August 7, 2018 Redux Redux: Doing Battle with Your Successors 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. This week, we bring you August Wilson’s 1999 Art of Theater interview, Ben Okri’s short story “The Dream-Vendor’s August,” and Joyce Carol Oates’s poem “Wild Bamboo, Late August.” Read More
August 7, 2018 Arts & Culture Seven Books I’ll Never Read By Adam O’Fallon Price There comes a point in every reader’s life when they must make peace with all the books they’ll never read. This is true even for the most voracious reader in the world. They say Alexander Pope was the last person to have read every book ever written. Given today’s publishing release schedules and the advent of e-books, a newborn in 2018 who lived to be eighty and did nothing but read their entire life would not even read a small fraction of the world’s library, an exponentially growing Babel straight out of Borges’s most fevered fantasy. When you’re younger, you know logically that you will not, cannot, read every book. Yet youth’s convincing illusion of immortality is not confined to the realms of romance and illegal substances—it informs your reading as well, and it does so in two senses. First, all books possess a nimbus of potentiality, however faint. True, it may not be likely that you’ll read Finnegans Wake, but it’s possible. Second, believing you possess an infinite amount of life, you can fritter it away on books both trivial and great. A nostalgic rereading of The Hitchhiker’s Quartet? Sounds fun! An abortive yearlong stab at 2666? Why not! But as holds true for many other things, these illusions begin to fall away around the age of forty. You don’t have time to waste on bad books, and you know yourself better than to seriously think you’re going to learn French in order to read À la recherche du temps perdu in its original language. You know yourself well—too well, maybe. Your tastes can easily become circumscribed by habit, and you venture less frequently afield to the strange shelves that turned up unexpected favorites in your youth. These tendencies should be countered whenever possible, but aging unavoidably shapes a reader. Read More
August 7, 2018 At Work Mermaids and Transgressive Sex: An Interview with Alexia Arthurs By Abigail Bereola How to Love a Jamaican, Alexia Arthurs’s first book, is a short-story collection that delves into the lives of people who have Jamaica in common. Whether it’s the place they currently live, the place they left, or the place their parents are from, Jamaica always forms some notion of home. And How to Love a Jamaican explores, in part, what it means to make and remake that conception of home. In this book, there’s no single way to be Jamaican—the definition of the word itself expands to encompass each person who claims it. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Arthurs has been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review and Granta, among other publications. A story from the collection, “Bad Behavior,” first appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of The Paris Review and was awarded the 2017 Plimpton Prize. Arthurs and I spoke on the phone two days after the collection was published, about invisibility, the idea of “a better life,” mermaids, and more. INTERVIEWER When you were writing these stories, what did you want from them? ARTHURS That’s such an interesting question. What did I want from them? I think I was working through various things and, intuitively, I was trying to make peace with things that had happened or were happening, and with myself. My stories are really personal, so even though it’s fiction, the stories, in different ways, feel as though they’re about me. At its essence, perhaps I just wanted to feel less lonely. These stories allow me to feel heard and maybe even understood. Read More
August 6, 2018 Arts & Culture Notes on the Death of Oxana Shachko By Jacqueline Feldman From Oxana Shachko’s Instagram (@oksanashachko). Oxana Shachko told me she preferred that spelling, with the x, in 2016, as I was finalizing an essay that would describe, among other things, her life. In news articles about her, which have multiplied since her death by suicide in Paris this July, journalists more typically use the Romanization Oksana. I will stick with the spelling she and I agreed on even though I knew Oxana, an artist who was thirty-one, to take things like this lightly, often changing her mind. My essay deals with the women’s group Femen, which Oxana helped found in Ukraine. Beginning in 2008, it protested corruption in government; the conscription of Ukrainian women into sex work, which Oxana described as an issue of poverty, of globalization, even; and the failings of the hospital in Khmelnytskyi, of the Kiev Zoo. By 2013, the founding members all lived in exile. Oxana and another cofounder, Sasha Shevchenko, had fled to France, where they would become political refugees. The third, Anna Hutsol, went to Switzerland, where she was denied asylum. By the time I met Oxana in Paris, Femen had added activists internationally. The group had attracted attention in the West for its performative topless protests as well as for a certain overreach, taking on issues as far afield as the situation of women in Muslim countries. It would have surprised people I knew in Paris, where