May 14, 2019 Happily Children with Mothers Don’t Eat Houses By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Turns out, for three months, Eli, my five year old, had a small black pebble in his ear. Don’t ask me why it never bothered him or why I never noticed. I am only his mother. When the very old doctor gently removed the pebble, Eli said, “Oh, there you are. I was looking for you all over.” About a week later I read about the Makapansgat pebble, a two-million-year-old reddish-brown pebble described as “water worn” with “staring eyes.” In 1925, this pebble, a pebble with a face, was found outside the vicinity of extinct hominids, implying that it was carried a good distance, as one might carry a fairy tale, because in the pebble a human recognized something and so kept it and carried it. In Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel,” it’s not the breadcrumbs but the moonlit pebbles that point the children home. The breadcrumbs, eaten by birds, are the vanishing path that lead Hansel and Gretel to an edible house inhabited by a ravenous witch. At first, Hansel and Gretel gently nibble at the house, like mice. Then Hansel tears off a big piece of cake-roof. Then Gretel knocks out an entire sugar windowpane. The children are insatiable because what they are really hungry for is a mother and their mother is gone. Children with mothers don’t eat houses. While I write this essay, my mother stops speaking to me. The reasons are as old as the oldest fairy tale. As old as pebbles. For days my chest feels like it’s filling up with dry leaves. My head is bricks and glass. A shattering takes up residence in my body. I am forty-three and her silence still does this to me. I want sugar. I want to sleep. Read More
May 13, 2019 At Work The Ideal Place to Disappear: An Interview with Julia Phillips By Jennifer Wilson The Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia is a sparsely populated landmass that sits atop the Pacific Ring of Fire. Forty percent of the land is covered by volcanoes, twenty-nine of which are active. There are earthquakes, hot springs, extreme weather, brown bears, rivers turned blood red from spawning salmon, and vast frozen expanses. Not many people live there, though more do now than did during the Soviet era—Kamchatka was a closed military zone until 1989. There are no roads connecting it to mainland Russia and much of the territory is accessible only by helicopter (or dogsled). Julia Phillips is the author of Disappearing Earth, a crime novel set in this remote peninsula of the Russian Far East, “sixteen time zones away” from her hometown of Montclair, New Jersey. Phillips, who studied Russian literature in college, went to Kamchatka on a Fulbright in 2011. While there, she spent a month traveling across Russia’s easternmost tundra with the organizers of the Beringia, a 685-mile dogsled race. More recently, Phillips contributed a piece to BuzzFeed about the challenges facing Kamchatka’s nomadic reindeer herders. In all her writing about Kamchatka, Phillips seems most fascinated by the creative potential of emptiness, identifying in the horizonless tundra feelings of awe and dread in equal measure. Those feelings are written into every page of her debut novel, Disappearing Earth. Told over the course of a year, the story begins with the news that two young Russian girls, sisters Alyona (age eleven) and Sofia (age eight), have gone missing from Petropavlovsk, the capital city of Kamchatka, one August afternoon. As summer draws to an end, and winter settles in, so too do the anxieties of being a woman in an isolated landscape. In Disappearing Earth, Phillips explores the impact the girls’ abduction has on the fabric of this unique community where xenophobia and tensions between ethnic Russians and the indigenous population are all heightened by the disappearance and the criminal investigation that follows. I spoke with Julia over the phone about her stunning debut, Kamchatka as muse, and the feminist potential of crime fiction. Read More
May 13, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Mariama Bâ By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. As a Muslim schoolgirl in Senegal in the forties, Mariama Bâ had to choose her life’s direction at the age of fourteen. When girls graduated from primary education in the French colonial system, the main options were enrollment in either typing or midwifery courses. Only the most academic students at Bâ’s school progressed to the École normale des jeunes filles de Rufisque: an elite teacher training college just outside Dakar, whose intake included the surrounding Francophone territories. Bâ had decided to become a secretary, but her dynamic headmistress, ambitious on her behalf, wouldn’t hear of it. “You are intelligent,” she told her pupil. “You have gifts.” So Bâ took the entrance exam for the École normale and received the highest mark in French West Africa. The