August 13, 2019 Redux Redux: Helpless Failed Brake 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. Jorge Semprún. This week, The Paris Review is celebrating the simple joys of bicycling. Read on for Jorge Semprún’s Art of Fiction interview, as well as Paulé Bártón’s short story “The Woe Shirt” and Carol Muske-Dukes’s poem “No Hands.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Read More
August 13, 2019 Devil in the Details For the Love of Orange By Larissa Pham Paul Gauguin, Still life with Oranges, 1881 Something odd happened to me in late 2017: I became enamored with the color orange. That fall, I’d met someone, and orange was appearing everywhere, like some kind of hallucinatory sign. It sped by on the side of a truck, flowers in the park, the color of his surfboard. It appeared in past purchases: an orange skirt I bought in the spring, imagining it billowing in the wind, a tangerine wristlet made of pebbled leather. It appeared in poems I wanted to read aloud: Frank O’Hara’s lover in an orange shirt; Ada Limón’s ripening persimmons. I wanted to know what it meant, that I was seeing this color as if for the first time, and why it was suddenly all around me. When I was in high school, in spring—sun out, the world thawing—my friends and I would walk from our campus down to the wetlands, a startling bit of wilderness in the middle of Beaverton, Oregon. There was a pond, and a dock that led out onto it, where you could sit in skinny jeans and kick your legs out over the water. On bright and windless days, the landscape on the other side of the pond was reflected in its surface as perfectly as in a mirror. I loved to sit on the dock and look at the trees dancing on the water, their colored foliage, their leaves precisely outlined against the sky. There was something about the tree line that felt particularly painterly—like something out of an American natural-history landscape, red alder and Oregon ash and western red cedar all lined up in a row. It’s this feeling I return to when I consider the natural world—that awe at its specificity, its many names. It took me a long time to realize that all things are visible, even if my human eyes can’t see them: shingles on a roof, eyelashes on a mouse, leaves on a tree. Naming things is a means of recognizing them, and I’m drawn to flower guides and botanical illustrations the way a bookish child is drawn to a dictionary. I wanted to apply this same kind of naming to the color orange, to understand why it was all around me. Read More
August 12, 2019 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Téa Obreht By Téa Obreht In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. Our fridge tends to be bursting with bags of fruit and vegetables and arugula that will super-definitely be eaten before it wilts; but on the occasion of this particular photograph, taken the morning after my return from summer in Wyoming (before which a massive clearing-out had taken place), it mercifully boasts just five categories of items. First we have the New Perishables, last night’s jet-lagged bodega haul: yogurt, Dubliner cheese, eggs. Roasted red peppers, for some reason? Basic, utilitarian, devoid of any emotional relevance, destined for immediate consumption. Then there are the Dry Goods—farro, granola, polenta—which, thanks to my conviction that leaving them in the pantry would prompt a full infestation by New York City vermin, spent the whole summer in cold storage. Read More
August 12, 2019 First Person Death Valley By Brandon Shimoda Hiroshige, New Year’s Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji, 1857. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. My grandfather Midori wanted to return, after death, to the desert. He wanted his ashes scattered in Death Valley. On November 9, 1996, we gathered on a hill on the road to Stovepipe Wells. Midori’s ashes traveled, in a clear cellophane bag in a wooden box, by car from Denver, North Carolina, to the airport in Charlotte, by plane to Las Vegas, and by car to Death Valley. We chose a hill and walked up. I had the feeling we had gathered as strangers, that each of us was walking alone. That with Midori’s death we had been particularized by our relationships with him, each of us compelled by what we shared with him, what we did not share with each other. We each found a rock that reminded us of Midori. We built a monument. The monument amounted to a prototypical effigy. The sun was high. My grandmother June was wearing a white turtleneck and jeans. There was a purple cactus with luminous spines. Midori’s ashes were gray, a puzzle cut into a trillion pieces. June scattered his ashes with a spoon. Scattered is not the right word. June dressed the rocks with Midori’s ashes. She planted his ashes, while walking in a circle around them. She released them. Read More
August 12, 2019 Archive of Longing The Literary Marmoset By Dustin Illingworth Crop of cover, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, by Sigrid Nunez For all the High Modern sophistication of the writers who made up the Bloomsbury set in England in the early 1900s, there remains something creaturely about the collective. It is as if, beneath the frocks and tweeds, a simian itch lingered. To begin with, there were the names they gave one another, curious and whiskery terms of endearment: Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard called each other Mandrill and Mongoose; Vanessa Bell referred to her sister as Singe (ape in French) or Goat, while Vanessa herself was known as Dolphin; Virginia’s friend and sometime lover Vita Sackville-West gave her the private name of Potto, a kind of lemur; and several members of the group referred to T. S. Eliot in private letters as Old Toad. The impulse would occasionally manifest in their art. Take, for instance, Flush: A Biography, Woolf’s imaginative consideration of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. The fictions of Sigrid Nunez are often similarly attuned to animals, though they serve different ends here. They are not, as in Woolf, an uncharted tributary into the river of animal consciousness. Instead, they act as a conduit for the unpredictable weight of self-knowledge. In her 2018 National Book Award–winning novel The Friend, a woman charts her course through grief by adopting Apollo, the Great Dane belonging to her dearly departed. It is a novel of tender transference, delineating intimacies between different species that are not precisely sexual, though also not without an erotic dimension. (In bed, the paw Apollo places on the narrator’s chest is “the size of a man’s fist.”) Read More
August 9, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Barbecues, Beyoncé, and the Bourgeoisie By The Paris Review Nancy Hale. Photo courtesy of the Nancy Hale Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. Before picking up Where the Light Falls—a selection of Nancy Hale’s short stories forthcoming from Library of America this September—I had never heard of her. My ignorance, unfortunately, seems to be common. Despite being one of The New Yorker’s most prolific writers from the thirties to the sixties and a recipient of ten O. Henry Awards, Hale has been woefully overlooked. In some ways, this is understandable. Her concerns are primarily upper-crust, her scenes largely composed of WASPs feeling fraught. But how many men have written about these subjects to lasting acclaim? And while Lauren Groff, the collection’s editor, argues that Hale’s bourgeois subjects belie fierce political commitments, Hale’s prose is so compelling I hardly care. Every sentence pulses with energy and specificity. In “Midsummer,” Hale makes teen angst exciting again: “She wanted to climb the huge pine tree on the lawn, throw herself upward to the top by some passionate propulsion, and stretch her arms wildly to the sky. But she could only sit around interminably in chairs on the lawn in the heat and quiet, beating with hate and awareness and bewilderment and violence, all incomprehensible to her and pulling her apart.” Hale’s stories are rich, delightful, and often strange. They nearly always end abruptly, as if on an inhale, preparing you for whatever comes next. —Noor Qasim Read More