Femen was famous, that these women had begun with issues local to Ukraine. My memory is that Oxana left Femen in 2014 and that even then she showed ambivalence. (She’d say, for example, that she affiliated not with Femen France but with Femen International.) In later accounts, the date moves up. A 2016 text published by a gallery says she left the group in 2013. I am wary of making too much of slippages like this, particularly in retrospect. Still, if Oxana’s life did reshape itself on the many occasions she had to tell of it, her death has cluttered the truth further. Web searches turn up the work of artists less accomplished than she was, the photographers and filmmakers who shot her. If you didn’t know her, you might struggle to identify the paintings that were hers. She was born in Khmelnytskyi, which is in western Ukraine, where at the exceptionally young age of eight she apprenticed herself to a Greek man who painted icons. A deeply religious child, she came to identify as an atheist, a materialist, a communist, and, at last, a feminist. In her late paintings, her technique with gold leaf, with the tempera she herself made out of egg yolk, translates into a political vernacular. Madonnas, haloed, wear niqabs. An archangel is gay, as denoted by a rainbow. Jesus and fishermen float in a comfortable boat as hands reach up from below them to break the waves. They are the hands of humans sinking, which the sanctimonious men ignore. Read More
August 6, 2018 Arts & Culture The Treasures That Prevail: On the Prose of Adrienne Rich By Sandra M. Gilbert Adrienne Rich. Toward the end of “Diving into the Wreck,” one of her most renowned poems, Adrienne Rich explains the goals of her underwater journey: I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth Here, she says, is the imperative of investigation: needful research into “the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.” Arguably, as she confided that she discovered sometime in the sixties, such research into reality—“the thing itself and not the myth”—was a major aim of her work as a poet. But perhaps it hasn’t yet been clearly enough understood how crucially her writings in prose complemented, supplemented, enriched, and, yes, inspired her writing in verse. For in these writings she was not just one of many contemporary poets illuminating her verse through confessional glosses but a major memoirist, essayist, theorist, and scholar. Read More
August 3, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Jewel Thieves and Drunken Companions By The Paris Review The comedy of the New York girl abroad, exemplified in Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, is high among my favorite genres, followed closely by the tragedy of the New York girl abroad—Daisy Miller is one among many Jamesian examples. Eve Babitz’s Black Swans, originally published in 1993, is both the comedy and the tragedy of the Los Angeles girl on her home coast, and it elevates one of my less-favored genres, the personal essay. These autobiographical “stories” are peopled with sad, handsome men (thus the comedy). The tragedy is the denouement of the preceding decades, which is more readily on display in her interactions with women. Babitz lunches in the L.A. heat, dressed comfortably and mindful of her newly middle-aged metabolism, watching her companion, an effortlessly svelte woman her age, fully made-up and dressed in a fine white pantsuit, devour a hamburger, a bourbon, then a custard, a rare holdout of refined excess. The blinding twilight of a bygone era in Los Angeles is Babitz’s lived experience, distilled here into stories with sweet bite, like sour fruit only just past the point of ripe. —Lauren Kane Porochista Khakpour’s memoir Sick doesn’t need much more hype, but I have focused on almost nothing else the last two weeks, deliberately stretching it into as many days of reading as possible. That a book chronicling year after year of physical agony, misdiagnosis, and serial dating never becomes narcissistic or self-involved is a miracle; instead, reading Khakpour’s memoir is more like a chance meeting with someone you’ve always dreamed of commiserating with. It could easily have been a polemic against the health care industry; you’ll quickly lose count of how many providers fail Khakpour. It took her years to get a Lyme disease diagnosis, which, detected in the late stage, signifies a lifetime of health problems and relapses. Polemic typically necessitates ego, but Khakpour’s is absent in Sick. My favorite part of the book is its structure, each chapter set in a new city at a new gig. She is writer adept at snagging grants and fellowships, and her story as a sick person spreads from her hometown of Tehran, to L.A., to Sarah Lawrence College, to Johns Hopkins, to New Mexico, to Pennsylvania, to Germany, and always back to New York. The constant change in geography, in lovers, and in health are immensely pleasurable to read on every page, despite the author’s uncertain future through it all. The very worst moments—hiding in the bathroom with scissors to her arm in Leipzig while her boyfriend has a psychotic episode—are gravid with her joy at being able to write it. In the end, it’s this joy of writing, however grim the content, that is really the subject of Sick. I love this book. —Ben Shields Read More