August 5, 2019 Arts & Culture Sigrid Nunez’s Portraits of Animal Intelligence By Peter Cameron Photo: Marion Ettlinger. Sigrid Nunez, like Virginia Woolf, is a writer known for her intellectual rigor and her ability to capture, insightfully and unsentimentally, the myriad complexities of human life in beautifully written prose. In the ambition and variety of their work, they have much in common. Something else that they share: neither Sigrid Nunez nor Virginia Woolf is thought of as a warm-and-fuzzy writer, and yet both, quite literarily, are. And I mean warm and fuzzy in every sense of the phrase. For while both Nunez’s marmoset Mitz (from her 1998 novel Mitz) and Woolf’s spaniel Flush (the hero of Flush: A Biography, published by Woolf in 1933) are warm-blooded and furry creatures (although they suffer the indignities of lice and fleas), they are also engaging characters based upon actual animals. Many famous nonhuman literary characters are inventions: Chekhov’s lapdog, E. B. White’s mouse and pig and spider and swan, Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller, John Steinbeck’s Red Pony, and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. Elsa, the lion who was born free, did exist, as did Tulip, J. R. Ackerley’s beloved Alsatian bitch. Nevertheless, real or imagined, few animals have literary pedigrees as noble as Flush and Mitz. Read More
August 5, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Cora Sandel By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Cora Sandel “In everything one writes,” said the Norwegian novelist Cora Sandel, “there is woven in a thread from one’s own life. It can be so hidden that nobody notices it, but it is there and it must be there, I suppose, if it is to be seen as a piece of living writing.” Sandel, born Sara Fabricius in Kristiania (now Oslo), tried to avoid undue conjecture on her fiction’s autobiographical basis by using a pseudonym. When she published her first novel, Alberta and Jacob, in 1926 at age forty-six, she gave her publisher no author photo, nor did she ever agree to be interviewed on television. The two other books in the acclaimed Alberta trilogy appeared shortly thereafter: Alberta and Freedom in 1931, and Alberta Alone in 1939. After Alberta and Jacob drew a wide and appreciative Scandinavian readership, an uncle wrote to her in Sweden, where she was living, to tell her: “I have just read a book by a woman who calls herself Cora Sandel. Everyone here says that it is you.” He had always known, he added, that she would achieve something significant. The demands placed on today’s authors, the all but mandatory self-disclosure and endless media promotion, would have horrified Sandel. “I have always been of the opinion,” she said, “that no more needs to be expected of an author than she should write books.” Though she lived in Paris for fifteen years she didn’t, on principle, engineer an encounter with Colette, whom she idolized and whose novel The Vagabond she translated into Norwegian. “I considered it too presumptuous to have friends arrange a meeting—Colette was forced to meet so many people anyway.” Sandel valued solitude above all, and spent long hours in silent contemplation of the precise words she needed to capture a mood or sentiment. In the final novel of the trilogy, the eponymous writer-heroine reflects of her manuscript: “Each word had come floating up singly from the unknown depths, where the truth hides itself and then rises again, in different guise, unrecognizable as a dream, but irrefutable.” Read More
August 2, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Free Verse, Farewells, and Fist City By The Paris Review Nell Zink. Photo: Francesca Torricelli. Nell Zink’s Doxology is the first truly great novel to tackle the 2016 election. I’ve been a fan of Zink’s work since The Wallcreeper, but in this new novel, she’s sharper and slyer than ever before. At times, it almost feels like she’s winking at Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, with its indie-rock musician character and D.C. environmentalist subplot. But Zink turns everything on its head: the musician isn’t sexy but an idiot savant; the worldly D.C. operative isn’t greedy but instead trying to defeat Trump; the environmentalists’ idealism rapidly turns self-serving. And no one can write a one-liner like Zink: New York, for instance, is “a city devoted to making the labor theory of value look stupid.” In 2016, I briefly worked on the Hillary Clinton campaign. I’d never worked in politics before, and I’ll never work in them again; I joined the campaign out of a sense of fear, an obligation to do something, anything, in the face of Trump. We all know how that ended. But Zink, from her perch abroad, captures those doomed final days before November 8, 2016, more accurately than any breathlessly reported account from any political reporter or former campaign worker. “Hillary can beat a Republican, but she can’t beat a totemic forest spirit,” a character tries to explain at one point to a few hapless campaign staffers. It doesn’t work, of course. Nothing worked in real life either. But at least we have Nell Zink to show us how we got here. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
