June 4, 2025 First Person 1988–? By Eileen Chang Zhang Ailing in 1954. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The old-time Overseas Chinese call Los Angeles “Luo Sheng.” It’s a phonetic transliteration, just like “Lo Shan,” the shortened form of “Lo Shan Ji” [Los Angeles]. But when it’s cut to two syllables, with “Sheng” at the end, those not familiar with the term could think it refers to a U.S. state—a short form of Louisiana, maybe? This city does cover a huge area, though it’s not as big as a state. It’s famous for being a “Mecca of Car Culture,” lots of cars, late models, everywhere—everyone has a car, hence the terrible bus service. It’s bad in the city, even worse in the suburbs. Here on this main route in a little satellite city, the bus stop was stagnant, no one had come for half an hour, maybe longer. Peering down the road, craning to spot an approaching bus, all you could see was a stretch of scenery, the upper swathe filled with commanding mountain ridges, rising and falling, which the yellow-green of Southern California’s steady, year-round climate, warm and dry, shimmered into the hazy blue of afternoon sky. Up on those hills, there were no houses yet, this valley being quite far from the city; and even among the trees, there were none of the little white houses that dot the hills in closer suburbs. There was only that high hill stretching up and out all in one color, a lightly yellow vegetation green, then the sky behind the hill, in a blue that wasn’t very blue. The Spaniards, when they’d first landed and looked at this empty mountain, had probably seen the very same thing. Read More
June 3, 2025 First Person A Return to the Frontier By Eileen Chang Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. When I got off the plane in Taipei on my way to Hong Kong, I did not expect to see anyone I knew. I had asked the Chus not to meet me, knowing they were busy just then. But it was possible that they would get somebody else to come in their stead, so I was not surprised when an efficient-looking man in neat Western clothes approached me. “You are Mrs. Richard Nixon?” he said in English. I had seen many photographs of the blond Mrs. Nixon and never imagined I resembled her. Besides, he should be able to tell a fellow Chinese even behind her dark glasses. But with a woman’s inability to disbelieve a compliment, no matter how flagrantly untrue, I remembered that she was thin, which I undoubtedly was. Then there were those glasses. “No, I am sorry,” I said, and he walked away to search among the other passengers. It struck me as a little odd that Mrs. Nixon should come to Formosa, even if everybody is visiting the Orient just now. Anyhow there must have been some mix-up, as there was only this one embassy employee to greet her. “Did you know Mrs. Nixon is coming today?” I asked my friends Mr. and Mrs. Chu, who had turned up after all. “No, we haven’t heard,” Mr. Chu said. I told them about the man who mistook me for her and what a joke that was. “Um,” he said unsmiling. Then he said somewhat embarrassedly, “There’s a man who is always hanging around the airport to meet American dignitaries. He’s not quite sane.” I laughed, then went under Formosa’s huge wave of wistful yearning for the outside world, particularly America, its only friend and therefore in some ways a foe. “How does it feel to be back?” Mr. Chu asked. Although I had never been there before, they were going along with the official assumption that Formosa is China, the mother country of all Chinese. I looked around the crowded airport and it really was China, not the strange one I left ten years ago under the Communists but the one I knew best and thought had vanished forever. The buzz of Mandarin voices also made it different from Hong Kong. A feeling of chronological confusion came over me. “It feels like dreaming.” And taking in all the familiar faces speaking the tones of homeland, I exclaimed, “But it’s not possible!” Mr. Chu smiled ruefully as if I had said, “But you are ghosts.” Read More
June 2, 2025 Bookmarks Nadja and Britney By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Mark Polizzoti’s new translation of André Breton’s Nadja (NYRB Classics): A certain attitude toward beauty necessarily results from this, beauty that is conceived here solely in terms of passion. It is in no way static, in other words encased in its “dream of stone,” lost for mankind in the shadow of Odalisques, behind those tragedies that claim to encompass only a single day; nor is it dynamic, in other words subject to that rampant gallop after which there is only another rampant gallop, in other words more scattered than a snowflake in a blizzard, in other words determined never to let itself be embraced, for fear of being confined … It is like a train ceaselessly lurching from the Gare de Lyon, but that I know will never leave, has never left. It is made of jolts and shocks, most of which are not significant but which we know will necessarily bring about a huge Shock … The morning paper can always bring me news of myself: From Jeff Weiss’s Waiting for Britney Spears (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a memoir of his time as a tabloid journalist: Love bludgeons me before I fully understand what it means. It requires only a caramel-blonde whip of hair, a harem dancer hip shimmy, a lashing of apricot arms, a dizzying 360-degree whirl, and a graceful floor slide. I saw the sign, an immaculate conception, a fated tarot. Only a higher power could have blessed me to bear witness to the taping of the “… Baby One More Time” video. Read More
