May 8, 2025 First Person The Last Dreams By Naguib Mahfouz All photographs by Diana Matar. Dream 203 I found myself in a strange and sad place when suddenly there was my old love, B. She walked burdened by old age. Knowing that I will never see her again, I felt such deep sorrow. Dream 204 I saw myself in my forties, caressing a pale rose. It responded, encouraging me, but, given our age difference, I hesitated. My reluctance persisted until she left, leaving me alone to contend with my aging self. Read More
May 6, 2025 First Person A Certain Kind of Romantic By Edward Hirsch Postcard from the Boston Public Library Tichnor Brothers Collection. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. PARALLEL PARKING The guidance counselor was my driver’s ed teacher. He liked to talk about football. He didn’t guide me much on driving. I angled the car into the school lot. We never practiced parallel parking. Therefore, I failed the test for my driver’s license twice. I had one more try. I diligently practiced between garbage cans in front of the house. It was like playing bumper tag. I didn’t know who got it worse—the fender or the cans. My dad and I drove to Des Plaines for my last try. I pulled into the street. The instructor had a headache and blew off the part about parking. I drove to the first McDonald’s on River Road to celebrate my special day. It was as spotless as all the others. But there were hundreds of green pickles dotting the lot. “I guess they don’t want you to park here,” my dad said. CAUTION Whenever I drove, my mother sat in the passenger seat and slammed on imaginary brakes at yellow traffic lights. This was cautionary. When I was on my own, I stopped. When I was with her, I gunned it. AFTER I GOT MY DRIVER’S LICENSE I picked up my grandmother at her poker game on Saturday night. She wanted to show me off to her friends. She was in high spirits after the win. When we got back to her place, she drank half a beer to mark the occasion. My grandmother didn’t want me to drink and drive. That was a laugh. I had never even had a full beer. I ate a pastry in celebration. Whenever I had a date, I dropped off my grandmother in front of her apartment on Lawrence Avenue. She said, “Good luck in all your future endeavors.” “Okay, Gram, but I’ll pick you up for breakfast in the morning.” Read More
May 5, 2025 On Photography How to Find Your Mother in Her Portrait By Iman Mersal Hidden mother with child. Linda Fregni Nagler, #0173, tintype from The Hidden Mother, 997 collected daguerreotypes, tintypes, albumen prints, snapshots. When my mother died in the mid-seventies, her only extant portrait took on a greater significance. Thus photography’s basic function: “Photography is an elegiac art,” as Susan Sontag wrote. To the little girl that was me, this portrait happened to be a document of the moment in which, for the first and last time, I had stood beside my mother in a studio, unaware that less than two months time she would be dead. That photograph must be a means of instruction, an exercise in recovering the moment that had passed, in recovering the features and presence of my mother or, as Barthes writes, “The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see [in this instance, my mother] has indeed existed.” I never had the sense that the woman in the photograph was my mother. Perhaps it is the anxious expression she turns toward the lens, as though, having stepped out of her domestic fortress, she now stood powerless. Perhaps it is the dress she is wearing, one I only ever saw her in once or twice on expeditions into town. Or maybe it is the hair that hangs down to her waist and which was usually plaited into two long braids that circled her head in opposite directions. The woman in the picture is not just different from what I remember of her, or want to remember: she is a ghost, like the ghosts I would see on strips of negatives as a girl. I would hold them up to my eye, trying to guess who they were, and when I grew bored of this, would fashion these haunted ribbons into bracelets around my wrist. Read More
May 2, 2025 The Review’s Review Keith McNally’s Rearview Mirror By Rosa Shipley From Reflected by Vijay Balakrishnan, a portfolio in issue no. 185 of the Review. “Restaurants will break your heart” is something that I often hear myself saying. It has become a mantra. When did I start saying it, I wonder. Maybe it was when I first discovered the criss-crossed lines of affection; falling in a crash-out kind of love with a fellow line cook because he helped me with my mise en place. Maybe it was when my sous-chef first called me mediocre; we all watched slices of chocolate cake I cut pile up in the garbage because of my disappointing quenelles. Maybe it was the first time that I had to fire a kitchen assistant over the phone, hearing him quietly murmur in response, “Okay.” Maybe (definitely) it was the time I got fired—the bad news sandwiched between my manager saying I was “amazing” and also “so great.” Maybe it was the first time I watched a plate of food I made go out and I understood, profoundly, that I would never know who might eat it. In his new memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, Keith McNally’s tells us that his heart has been broken many times over—but it seems that restaurants are, in fact, what have saved him. As a diner, his restaurants have certainly given me much life force and heart-mend; they are perhaps the most accessibly glamorous in New York City, where I grew up. Over the course of his career, McNally, who is now seventy-three, has opened Augustine, Balthazar, Café Luxembourg, Cherche Midi, Lucky Strike, Nell’s, Minetta Tavern, Morandi, Pastis, Pravda, and Schiller’s, as well as Balthazar in London