family, nation.” Either we are still animals marking territory, or we have exceeded the animal realm by attempting to mark all territory—sea, earth, air, and even outer space. My friend laughed at the idea that we were excited by a trace of water on Mars. “There’s so much water here!” she exclaimed. Serres calls for universal dispossession before the war of all wars begins. No one willingly gives up ownership of anything, I think. Sacrifice, if we are to make it, requires some kind of structure that wills us toward it. Freud, for his part, was interested in the expansion outward of the ego by day and its recoiling at night in dreams. I think of patients who have tried to tell me that dreams are just the brain cleaning up trash. This isn’t possible. Not because I believe in dreams, but because we don’t even know what to do with real trash. Better interpretation: a reaction to the act of nocturnal emission. A universal tendency toward debasement in the sphere of dreams. Read More
July 17, 2025 First Person The Same Damned Thing Over and Over By J. D. Daniels Photograph courtesy of J.D. Daniels. I knew a girl. Her hobbies included telling me I was wrong about my own life. More than once she said to me, “You say that you feel trapped in your past, and everything is repeating. I don’t understand that. Everything feels new to me, all the time,” and she struck a heroic pose, despite the fact that we had already had this argument forty times. Ladies and gentlemen, for your entertainment, we now present, snarling at each other, the world’s smartest ants. “Those who cannot remember the past,” wrote Santayana, “are condemned to repeat it.” Not as impressive as it seems, because those who can remember the past are also condemned to repeat it. It’s the only thing that ever happens: the past repeats itself. Everyone is condemned to repeat the past. The question is whether you are able to admit it or not. My mamaw used to say, “I thought life was just one damned thing after another until I realized it’s the same damned thing over and over.” Read More