May 30, 2025 The Review’s Review Cathedrals of Solitude: On Pier Vittorio Tondelli By Claudia Durastanti Courtesy of Zando Projects. As it so happened, I was visiting a college on the East Coast a few years ago to talk about contemporary Italian literature. Right before my lecture, a small group of comparative literature students approached me with what I could see were a bunch of badly printed photocopies. They wanted to know why the work of “the greatest Italian author after Pasolini’s death” was no longer available in English. The author was Pier Vittorio Tondelli and the photocopies were of the first English-language edition of the novel Separate Rooms, published by Serpent’s Tail in 1992. I had no good answer for them. At that time Luca Guadagnino was not yet the internationally recognized director he is today, and his decision to turn Separate Rooms into a film starring Josh O’Connor was yet to come. Had I known, that would have been the most honest answer: that it would ultimately take a high-end adaptation—which is still in progress—to resuscitate Tondelli’s work in English. (Separate Rooms was reissued in translation this year by Zando in the U.S. and Sceptre in the UK.) In many ways, the question posed by those students seemed to put Tondelli on too much of a pedestal: after Pasolini’s death there have been many great Italian authors—Claudio Magris, Daniele Del Giudice, Fleur Jaeggy, and Gianni Celati, to name a few. But they are being constantly claimed and reclaimed, while for a long time it seemed that everybody wanted a piece of Tondelli, including myself, only to hide it somewhere. Read More
May 28, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Nasser Rabah and Wiam El-Tamami on “The War Is Over” By Nasser Rabah and Wiam El-Tamami The first few lines of the Arabic original of “The War Is Over.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Nasser Rabah’s poem “The War Is Over,” translated from the Arabic by Wiam El-Tamami, appears in our new Spring issue, no. 251. Here, we asked both Rabah and El-Tamami to reflect on their work. 1. Nasser Rabah How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I live in Gaza. In the early months of the war, we weren’t expecting it to last for so long. I kept telling my children that it would all be over in a few days, in a week—and every time, I was disappointed. It’s a sad thing, to be proved wrong in front of your children. But somehow, out of stubbornness or self-protection, I started denying reality, believing in my own optimism. I said to myself, The war is over. I jotted that sentence down in the Notes app on my phone, and left it there. The next day, I asked myself, What would I do if the war was over? I thought, I would go to the graveyard to visit my friends whose funerals I hadn’t been able to attend. So I wrote down one more sentence—“I’ll go to the graveyard.” I still wasn’t thinking of it as a poem. But then poetry overtook me, and I wrote, “I’ll take bread, a lot of bread, one loaf for each friend.” When the stanza was finished, I felt a rush of adrenaline, that nervous energy that accompanies the birth of a new poem. And I kept going. Read More
May 27, 2025 First Person The Stipend By Deb Olin Unferth Photograph by Jan Mellström, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0. My new job came with a research stipend. I’d never had one before—a few grand that would renew each year for five years and then end. What could I use it for? “Anything,” I was told, which seemed remarkable, but as the months passed, it turned out to be harder to use the money than I thought. The rules were confusing, evolving. Every expense—a print cartridge, a pen, a meal with a student—required an array of online forms, approvals, files uploaded in special formats, and was a hassle for the beleaguered office administrator who wrote me careful, patient emails about my failures. Only books required a single, simple form. I soon understood that “anything” meant I could buy books. I can buy books. I’ve always been a person who buys books. I live in a city that has twelve independent bookstores within a short radius of my home. I began rotating between these stores, buying piles of books, and ordering them online too. I bought another bookcase, filled it, moved some furniture around, bought another. I know it’s the mark of an unstable mind to store more than one row of books on a bookshelf, so I stacked the second row horizontally, to achieve a causal, temporary effect. My husband wasn’t fooled but he rarely criticizes me, having his own demons he contends with every day and through the night in his sleep. He is aware that to love me means letting me proceed with whatever I believe I must do, which is one reason that, years ago, I divorced the other person I had married and married him. Read More