March 3, 2020 Redux Redux: Monologue for an Onion 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. Jane and Michael Stern at home in Connecticut in 1975, with the manuscript of the first edition of Roadfood. This week at The Paris Review, we’re weeping over the alliums in our archive. Read on for Jane and Michael Stern’s Art of Nonfiction interview, Aleksandar Hemon’s short story “Fatherland,” and Sue Kwock Kim’s poem “Monologue for an Onion.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast! Jane and Michael Stern, The Art of Nonfiction No. 8 Issue no. 215 (Winter 2015) We were eating in all these road-food places, which didn’t have a name then. There wasn’t the concept of “road food”—there were just these little mom-and-pop cafés, and we kept a little notebook of these places. Read More
March 3, 2020 Dice Roll The Pioneer of Online Gambling By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. Original Illustration © Ellis Rosen In April 1995, traders on the floor of the Pacific Exchange were in a frenzy. The jury in the O. J. Simpson trial had refused to come to court that morning. In the Washington Post, a law professor said that the probability of a hung jury had increased. And so at the exchange, if traders had shares in guilty or not-guilty verdicts, they wanted to dump them; a hung-jury share was looking a lot sharper today. Everyone was looking for Steve. This had nothing to do with the stocks on the ticker, and everything to do with an elaborate, parallel marketplace operated by Steve Schillinger, an independent broker, who sold futures on the side for countless things you couldn’t find at the exchange: Who would win baseball’s MVP award? Who would make the Final Four? Would O. J. go to prison? Although Schillinger was a decent enough stockbroker, his real talent was in figuring the odds for nebulous outcomes like that of the O. J. verdict and revising them as events unfolded. His colleagues placed bets with him, and he’d pay out on the basis of whatever the odds had been at the time of the wager. He was, in short, a bookie. “People were leaving their stocks to come bet on the NCAA,” Schillinger said, explaining why he was quietly asked to leave the exchange. But by then, he had a dream. In his covert marketplace, he’d glimpsed not just his own future, but the future of gambling. That vision would lead him to become the pioneer of a multibillion-dollar industry, and then a fugitive from justice who would die in exile. Read More
March 2, 2020 First Person My Life as Lord Byron By Evan James Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration from page 87 of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was on. We’d seen it before, but who can resist a romantic fantasy between a young widow and the ghost of a ship captain in a seaside English village? Certainly not my mother, who loved England, romance, and ghosts. My mother communicated with ghosts regularly. This was such a matter-of-fact part of her life that I had taken it for granted from the very beginning; I wasn’t sure what I believed about ghosts themselves, but knew for certain that, whatever they were, my mother saw them, sensed them, and spoke with them. Stories about the ghosts of former residents alerting her to their presence at open houses for coveted real estate, chats with those who’d passed to the other side, et cetera: these were simply part of the ongoing family conversation about multiple realities unfolding simultaneously. “You know, I had to help this guy who died out there a little while ago,” she said, waving a hand over her shoulder at the Puget Sound. I was back on Bainbridge Island between periods of travel. My mother was house-sitting the big waterfront home of some people who worked for Microsoft and had gone to Australia. She sat tucked into the corner of the sofa, wrapped in a blanket and holding a cup of tea. “Really?” I said. It was the word that came out of my mouth most often on visits to the island, in a way that meant, “Please tell me more, and I’m also not sure what to think about this.” “I saw a crew out searching for him one evening,” she said. “He was a diver for some official department. He’d gone missing.” “My God,” I said. “So I spoke to his ghost,” she said. “He was very confused. Like, Whoa, where am I? What’s happening? He didn’t get that he was dead, you know? He had a lot of cocaine in his system. I had to break the news to him.” Read More
February 28, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Long Walks, Little Gods, and Lispector By The Paris Review Jessi Jezewska Stevens. Photo: Nina Subin. Anyone who has googled their own name knows the curious thrill of watching the page populate with alternate identities. Percy, the narrator of Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s debut novel, The Exhibition of Persephone Q (out next week), suddenly finds herself awash in that potent mix of familiarity and alienation. She indeed googles herself not long after receiving a new exhibition catalogue of photographs, taken by her ex-fiancé, of a naked woman with a hidden face. Percy feels certain the woman is her—she recognizes the apartment, the body—but she cannot prove it, and the more she insists, the less plausible it all starts to seem. Previously a person of apathy, Percy has long been satisfied to be taken through life by a slow-moving current as invisible to herself as it is to those around her. She learns she is pregnant and keeps not mentioning it to her husband; she goes out for long walks at night, makes money in vaguely nondescript ways, and seems generally on the brink of disappearing from her own life. The arrival of the catalogue upends her complacency and sends her reeling into a quest of self-discovery and assertion amid the social landscape of post-9/11 New York. Stevens uses her wry perspective and lucent style to pose a deceptively simple question of personhood: How could you prove who you were? —Lauren Kane Read More
