September 11, 2019 Bulletin Six Young Women and Their Book Collections By The Paris Review In 2017, Honey & Wax Booksellers established an annual prize for American women book collectors, aged thirty years and younger. The idea took shape when Heather O’Donnell and Rebecca Romney, the bookstore’s owners, observed that “the women who regularly buy books from us are less likely to call themselves ‘collectors’ than the men, even when those women have spent years passionately collecting books.” By providing a financial incentive to them, and a forum in which to celebrate and share their collections, O’Donnell and Romney hope to encourage a new generation of women. This year, they write, “We were impressed by the many contestants whose initial collecting interests put them in pursuit of unusual material not available for Prime delivery: vintage, underground, out-of-print, annotated, foreign, small press, or self-published finds.” We are pleased to unveil the winner of the 2019 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize, who will receive $1,000, as well as five honorable mentions, who will each receive $250. WINNER Emily Forster: Fan-Made Comics and Dōjinshi Emily Forster, twenty-eight, is a cartoonist in New York City. She has amassed a collection of almost five hundred original fan-made comics, from photocopied zines to hardcover anthologies, primarily the self-published comics known in Japan as dōjinshi. “Most of the modern-day distinctions between official and derivative art—and the assumptions of quality attached to each—were based on concerns of property, not an evaluation of the art itself. There was something incredibly alluring to me about comics art created at a professional standard of quality without the expectation of professional reward,” Forster writes in an essay about the collection. Forster’s essay offers a series of insights about the fan-made books she collects, gradually revealing the narrative conventions, circumstances of production, and readership of the material. Honey & Wax says, “We admired her observations on the power structures ‘fanfic’ subverts, her attraction to ‘the ultra-niche within the niche,’ and her insistence on ‘what is beautiful about the illegitimate, the indulgent, and the disposable.’ ” Read More
September 11, 2019 Arts & Culture Artworks in the Room Where I Write By Diane Williams Diane Williams’s story “Garden Magic” appears in our Fall 2019 issue. We asked her to give us a tour of the objects in her office. The artworks in the room where I write inhabit my fiction everywhere, and those of them that are not explicitly conjured nevertheless recommend themselves to me daily. If I look to the right, while sitting in my chair, I follow the travels of Ebenezer Wright’s jerry-rigged adventurer with whom I readily identify. He is a vintage toy clown, riding a scooter, coasting on a roadway—wholly dependent, it seems, on a wing butterfly screw. His destination is a formidable one and he is so eager—he’s on tiptoe. For if he keeps faith with the gray-shaded, curving pathway that he began the journey on, he’ll soon arrive at the Great Sphinx—situated only inches above him. Read More
September 11, 2019 First Person The Sticky Tar Pit of Time By Maria Tumarkin A cat running. Collotype after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887. Credit: Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons. This morning—that morning, rather—two men in my train carriage lift their heads—two men in their fifties in silky, understated ties—then there is a little snap, like a red light camera going off, and even before the next stop gets announced they’re leaning into each other laughing, How long has it been? Must be forty years give or take. What’s been happening? They run through their classmates: two cancers (one in chemo, one cannot hack chemo), a property development fraud, one guy (just on the other side of a protracted settlement) with too many ex-wives (stupid bastard, he and them deserve each other). A pause. Please don’t tell me it’s all there is. Fraud, cancer, bad marriages, being caught, extricating yourself, chance encounters on trains; can you remember the last time life felt long or kind, or like it was yours and mine? My phone vibrates, one time only for texts. “Make sure you don’t have scissors, nail files, anything sharp.” It’s Vanda. Thank you, Vanda. Shhh. In front of me is time. Time is not a river. It is two strangers on a train whose briefcases touch as they hold each other. Two men who’ll never ride the same train again. Read More
September 10, 2019 Redux Redux: Volume and Color 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. William Styron. This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the release of our latest issue with selections from Fall 2019 contributors who have previously appeared in the magazine. Read on for William Styron’s 1999 Art of Fiction interview, Diane Williams’s short story “O Fortuna, Velut Luna,” and Kevin Prufer’s poem “The Adulterer.” 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. William Styron, The Art of Fiction No. 156 Issue no. 150 (Spring 1999) There have been certain scenes in all my works that came to me with such mysterious ease—with the sense of being preordained—that I can only attribute them to the same powerful subconscious process. Read More
September 10, 2019 At Work We Labor under Tyrants: An Interview with Jesse Ball By Patrick Cottrell Jesse Ball (Photo: Joe Lieske) Jesse Ball is an absurdist writer. His latest work, The Divers’ Game, set in a world much like our own, examines what happens when the lives of others are seen as disposable and small measures of kindness are largely absent. In other words, The Divers’ Game is a meditation on violence, longing, cruelty, pageantry, and joy. It’s made up of four sections, and filled with despair and stark beauty, written by one of the finest writers and humans I’ve had the great fortune to encounter in this frequently calamitous world. I first met Jesse in Chicago in 2010. I was beginning graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches, and I wanted to work with him. I remember we had meetings every other week in which we would sit in a conference room with corporate furniture. Each time, upon entering that sad little room, I felt as if I were visiting a wizened old monk at the top of an arduous hill. A couple months ago, when I proposed this conversation, I was hopeful we could meet to go bowling or gambling or shopping for artisanal hats, but owing to our different time zones, this interview was conducted by email. INTERVIEWER Where are you right now? BALL In Shanghai. I am in a hotel in the city center. I’m seated in the dining area. It’s six A.M. No one but me has yet come down for breakfast. All the breakfast attendants are here, but other than that, I’m alone. They are all very busy and I am answering your questions on a small sheet of paper. A man in a paper chef’s hat is very rapidly making a great pile of fried eggs. I am not sure when or whether he’ll stop. I have on my plate two slices of watermelon, some tofu, bitter melon, and a red bean roll. I was drinking tea but it’s all gone. Read More
September 10, 2019 Arts & Culture The Joys of the Italian Short Story By Jhumpa Lahiri One evening in Rome, in the kitchen of the Italian writer Caterina Bonvicini, I expressed a desire to assemble a collection of Italian short stories translated into English. It was March of 2016, during a brief trip back to Italy. Six months before, my family and I had returned to the United States after living for three years in Rome. My life as a reader had, by that time, taken an unexpected turn; since 2012, shortly before moving to Rome, I had chosen to read only Italian literature, mostly from the twentieth century, and to read those works exclusively in Italian, a language I had diligently studied for many years but had yet to master. I was forty-five years old, and I believed, even before this new phase began, that I was already fully formed as a reader and writer. And yet I surrendered to an inexplicable urge to distance myself, to immerse myself, and to acquire a second literary formation. It was one thing to read only Italian when living in Italy, where the winds were favorable, where my state of voluntary literary exile made sense. I read with an adolescent’s zeal, transported to another dimension, standing before a new group of gods. I had an Italian teacher who came to my home twice a week and, at the start, brought me chapters and excerpts equipped with footnotes for elementary readers. I befriended Italians who mentioned authors I had never heard of before. I began frequenting bookstores, especially those that sold secondhand volumes, combing the shelves for their works. I purchased them and read them, and copied down sentences by hand, taping them over my desk for inspiration. I realized that, for the first time in decades, I was reading to satisfy only myself. I was no longer influenced by the expectations and broader cultural consensus that dictate what one should be reading—such frames of reference had fallen away. The more people remarked on my new inclination—But don’t you miss English?—the more I clung to my newfound freedom, not wanting it to end. Read More