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
May 23, 2025 The Review’s Review Two New Movies By The Paris Review Amalia Ulman’s Magic Farm (2025). Montreal/Paris/London/New York/Berlin/Chicago/Seoul/Amsterdam/Mexico City/Tokyo/Vancouver/Los Angeles. In the Day-Glo light of the mid-aughts, that slogan of American soft power swung off canvas tote bags everywhere. The message was optimistic: the world has no boundaries—at least, if you’re wearing American Apparel. Magic Farm, the sophomore work of Argentine director Amalia Ulman, is that millennial dream fruited and fermented. Her characters work at a VICE-style gonzo web show, pal around with Chloë Sevigny, and proudly blaze a trail through the world, totally unaware that the trail they’re proudly blazing has already been paved and advertises Monday–Friday street-side parking. Read More
May 22, 2025 Dispatch The Matter of Martin By Lora Kelley Martin Amis poses for a photo in his North London home on Oct. 18, 2005. Courtesy of Writer Pictures/Graham Jepson, via AP Images. “They’re waiting for an autograph from Salman Rushdie,” the man behind me explained. After everything he’s been through. People were gathering behind a barricade at a door of the 92nd Street Y, down the block from the one where I stood waiting for “A Celebration of Martin Amis.” A couple of minutes passed, during which time the man behind me also decided to tell me that he thought the attempt on Donald Trump’s life seemed staged. Then the actual Salman Rushdie arrived at our door, wearing a tan Yankees cap, and walked right in, unbothered by fans. Suspicious of my line mate’s sense of the nature of the assassination attempt and his suggestion that the crowd was there for a novelist, I excused myself and went to investigate. A woman at the barricade said they were there for Murderbot. (This, I gathered from Google later, is an action-comedy TV series.) A literary writer in 2025 may not pull throngs of fans hanging off a barricade the way an action comedy TV series can. But the crowd passing through the lobby of the 92nd Street Y, there to hear a set of distinguished writers talk about Amis, was indeed soon in the hundreds. Martin Amis, whom Geoff Dyer once called the “Mick Jagger of literature,” was among our last great literary celebrities. Along with his crew of London writer friends—which included Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, and Rushdie—Amis moved like a star, back when writers (I’m told) commanded that kind of public attention. In the lobby, some attendees self-identified as Amis diehards: Paige McGreevy, who works at the United Nations, remembered being eighteen in Barcelona, staying out until six in the morning, sleeping all day in her blackout-shaded room, and then waking up and inhaling Money in bed. The novelist Julian Tepper recalled with a cringe the time he approached Amis at a PEN gala and did the whole “Mr. Amis, I just wanted to say—” thing. Another Money fan, Emilie Meyer, who said she was a friend of the Amis family’s, marveled at the way its protagonist combines piggishness with a nimble, pixielike wit. Meyer is a bookseller at Aeon Bookstore, and she often recommends Amis’s work to people who come in seeking books for a vacation—that way, she explained, they will always remember it as the trip when they read Amis. Read More