headmistress’s discernment of exceptional talent was again strikingly vindicated when Bâ, on publishing her debut novel at age fifty, became one of the first black African women to achieve international renown as an author. So Long a Letter, an incandescent critique of Islamic polygyny from the point of view of a middle-aged Senegalese widow, won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa and was translated into many languages. Bâ, who had been a women’s rights activist since the sixties, was suddenly hailed as the pioneering feminist voice of a continent. Sadly, she had little time to enjoy her success. Less than a year after accepting the Noma prize and giving a speech at the 1980 Frankfurt Book Fair, Bâ died of cancer. According to those who knew her, she didn’t rail against her fate. She accepted premature death as the price of her startling literary glory. Read More
May 10, 2019 This Week’s Reading Books Only a Mother Could Love By The Paris Review Ali Smith. Photo: Christian Sinibaldi. © Christian Sinibaldi. Dear Mum, I know it’s not Mother’s Day in Scotland, but it is here in America. The Queen has two birthdays—maybe you can have two Mother’s Days? Anyway, I’m only halfway through Ali Smith’s Artful, but it’s already sad and clever and beautiful. The book is composed of four lectures on literature, tangled up with a narrative of mourning, and is gently self-aware in a way that isn’t annoying. You’d like it, I think. I’ve just ordered another copy online and had it posted to you. I’m sorry it won’t arrive in time for Sunday (I didn’t have much forewarning regarding this extra Mother’s Day). What else from New York? I just read Emmanuel Carrère’s My Life as a Russian Novel, and it was a splendid, if somewhat traumatic, experience. Carrère lays bare his faults in such a way as to make one feel very aware of one’s own. It, too, is sad and clever and beautiful, but I can’t recommend it to you, owing to it being occasionally pornographic. If you want to read it, you’ll have to find it for yourself; I can’t be involved. Anyway, Happy Mother’s Day! Again. —Robin Jones Read More
May 10, 2019 Eat Your Words Cooking with Martial and Catullus By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. In ancient Rome, poetry was pop culture, and being a poet was a viable living of sorts—you attached yourself to a patron and wrote flattering words about him, nasty verse about his enemies, and humorous epigrams to enliven his dinner parties. You kissed political ass, stuck in well-timed barbs, snarked about fashion and stupid food trends, and called out friends, foes, and former lovers. And while many wrote elevated, epic work, there was a thriving culture of poets like Martial (A.D. 40–103) and Catullus (84–54 B.C.), whose catty, witty, often obscene poems reflect daily life and circulated first through gossipy word-of-mouth and graffiti. If it seems surprising that the enjoyment of bitchy public ephemera (see: Twitter) is as old as human civilization, it’s only one way in which the psychology of ancient Rome seems eerily similar to our own. Martial and Catullus cared about money and sex, status and partying, making art and having dinner, just like we do today. Their city, as described by Martial, has “grimy restaurants” that “spill out too far” onto the sidewalks, “inn posts … festooned with loads of chained flagons,” and at least one bar that’s a “smoke-blackened dive.” It’s populated by “bar owners, butchers and barbers,” but the elite pretty boys have “long hair and soft beards,” and there is a brisk economy of gift-giving. In one epigram, Martial notes that “this month,” trendy items include “napkins, pretty spoons, / Paper, wax tapers and tall jars of prunes.” In another, wishing to be written into someone’s will, he sends gifts of “cakes flavored with honey from Hybla.” Even in the ancient world, the provenance of gourmet food items mattered. Read More
May 10, 2019 Bulletin The Winners of 92Y’s 2019 Discovery Poetry Contest By The Paris Review For nearly seven decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers—John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Larry Levis, Mary Jo Bang, and Solmaz Sharif, among many others—have gone on to become leading voices in their generations. This year’s competition received close to twelve hundred submissions, which were read by preliminary judges Timothy Donnelly and Mai Der Vang. After much deliberation, final judges Daniel Borzutzky, Randall Mann, and Patricia Smith awarded this year’s prizes to Alfredo Aguilar, Bernard Ferguson, Omotara James, and Alycia Pirmohamed. The runners-up were Mia Kang, Henry Mills, and Jasmine Reid. The four winners receive five hundred dollars, publication on The Paris Review Daily, a stay at the Ace Hotel, and a reading at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center on May 16. Congratulations to the winners! We’re pleased to present their work below. Read More