January 1, 2020 Best of 2019 Not Gonna Get Us By Amanda Lee Koe We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Original illustration © Jia Sung. “Don’t eat pigs,” she said. “So I can kiss you, if we meet again.” That was how she said it, in Mandarin. Pigs, not pork. The line went dead. I was out of calling-card credits again. We’d met a year earlier, in 2002, at the Shanghai Municipal Physical Sports School. She was fourteen, I was fifteen. She played soccer, I played softball. She was a Uighur Muslim who’d never heard of metropolitan Singapore, I was a Straits Chinese atheist who didn’t know pastoral Xinjiang existed. Read more >>
January 1, 2020 In Memoriam Eating Oatmeal with Alasdair Gray By Valerie Stivers Alasdair Gray as a young man. Photo provided by the author in 2016. The Scottish writer Alasdair Gray died on December 29, at the age of eighty-five, four years after a fall from the outside steps of his house left him with a spinal injury that confined him to a wheelchair, and almost three years after I went to Glasgow to conduct an Art of Fiction interview with him for The Paris Review. Gray was a Whitbread Award–winning author, best known for the weird, speculative work, Lanark, an autobiographical tale in four out-of-order books (two of them nonrealist), and several volumes of short stories, but also for his painting, for illustrating his own work, and for cutting a wide and eccentric swath in the Glasgow arts scene. He was a socialist, an advocate for Scottish independence, a fierce proponent of friends’ work, and a tireless critic of the craven or pompous. Rereading my interview with him now, on the occasion of his death, I’m amazed by how cool and professional it is, and how much it leaves out, as I suppose it had to, of what Gray was really like, and what he meant to me. Read More
January 1, 2020 Best of 2019 Tove Jansson on Writer’s Block By Tove Jansson We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Tove Jansson I’m sitting comfortably parked on a bench in a little park behind Saint-Sulpice and I’m supposed to find something to write about. It’s very quiet here. Pigeons copulate on a patch of grass, some tourists catch their breath on the benches across from me, an organ plays behind my back, far away. A clochard comes every now and then and bothers the tourists—he explains, at length, that he also understands Italian. I just keep quiet, and eventually he goes away. I can’t comprehend why this has to be so hard; one should be able to write just about anything at any time, in a purely professional way. (I wonder how it is for other people.) For the time being I have only written the date on the first page of my notepad but that was yesterday. Read more >>
December 31, 2019 Redux Redux: Revolve on the Past Year 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. This week at The Paris Review, we’re resolving to read even more of our archive in the New Year. Read on for Octavio Paz’s Art of Poetry interview, Rachel Cusk’s “Freedom,” and Catherine Davis’s poem “The New Year’s Burden.” 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 if you subscribe via our special bundle, you’ll get a tote bag, too! And don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast! Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry No. 42 Issue no. 119 (Summer 1991) I am very fond of fireworks. They were a part of my childhood. There was a part of the town where the artisans were all masters of the great art of fireworks. They were famous all over Mexico. To celebrate the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, other religious festivals, and at New Year’s, they made the fireworks for the town. I remember how they made the church façade look like a fiery waterfall. It was marvelous. Read More
December 31, 2019 Best of 2019 On Nighttime By Hanif Abdurraqib We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Source: Thinkstock. I find myself most aware of silence when I am thinking about the many ways it can be punctured. Under the wrong circumstances, a hospital room can become a symphony of noises, each of them courting the worst of a person’s anxieties. There might be an incessant but inconsistent beeping, or the sounds of several machines doing the work of keeping a person alive. It is a privilege to be told that someone you love is going to survive. The message comes from some exhausted doctor, eager to give the good news after the tests, or the surgery, or whatever else. I have also been on the other side: knowing that I would be watching a person I love slowly fade until they vanished altogether, and understanding there’s nothing that can be done. There’s something uniquely challenging about the moments in between, when the good news of a person’s continued living is delivered, but they still have to stay in a hospital room for a few more days before they can go home. From far enough away, underneath a wave of monochromatic hospital blankets, it can be hard to tell if someone is still breathing. Particularly if you’ve already imagined a world without them in it. If you’ve spent enough time imagining someone as dead, it can be difficult to visualize them as simply sleeping. I don’t love hearing the beeping and the sonic hiccups of hospital machinery, but it is worse not to hear anything. Read more >>
December 31, 2019 Best of 2019 On Classic Party Fiction By Elisa Gabbert We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Irving Nurick, illustration from the 1920s In her 2008 review of Cecily von Zeigesar’s Gossip Girl novels, Janet Malcolm quotes the eponymous narrator’s “opening volley”: “We all live in huge apartments with our own bedrooms and bathrooms and phone lines. We have unlimited access to money and booze and whatever else we want, and our parents are rarely home, so we have tons of privacy. We’re smart, we’ve inherited classic good looks, we wear fantastic clothes, and we know how to party.” I’ve never read the books myself, but on the CW show, which I was briefly obsessed with, we hear Kristen Bell’s voice-over during the title sequence: “Gossip Girl here! Your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite.” The actors playing these trust-fund teens aren’t just good-looking; they seem like genetic impossibilities. Blake Lively is perfectly cast as the, in Malcolm’s words, “incandescently beautiful” Serena van der Woodsen. She’s 5’10” and usually wearing heels. Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan of the blog Go Fug Yourself used to call her “Boobs Legsly.” Serena and her friends and enemies (there is often little distinction between the two) have not only lucked into the 1 percent, they are also having an unfair amount of fun. Classic party fiction is often, if not always, a kind of wealth porn. When Emma Bovary arrives at La Vaubyessard, the chateau of the marquis, for dinner and a ball, the opulence blows her bourgeois mind: “The red claws of the lobsters overhung the edges of the platters; large fruits were piled on moss in openwork baskets; the quails wore their feathers; coils of steam rose into the air; and, grave as a judge in his silk stockings, knee breeches, white tie, and jabot, the butler conveyed the platters.” Party scenes are full of these lists of foods and drinks and flowers, overloaded sentences that embody abundance, the fulsome displays of affluence. See Nick Carraway’s first party at Jay Gatsby’s: “Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York … On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.” Was Flaubert the first to use this listing trope, appalled by the excess? Jane Austen’s balls are disappointingly devoid of visual detail, as if the evidence of money was just assumed. (Austen’s novels adapt so well into film because the dialogue is all there, and costume and set designers can supply the surrounding lushness.) A truly expensive party should feel otherworldly; the marquis’s ball, by putting her in “contact with wealth,” leaves Emma utterly changed. It makes “a hole in her life, like those great chasms that a storm, in a single night, will sometimes open in the mountains.” Read more >>