December 25, 2019 Best of 2019 The Crane Wife By CJ Hauser We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Original illustration © Daniel Gray-Barnett Ten days after I called off my engagement I was supposed to go on a scientific expedition to study the whooping crane on the gulf coast of Texas. Surely, I will cancel this trip, I thought, as I shopped for nylon hiking pants that zipped off at the knee. Surely, a person who calls off a wedding is meant to be sitting sadly at home, reflecting on the enormity of what has transpired and not doing whatever it is I am about to be doing that requires a pair of plastic clogs with drainage holes. Surely, I thought, as I tried on a very large and floppy hat featuring a pull cord that fastened beneath my chin, it would be wrong to even be wearing a hat that looks like this when something in my life has gone so terribly wrong. Ten days earlier I had cried and I had yelled and I had packed up my dog and driven away from the upstate New York house with two willow trees I had bought with my fiancé. Ten days later and I didn’t want to do anything I was supposed to do. Read more >>
December 24, 2019 Redux Redux: The Seasons Roll Over 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. J. G. Ballard. Photo: Fay Godwin. This week at The Paris Review, we’re in a holiday kind of mood. Read on for J. G. Ballard’s Art of Fiction interview, Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Dancing in the Moonlight,” and Diane di Prima’s poem “Rondeau for the Yule.” 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! J. G. Ballard, The Art of Fiction No. 85 Issue no. 94 (Winter 1984) I have a sense of certain gathering obsessions and roles, certain corners of the field where the next stage of the hunt will be carried on. I know that if I don’t write, say on holiday, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream. Read More
December 24, 2019 Best of 2019 Literary Paper Dolls: Franny By Julia Berick and Jenny Kroik We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! © Original illustrations by Jenny Kroik Before I was a tomboy or a clotheshorse or a loser or a teenager, I was a bookworm. In that happy valley before puberty, my greatest bliss was to be given both a book and the permission to play dress-up all at once. I had a plain white trunk for my robes and silks, my wings (several kinds), my swords and my purses. Dressing up as my favorite characters was a bit of magic, and, even today, I still read novels like a costume designer. I can tell you that the best part of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is Edna Pontellier’s peignoir. I think a lot about Moriah’s underwear in Play It As It Lays (blue silk from a hotel shop) and Hana’s sneakers in The English Patient (slightly too big). How could I not? They are the only shoes she wears. Clothing means something about our destination, our origins, our field, our desires. Everyone in a novel is dressed with intention by their author. I’ve paired with the illustrator Jenny Kroik to bring you what us bookworm-clotheshorse child-adults have always wanted: literary paper dolls. We’ve begun with J.D. Salinger’s Franny, but stay tuned for more. Print them, share them, dress them, and please, please play with them. There’s a link to your own printable paper doll at the bottom of this post. You, too, can take Franny from one edge of her breakdown to the other by taking off her smart traveling outfit and fitting her with a pale blue cashmere afghan. We who shop late nights in marketplaces online might find satisfaction in printing out a robe and pinning it literally onto not just a figurine but to a character, an author, a time period. At the very least, this will look great on your desk. Read more >>
December 24, 2019 Document Robert Lowell Dressed as Santa By Saskia Hamilton Harriet Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell on the steps of 239 Marlborough Street in Boston, Massachusetts, Christmas 1959 (Courtesy of Harriet Lowell) In 1959, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick were feeling restless with their Boston life. It was the year of the publication of Lowell’s Life Studies: Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house on Boston’s “hardly passionate Marlborough Street,” where even the man scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, and is a “young Republican.” (“Memories of West Street and Lepke”) Lowell won the National Book Award for the collection, but the publication also coincided with a manic episode. “I feel rather creepy and paltry writing now to announce that I am all healed and stable again. So it is. Five attacks in ten years make you feel rather a basket-case” he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop in July. By the fall and winter, still recovering, he was writing little, working mostly on translations. In the meantime, Hardwick was writing essays for Harper’s that would go into her collection A View of My Own, including “The Decline of Book Reviewing” in October (the article that would inspire the founding of The New York Review of Books in 1963), and, in the December issue, “Boston: The Lost Ideal,” an excoriation of the city they lived in and a longing for the one they would move to the following year: “In Boston there is an utter absence of that wild, electric beauty of New York, of the marvelous, excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great Avenues and Streets, the restaurants, theatres, bars, hotels, delicatessens, shops. In Boston the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality.” When Frederick Seidel traveled to their Boston home to interview Lowell for The Paris Review in March 1960, he described the sounds of the street outside: “Four floors below the study window, cars whined through the early spring rain on Marlborough Street toward the Boston Public Garden.” In the Christmas of 1959, Lowell, dressed as Santa, gave their daughter, Harriet, a doll with a velvet hat. The gift was actually from Elizabeth Bishop. He wrote to thank her on January 4, 1960 (Harriet’s third birthday): “Three marvelous bottles of wine from S. S. Pierce made you seem just around the corner, while Harriet’s ‘Anna Karenina’ doll, dressed in the white boots you brought her, made you exotic and far away.” Saskia Hamilton is the editor of The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019) and the author most recently of Corridor (Graywolf, 2014). She is an advisory editor for The Paris Review.
December 24, 2019 Best of 2019 Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction By Mairead Small Staid We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Johan Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Laesende lille pige, 1900 “I read books to read myself,” Sven Birkerts wrote in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Birkerts’s book, which turns twenty-five this year, is composed of fifteen essays on reading, the self, the convergence of the two, and the ways both are threatened by the encroachment of modern technology. As the culture around him underwent the sea change of the internet’s arrival, Birkerts feared that qualities long safeguarded and elevated by print were in danger of erosion: among them privacy, the valuation of individual consciousness, and an awareness of history—not merely the facts of it, but a sense of its continuity, of our place among the centuries and cosmos. “Literature holds meaning not as a content that can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience,” he wrote. “It is a participatory arena. Through the process of reading we slip out of our customary time orientation, marked by distractedness and surficiality, into the realm of duration.” Read more >>
December 23, 2019 Best of 2019 Reimagining Masculinity By Ocean Vuong We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! “No homo,” says the boy, barely visible in the room’s fading light, as he cradles my foot in his palms. He is kneeling before me—this 6’2” JV basketball second stringer—as I sit on his bed, my feet hovering above the shag. His head is bent so that the swirl in his crown shows, the sweat in the follicles catching the autumn dusk through the window. Anything is possible, we think, with the body. But not always with language. “No homo,” he says again before wrapping the ace bandage once, twice, three times around my busted ankle, the phrase’s purpose now clear to me: a password, an incantation, a get-out-of-jail-free card, for touch. For two boys to come this close to each other in a realm ruled by the nebulous yet narrow laws of American masculinity, we needed magic. No homo. The words free him to hold my foot with the care and gentleness of a nurse, for I had sprained my ankle half an hour earlier playing manhunt in the McIntosh orchard. We ran, our bodies silver in the quickening dark, teenagers playing at war. Read more >>