October 11, 2018 Arts & Culture Behind the Author’s Photo By Beowulf Sheehan Beowulf Sheehan is the master of the literary portrait. His new book, AUTHOR, collects his photographs of two hundred writers, historians, journalists, playwrights, and poets from thirty-five countries, from Roxane Gay to Masha Gessen, Patti Smith to Zadie Smith, Karl Ove Knausgaard to J. K. Rowling, and Jonathan Franzen to Toni Morrison. Here, he was generous enough to share some moments from behind the scenes: Margaret Atwood. Photograph © Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center/Agence Opale Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood radiates grace. I’ve felt it from her each time I’ve been in her presence. In 2012, I photographed her in the greenroom of the New School’s Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall for PEN America. She was, as she had been previously, the brightest light in the room. I broke the ice by recalling the last time I was with her. Our short conversation took a turn as she brought up social media and her elation at how many people were following her on Twitter. I replied that many people adored her work and her. Then we made our pictures. I didn’t know, however, that the door to the room was unlocked. Not one but two people who weren’t meant to be there came in while we were working. I was a bit less than graceful in redirecting them. When I turned back to Margaret, her warmth and her smile were unchanged. Of course. Read More
October 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Time Warps Are Real and What You Should Do About It By Anthony Madrid Original illustration by Jason Novak All of us have been thinking about this kind of thing for years, here at the Department of Ordinary Magic. We are very, very interested in supernatural phenomena that are entirely natural and that everyone ignores. Take magnets. If they didn’t really exist, they would surely exist anyhow in the imagination. They are exactly the kind of thing some kid would make up. The magical force is strong, invisible, and it only works under certain circumstances. For example, you cannot use a magnet on wood. Superman can’t see through lead, and magnets don’t work on wood. There are many things like this. Telepathy, for instance. That shit exists. Everyone knows this and uses it all day long. It’s just not like in the movies. I can’t simply close my eyes and know what any random person is thinking. But all day long, people know what I’m thinking, just by glancing at my face and posture. Half the time, they know my thinking better than I do myself! They can “see right through me.” However, they don’t have the last laugh, ’cuz I can see right through them just as well, if not better. It just doesn’t work on wood. Read More
October 10, 2018 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Violet Trefusis By Emma Garman Young Violet Trefusis Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. “O darling, aren’t you glad you aren’t me?” wrote Violet Trefusis to her pined-for lover, Vita Sackville-West, in the summer of 1921. “It really is something to be thankful for.” On the face of it, Trefusis—née Keppel—didn’t deserve anyone’s pity. At twenty-seven, she was brilliant, beautiful, and privileged beyond compare. Both her grandfathers had titles: an earl on one side and a baronet on the other. She had grown up in various grand homes with frequent foreign trips, spoke French and Italian fluently, and planned to be a novelist. Influenced by Oscar Wilde and Christina Rossetti, she was an aesthete whose god was Beauty. “If ever I could make others feel the universe of blinding beauty that I almost see at times,” she wrote, “I should not have lived in vain.” The only black mark on Trefusis’s illustrious background was the question mark over her father’s identity. As was then customary among the upper classes, her parents had an open relationship. All through Trefusis’s childhood her mother, Alice Keppel, was the mistress of Edward VII, whom the young Violet knew as Kingy. But he wasn’t her father: her birth predated the relationship, a fact that didn’t stop Trefusis dropping hints about her royal lineage. Nor was Alice’s complaisant husband, the Honorable George Keppel, the father. The likeliest contender was William Beckett, a banker and Conservative MP whose nose Trefusis apparently had. “Who was my father? A faun undoubtedly!” she joked to Sackville-West. “A faun who contracted a mésalliance with a witch.” Read More
October 10, 2018 Arts & Culture In Praise of the Photocopy By Alejandro Zambra Essays by Roland Barthes marked with fluorescent highlighters; poems by Carlos de Rokha or Enrique Lihn stapled together; ring-bound or precariously fastened novels by Witold Gombrowicz or Clarice Lispector: it’s good to remember that we learned to read with these photocopies, which we waited for impatiently, smoking, on the other side of the copy-shop window. As citizens of a country where books are ridiculously expensive to buy and libraries are poorly equipped or nonexistent, we got used to reading photocopies, and we even came to find it charming. In exchange for just a few pesos, some giant, tireless machines could bestow on us the literature we so desired. We read those warm bundles of paper and then stored them on shelves as if they were real books. Because that’s what they were to us: rare, beloved books. Important books. I remember a classmate who photocopied War and Peace at a rate of thirty pages per week, and a friend who bought reams of light-blue paper because according to her, the printing came out better. The greatest bibliographic gem I have is a slipshod but lovingly made copy of La Nueva novela, the inimitable book-object by Juan Luis Martínez that we tried to imitate anyway. My version is complete with a transparent inset, a Chilean flag insert, a page with Chinese characters intermingled in the text, and fishhooks stuck to the paper. Several of us collaborated on making it, regressing back to our days in carpentry class at school. The resulting table was pretty wobbly, but I’ll never forget what a good time we had in those weeks of scissors, fasteners, and photocopies. Read More
October 9, 2018 Redux Redux: The Idea of Women’s Language 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. Last week, The Paris Review announced Women at Work Volume Two, a collection of twelve interviews with female artists from the Writers at Work series. Volume Two is available for preorder now. This week, we bring you selections of work by some of the women featured in Volume Two: Luisa Valenzuela’s 2001 Art of Fiction interview, Louise Erdrich’s short story “The Beet Queen,” and May Sarton’s poem “Letters from Maine.” 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. Read More
October 9, 2018 First Person I Want a Reckoning By Lacy M. Johnson Usually it is a woman who asks the question—always the same question. She sits near the door in the last row of the auditorium, where I have spent the last hour talking about what it means to have been kidnapped and raped by a man I loved, a man with whom I lived. He was a man who, even before the kidnapping, had already violated me in every way you might imagine, especially a man like him. Someone else in the audience asks what happened to the man who did this to me, and I explain how he got away, how he is a fugitive living in Venezuela, raising a new family. This is not the ending anyone expects. Now the woman has a question, always last. She raises her hand and when I call on her, she stands and speaks in a clear, assertive voice: “What do you want to have happen to him, to the man who did this to you?” By “this” I know she means not only the actual crime that the man committed, but also all of the therapy, the nightmares and panic attacks, the prescribed medication and self-medication, the healing and self-harm. “I mean, you probably want him dead, right?” No, I think. “No,” I say aloud. Her expression crumples; she looks confused. Everyone in the audience looks confused. This isn’t supposed to be how the story ends; it’s not the ending they want for me, or themselves. Read More