and the new Minetta Tavern, in Washington, D.C. This memoir spans the course of McNally’s life. It loops and shifts between timelines, but in a way that is forgivable and even charming: it reads like McNally remembers as he writes and then—urgently—wants not to forget. A funny tension for someone who claims to regret almost everything. He weaves together memories from the working-class London of his childhood to his young man’s adventures abroad and the sets (strip clubs and playhouses alike) where he realized that film and theater were what moved him most. But more often than not, we’re in New York City in the eighties, witnessing, up close, the building of his empire, the explosions of his love affairs, and time’s passage and pains to the present. McNally turns on the overheads: We get intimate, poignant, sometimes brutal moments from his marriages (two, both now finished) and earnest, messy fatherhood. Lights intensify on a stroke, a suicide attempt, a stint at McLean, and an arrival at new kind of life. Read More
May 1, 2025 Bookmarks Souvenirs By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling in the back, a book of Corinne Day’s photos on the set of Sofia Coppola’s the virgin suicides, out from MACK this month. 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 Joan Copjec’s Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran: Corbin/Kiarostami/Lacan (MIT Press): As Ishaghpour puts it in his essay “The True and False in Art,” “It would be fair to say that, according to Kiarostami, the whole world has just one wish: being photographed, appearing in a film, being on the screen. So much so, that it would be necessary to change Descartes’s formula into ‘I have an image, [therefore] I [am].’ ” Why should women be exempt from this elemental desire to have an image—a desire so elemental that even the God of Islam is acknowledged to have pined for one. For want of an image he was hidden even from Himself. Those who protest against the assimilation of women to an image are right to do so, though it needs to be acknowledged that there is a critical difference between an image that assimilates what it depicts (or: reduces it to an object) and an epiphanic image. The latter—or “incorruptible”—form of the image performs an epiphanic function. It directs us to attend not merely to what it shows on its surface but also to what nestles in its shadow. One of the most famous illustrations of such an image is the painting of a veil by Parrhasios, which prompted those who looked at it to wonder what lay beneath it. The function of the image in this case is not merely to draw our attention to what is visible but also to what is not. Read More
April 30, 2025 First Person Meaning By Richard Russo Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. I’m walking, as I do pretty much every day, along the Eastern Promenade near my home in Portland, Maine, when I feel my wedding ring slip off. Luckily, my hands are in my jeans, so no harm done. I slip the ring back on without breaking stride and return to contemplating Casco Bay. I make it another ten yards or so before it happens again. When the ring slips off my finger a third time, I give up and leave it there at the bottom of my pocket. Though the jeans I’m wearing are relatively new, I double-check anyway to make sure there’s no hole in the pocket. Having read Tolkien, I know some rings want to be lost, others to be found, and I’ve already lost one wedding ring, though that was decades ago. The ring in my pocket doesn’t actually want anything, of course. It’s just a piece of metal and has no meaning other than what I attach to it. It’s sliding off my finger because it’s January and bitter cold and my skin is dry and—who knows?—maybe I’ve lost a couple pounds. As I said, it’s perfectly secure right where it is, yet here I am fretting about its safety and unable to reconcile its being in my pocket when it belongs on my finger. My parka has a tiny pocket with a zipper, and I consider putting the ring there, but that would further distance it from the finger it’s supposed to be on. Also, the zipped pocket of my parka carries its own risks. I’m seventy-three and my memory is becoming porous. Sometimes I have to page back through whatever novel I’m working on because I can’t remember the name of a character who’s been absent from the last couple chapters. And like many men my age I too often find myself in front of the open refrigerator, peering at its contents in the hopes of spotting the reason I’m standing there. Am I even in the right place? Is what I’m looking for in the washing machine? The silverware drawer? The pantry? If I put the ring in the pocket of my parka where it can’t possibly fall out, will I forget doing so? If so, then two or three years down the road the ring will go with the parka to Goodwill, and in the meantime I’ll be left to contemplate what it means that I’ve managed to lose not one but two wedding rings. To some people—maybe even to me—that might appear subconsciously intentional. My therapist, if I had one, would surely agree, which is why I don’t have one. Part of the reason I’m fretting is that this would be a terrible time to lose the ring. For the last several months my wife has been suffering from headaches that we’ve been unable to diagnose. MRIs and biopsies seem to have ruled out the most terrifying scenarios, but there’s something scary about not knowing, especially in the wake of the pandemic, which reacquainted all of us with mortality and the uncertainty of the future, realities that in the beforetimes we managed to sequester in the back of our brains. To lose my wedding ring at a time when my wife’s health is in question would mean something, wouldn’t it? Yes? No? Read More