February 28, 2020 Inside the Issue Learning Ancientness Studio: An Interview with Jeffrey Yang By Lauren Kane Jeffrey Yang. Author photo: Nina Subin. On an overcast Friday this January, I rode the Metro-North up along the Hudson to meet Jeffrey Yang at Dia:Beacon. Yang’s wife is an educator there, and the couple has lived in the town of Beacon, New York, for the past fifteen years. His poem in The Paris Review’s Winter issue, “Ancestors,” centers around an exhibition at a gallery in Seoul, South Korea, and the piece made me curious about his work as it overlaps with visual art. When I asked Yang if he might show me one or two of his favorites at Dia before we sat down to talk, my request was met tenfold. We embarked on a comprehensive tour: Dorothea Rockburne’s complex mathematical concepts alchemized through abstract, geometric installations; Richard Serra’s heavy, leaning sculptures of steel; the minimalist reimagining of a book of hours by On Kawara (about whom Yang recently wrote here). The pieces that he found exciting were as aesthetically diverse as his poetry. The world of a Jeffrey Yang poem is eclectically populated. His abecedarian debut collection, An Aquarium, is a taxonomy of aquatic life that incorporates characters from Aristotle to Emperor Ingyo. His most recent collection, Hey, Marfa, takes the Texas city (coincidentally home to Donald Judd, Dia:Beacon darling) as its subject, and examines the strange, transient nature of its history alongside paintings and preparatory drawings by Rackstraw Downes. In between, he edited the collection Birds, Beasts, and Seas, a seventy-fifth-anniversary tome of poetry from the New Directions archives, and he has translated work by Liu Xiaobo, Su Shi, and Ahmatjan Osman. Yang is warm and familiar. For every insight into a piece we were looking at, he had a humorous anecdote about Dia:Beacon—he was serious about art without solemnity. After our conversation, he walked with me to town to pick up a sandwich and then saw me and my lunch onto the train. In his career and his process, Yang has pursued his interests without expectation, with the simple faith that they will lead him where he is meant to be going. To all accounts, they have. INTERVIEWER What were your first forays into poetry like? YANG I probably started with Chinese poetry, because both my sister and I went to a Chinese school on Saturdays, and we were required to memorize and recite poems. I remember having some children’s poetry anthologies, too, and enjoying the rhythm and the music of those poems. At the University of California, San Diego, there was a pretty experimental literature department. I took one of my first writing classes with Carla Harryman, who was visiting. Melvyn Freilicher, Fanny Howe, Rae Armantrout, Wai-lim Yip, Jerome Rothenberg, Quincy Troupe, all taught there. Amiri Baraka also taught as a visiting writer. They were all involved in a more avant-garde idea of poetry in different ways. I remember reading the anthology Premonitions, published by this press called Kaya, an Asian American press, which was eye-opening for me. I hadn’t heard of most of the poets in that book, and it all felt fresh to me, how they were really pushing the language. It included some of Theresa Cha’s work, which was also performative and visual. I was curious. INTERVIEWER Did you know early on that you wanted to be a poet? Did you conceive of yourself as a poet? Read More
February 27, 2020 Arts & Culture Bread, Banana, Apple, Milk, Goodbye By Jennifer Tseng When my sister and I were children, we, along with our parents, were often invited to dine at the homes of other Chinese families. On such occasions, while our German American mother prepared Chinese food in the kitchen, our Chinese father would give us a crash course in Mandarin. We would learn—i.e. memorize—a brief paragraph designed to last the duration of the few minutes we spent on the host’s doorstep. Something along the lines of: Hello, Uncle Wu. How are you? Thank you very much for inviting us to your home. Our father would pay us a nickel ahead of time, saying, If you say X, I’ll pay you Y. But we knew the “if” was incidental. Refusing the money was not an option. We knew we would have to speak. We dreaded the feeling of that foreign language in our mouths; those native speakers watching us, their expert ears listening for mistakes; the possibility of a mispronunciation; the possibility that the host might ask a question that required an answer. In effect, we dreaded the moment our cover might be blown, exposing us as puppets who could no more speak the language than dolls could. When we succeeded in delivering our performances as Chinese-speaking girls, the dread grew worse, for then we might be spoken to further. Our father, however, took great pleasure in our successes. It was as if for once in his life he had arrived at those doorsteps of his acquaintances with the appropriate cargo: genuine 100% Chinese children. Never mind that our mother was German American, that our native language was English. When the Mandarin sounds flew from our mouths like songs, in tandem, perfectly timed, a look of pure joy crossed his otherwise angry face. He loved us best as puppets, our radiant puppeteer. For days in advance of a Chinese party, he fed us our lines. When the day finally arrived, our crash course intensified. How many hours did we spend for those few minutes of doorstep bliss? Read More