March 29, 2018 Fiction The Day the Carlton Began to Slip By Terry Southern The Carlton Hotel. This sequence from Terry Southern’s 1959 novel, The Magic Christian, was originally removed over potential libel concerns. Sometime in the early seventies, after the release of the Magic Christian movie, Terry dusted the piece off, hoping to bring his character, “grand guy” Guy Grand, the billionaire trickster, back for a series of new adventures, but the piece didn’t find a home. We are publishing it here for the first time. The massive and opulent Carlton Hotel, built in 1909 in Cannes, continues to be a locus for celebrities and special events held during the Cannes Film Festival. About a week after Guy Grand purchased the smart Carlton Hotel in Cannes, excavation work was begun, presumably for the purpose of an elaborate expansion of the lower and ground section of this already magnificent structure. Rumor had it that a vast complex of underground passages and rooms were to connect the hotel with the beach area opposite, thus giving Carlton residents—generally acknowledged to be the “smartest of the smart”—direct access to their private oceanfront. In any case, excavation work went ahead on a monumental scale for about three years. Read More
March 28, 2018 Celebrating Joy Williams Ode to Joy By Courtney Hodell Last month, midway through the seven-hour drive between Marfa and Austin, my friends and I sat at a picnic table over burnt winter grass, eating the last of our forty grapefruits and some cold steak whose marbling had turned to candle wax. An old man approached us from some distance, making his way over with difficulty. We waited to be hit up for a handout. He wore suspenders over a neat plaid shirt open to a sunburnt throat, and his eyelids were folded over like dog-eared pages. His white mustache combed the wind, and he called us all ma’am. He’d seen us wrestling our flapping map and had come to point out the landmarks: the dainty bank with Doric columns and plywood for windows, the old hospital, the old hotel, the old pharmacy. Everything was now something else, or shuttered—it was a hipster-free, pre-Marfa situation, a town dying like a tree dies, from the center out. My friend studied the black-and-yellow business card he gave her. “Bee removal! We could have used you when they were gobbling up our avocados.” He looked over our lunch spread. “I guess you could spare them just a little bit.” He spoke so much slower than we did. It was a faint reproach, but I felt a rush of shame and also excitement. The line actually felt good in the mouth. “I guess you could spare them just a little bit.” We’d assumed he would ask us for something. The yellow jackets had scissored off such tiny chunks. We were huge, lumbering as we swatted them away. A small moment had engulfed the larger one. I recognized this flash of moral vertigo: it’s found in the short stories of Joy Williams. Read More
March 28, 2018 Arts & Culture Chinese Rhymes By Anthony Madrid Everybody who cares anything for old poetry in English knows how it feels—knows how awful it feels—when a poem is rhyming away and then suddenly the rhyme goes off the rails for a second because English pronunciation has changed since the time the poem was written. Take a look at this gallery of specimens. Exhibit A: Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove Millions of examples of that. Love rhymed with prove or move. Elizabethan poetry is rife with this. • Exhibit B: A winning wave, deserving note In the tempestuous petticoat; A careless shoestring in whose tie I see a wild civility. Tie used to be pronounced tee. Read it again and say tee where it says tie. Aha. • Exhibit C: Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know What’s roundly smooth or languishingly slow. And praise the easy vigor of a line Where Denham’s strength and Waller’s sweetness join. I don’t know whether Pope pronounced line “loin,” or join “jine.” But it must have been one or the other. • Exhibit D: Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? Eye was pronounced ee. Read it again. Read More
March 28, 2018 Celebrating Joy Williams Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Illustrated: Part Three By Joy Williams On April 3, The Paris Review will honor Joy Williams with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement at our annual gala, the Spring Revel. In anticipation, we’ve asked the renowned artist Brad Holland to illustrate five stories from her 2013 collection, Ninety-Nine Stories of God. An original illustration by Brad Holland. Read More
March 27, 2018 On Design Oliver Munday’s Graphic Design with a Conscience By Andrew Ridker Perhaps the most striking images in Oliver Munday’s new monograph, Don’t Sleep, appear just before the title page. On the left-facing page is a nineteenth-century map of the Senate floor. On the page opposite is an illustrated cross section of the hull of a slave ship, scaled to the same size as the Senate and in the exact same semicircle shape. This encapsulates Munday’s design work: arresting juxtapositions, an engagement with the political, and above all, a deliberate, understated presence. As heavy as the visuals are, Munday’s hand is light. The images speak for themselves. Don’t Sleep is a powerful survey of thirty-three-year-old Munday’s career thus far. The title, which asks readers to stay alert to the implicit and explicit messages of an image-saturated culture, also calls to mind “wokeness.” Though Munday is hesitant to call himself an activist, he readily acknowledges the role of design in various social movements, from May 1968 to Cold War Cuba. Munday’s editorial illustrations, posters, and book jackets draw attention to social-justice issues—and awareness is the first step in making change. He is after, as he says, “the thing that makes you stop and think for just one extra moment.” Read More
March 27, 2018 Redux Redux: A Mild Olfactory Hallucination 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. It’s officially spring, right? This week, we help to hasten winter’s end with a story of knowing when to stop, from John Hall Wheelock’s interview; Ben Lerner’s appropriately named story “False Spring”; and, a staff favorite, Diane di Prima’s poem “Song for Spring Equinox,” in which we see the season’s “slightly boring” side. Read More