August 2, 2019 Re-Covered Re-Covered: From Bright Young Thing to Wartime Socialist By Lucy Scholes In her column Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. This month, she looks at Inez Holden’s There’s No Story There. Canadian Munitions Worker during World War II In the late twenties, London’s Bright Young People were on a mission to ensure that each of their many parties was more opulent and riotous than the last. At the “Impersonation Party,” for example, guests were asked to come dressed as well-known personalities. “London’s Bright Young People have broken out again,” announced the Daily Express in July 1927, reporting on the soiree. “The treasure hunt being passé and the uninvited guest already démodé, there has been much hard thinking to find the next sensation. It was achieved last night at a dance given by Captain Neil McEachran at his Brook Street House.” There’s a famous group portrait from the evening that serves, according to the biographer D. J. Taylor, as “a kind of Bright Young Person’s symposium.” It includes the brightest of them all, the socialite Stephen Tennant; his hedonistic partner in crime, Elizabeth Ponsonby; the photographer Cecil Beaton; the writer and aesthete Harold Acton; Georgia Sitwell; and the American actress Tallulah Bankhead. Despite the obvious visual draws of the scene—Ponsonby’s wig, Sitwell’s false nose, Tennant elaborately dressed as Queen Marie of Romania—one can’t help but be intrigued by the beautiful young woman wearing a Breton top in the very middle of the tableau. Her name was Inez Holden. Read More
August 1, 2019 Arts & Culture Eldorado, Illinois By Chris Dennis I am in a barn-red house on a hill. In my room there is a bookshelf, a desk for me to write at, a soft bed covered by a blue quilt, a wooden crucifix on the wall that opens to reveal the items necessary for administering last rites. Where I am now, there are peacocks, a rust-colored mule named Lulu, and hundred-foot-tall pine trees. Where I am now, I have my own bedroom. Here are some of the places I slept last year: Under a bush in front of a high school in Evansville, Indiana. In the stairwell of an apartment building in St. Louis, Missouri. In a car-wash stall in Kentucky. In an open field behind a McDonald’s in Illinois. In a booth at that same McDonald’s. In a laundromat. In the backseat of an abandoned car. In a stranger’s garage. In a chair at the public library. In a toolshed. In a burned-out mobile home. In a drug dealer’s backyard. On a drug dealer’s living room floor. On a drug dealer’s couch. In a drug dealer’s bed. On more than one occasion I’ve woken up on a total stranger’s front porch with no memory of how I got there. Last year, I was arrested three times for possession of methamphetamine, charged each time with having a single loaded syringe in my pocket. In Illinois, any paraphernalia containing residue of a controlled substance is considered possession, a Class III felony, carrying a sentence of two to five years in prison. The last time I was arrested I spent over six months in jail before my grandmother agreed to post bond. The rest of my family would hardly speak to me. I have yet to be tried. Nine years ago, I had just finished a master’s degree in writing at Washington University in St. Louis, was awarded a postgraduate fellowship, and had my very first short story published in Granta magazine. It was the tale of a young addict jailed on drug charges, titled “Here Is What You Do.” When I wrote the story, I had never been to jail. I had never injected drugs. I was clean, working as a college instructor, taking care of my son, spending a few hours every day working on other stories I wanted to include in the manuscript I was about to send to agents. Read More
August 1, 2019 Bulletin Announcing Our New Poetry Editor, Vijay Seshadri By The Paris Review Vijay Seshadri. The Paris Review is thrilled to announce Vijay Seshadri as the twelfth poetry editor in the magazine’s sixty-six-year history. Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954 and moved to the U.S. at the age of five. He is the author of the poetry books Wild Kingdom, The Long Meadow, and 3 Sections, as well as many essays, reviews, and memoir fragments. Over the course of his career, his work has been widely published, anthologized, and recognized with many honors, most recently the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for 3 Sections and a 2015 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was educated at Oberlin College and Columbia University, and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. “It is a wonderful and unique privilege to join the distinguished line of Paris Review poetry editors,” Seshadri said. “It is also an exciting privilege. All the questions that can be asked about poetry—about its form, purpose, scope—are more bristling and pressing now in America than they have been since the sixties. Anyone who loves the art should love the opportunity that the Paris Review poetry editorship offers to mediate the conversations between individual poets and the culture at large, especially in this watershed historical moment.” Read More