April 3, 2019 Happily The Evil Stepmother By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Franz Juttner, Illustration from Snow White, c.1905 The stepmother swings like a light bulb back and forth, causing the mother who is not there to glow. That is her job. I am a mother, a stepmother, and a step-stepmother because I am my husband’s third wife and he has daughters from his first marriage and a daughter from his second. And I am a mother-mother to our two sons. “This isn’t one of your fairy tales,” my husband once said to me during an argument. He didn’t mean Disney, he meant Grimm. He meant I was stowing myself in the body of a fairy-tale stepmother and setting sail. When all my husband’s daughters are in our house at once, I grow very small. The weight of those girls who are not mine tilts the house and slides me toward the door. The weight of my sons slides me back in. Up and down goes this seesaw. My husband takes no turns. He grows weightless and blurry. On weekends, my seventeen-year-old stepdaughter comes out of her bedroom in the early afternoon in a thick white robe. She moves slowly, like a gathering cloud. My sons worship her. She is soft and kind, and they scramble all over her body like mice. “Play with us,” they beg. She yawns. Shuffles into the bathroom. They wait by the door. Often she is in there for a long, long time. Her name is Eve, like the first woman on earth. I love my stepdaughter, but I don’t love being a stepmother. It’s grim work. If we stood side by side, Eve and I, and looked into the mirror, it wouldn’t be our reflections staring back at us. It would be something wild and cruel. A discarded mother skin. A punishment for loving what doesn’t belong to you. Read More
April 2, 2019 Redux Redux: Revelry 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. Deborah Eisenberg. Photograph courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In this week’s Redux, we’re reading the three writers we’ll be celebrating at our annual Spring Revel, with Hadada Award recipient Deborah Eisenberg’s 2013 Art of Fiction interview; Kelli Jo Ford’s short story “Hybrid Vigor,” winner of the 2019 Plimpton Prize for Fiction; and Benjamin Nugent’s short story “Safe Spaces,” winner of the 2019 Terry Southern Prize for Humor. 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. Deborah Eisenberg, The Art of Fiction No. 218 Issue no. 204 (Spring 2013) The real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There’s an incredibly inflexible set of instruments—our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it’s awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it’s so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time. Read More
April 2, 2019 Arts & Culture Athena, Goddess of Copyediting By Mary Norris Ancient pottery depicting Athena and Enceladus fighting. Louvre Museum. Public domain. My first exposure to Greek mythology was at the Lyceum—not the famed Lykeion in Athens, where Aristotle and his pupils strolled around as they discussed philosophy and beauty, but a movie theater on Fulton Road in Cleveland, where my brothers and I spent Saturday afternoons. The Lyceum was classic as opposed to classical: popcorn in red-and-white striped boxes, a stern lady usher who confiscated the candy we snuck in from outside, buzzers under the seats for a gimmicky thrill. Every week, the Lyceum showed a double feature, usually a horror movie—The Mummy, Godzilla, The Creature from the Black Lagoon—paired with something mildly pornographic (and highly educational). At one Saturday matinee, I laid eyes for the first time on the Cyclops. The movie was Ulysses (1955), starring Kirk Douglas as the man of many turnings. In a way, it, too, was a horror movie, full of monsters and apparitions: a witch who turned men into pigs, sea serpents, Anthony Quinn in a short tight skirt. Read More
April 2, 2019 Dice Roll Dice Roll: Madame Mustache By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s new monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. Original illustration ©Ellis Rosen “You will play, M’sieur?” was how a woman with a black mustache greeted gamblers at the Wild West Saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota. The year was 1877; the gold rush was on. Miners flocked to the saloon on the corner of Main and Gold to put the day’s earnings on a game of twenty-one. The elegant dealer with the musical French accent was one of the most notorious women in the West—Eleanor Dumont, whose life pursued two dangerous prospects: the action on the table and the riches underground. “No one knows her history,” wrote a local journalist, and that’s remained true to this day. As with so many figures of the Old West, Dumont’s life is shot through with disputed accounts and fictional flourishes. Only two things were for certain, according to the journalist: she was always alone, and always making money. * The chic Eleanor Dumont first materialized one night behind a roulette wheel at the Bella Union in San Francisco, already a virtuoso with cards. She’d come from New Orleans, a city on the cutting edge of gambling at the time. In addition to countless dens, where the rudiments of the art could be learned, New Orleans boasted luxurious gambling palaces that innovated modern casino mainstays, like free buffets. Read More
April 1, 2019 Arts & Culture A Storm Is Blowing By Brian Dillon John Ruskin, Study of Dawn, 1868 It’s said the British never stop remarking on their weather. How will they cope in decades to come, when life is all weather, all the time? The country ran a brief test a few weeks ago: in mid- to late February the sun blazed, spring surprised itself, and the temperature in London, where I live, reached over 20°C (68°F). Boon or portent? Meteorological holiday or climate-change hell? Beautiful or sublime? Britons could not agree. It’s now mid-March, and I was awoken at five this morning by rattling windows and the rising shriek of a storm called Gareth (not the direst of names). Abruptly, spring is canceled, and London’s squares are littered with the corpses of premature blossoms. As the wind died in the morning, I wandered around to Finsbury Circus, on the north side of which the London Institution once stood. It was here, on February 4 and February 11, 1884, that the essayist and art critic John Ruskin (who was born two hundred years ago last month) delivered “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century”: a pair of apocalyptic lectures on modern weather. Ruskin was days away from his sixty-sixth birthday when he rose to address a skeptical audience on the subject of “a series of cloud phenomena, which, so far as I can weight existing evidence, are peculiar to our own times.” His powers as writer and orator were not yet depleted; such masterpieces as Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice were behind him, but the autobiographical Praeterita, his last great work, remained to be written. Still, Ruskin’s psychic weather was on the turn. In 1878 he suffered the first of several breakdowns, and was unwell enough, later that year, to miss the infamous libel case that James McNeill Whistler brought against him after Ruskin accused the artist in print of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Read More
April 1, 2019 Bulletin Deborah Eisenberg’s Life in Comics By Liana Finck This year, The Paris Review honors Deborah Eisenberg with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. Eisenberg is a writing professor at Columbia University, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her first four collections of stories—Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006)—were reprinted as The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010). Her fifth collection, Your Duck Is My Duck, was published last year. But if you really want to know about Deborah Eisenberg, please enjoy an abridged biography by the cartoonist Liana Finck: Read More