September 20, 2018 Look Deana Lawson: A Preview By Deana Lawson Over the last ten years, Deana Lawson has created a landscape of found intimacy. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models she meets in the United States and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. The body—often nude—is central. A selection of photographs from her first monograph is presented below. Mama Goma, 2014 Read More
September 20, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Poor Deluded Human, You Seek My Heart By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I am the daughter of two wonderful, loving Chinese parents, and I have a supportive boyfriend and caring friends. But still, I somehow find myself dealing with daily feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. I am a humanities major with an uncertain future and less-than-average academics, and I am faced with continual feelings of shame and embarrassment about the lack of effort I put into my studies. My parents are intellectual giants who came from nothing and worked their way up into high-earning jobs so that they could give me the best possible education and life, and I feel as if I have squandered the opportunities they have worked so hard for me to have. To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices, and are constantly caring and understanding. How do I deal with my fears that I will never be able to honor my parents by becoming more successful than them? Sincerely, Dutiful Daughter Dear DD, “To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices” is such a strange and quintessentially immigrant utterance—I am smiling with affectionate recognition. What to do with the guilt we feel that our lives are often so much easier than the lives of our parents? How can any of our fears, anxieties, lonelinesses be worth mentioning when theirs have been so great? For you (and often, for myself), I prescribe Hai-Dang Phan’s “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981).” Read More
September 20, 2018 Arts & Culture Looking for Lorraine By Imani Perry Lorraine Hansberry was a giver. Bitterness never prevailed long enough in her spirit to destroy the “lift” that was a such a large part of her talent, and which comes naturally when human beings are created on stage. Mostly we see shadows being titillated into life, only to fall because their authors had no lover for them. I hate and deplore her death. We cannot afford such losses. As she once said of Baldwin: “We should be grateful we have him.” I say: we should be grateful we had her. Although what the hell all these words give her now, I don’t know. Relieve my chest. A gift given too late. —Camille Skirvanek of Brooklyn, in a letter to the New York Times, published January 21, 1965 In the tradition of Alice Walker, who followed the literary and literal maps of Zora Neale Hurston’s home and life, I find myself wanting to stand in the places Lorraine Hansberry stood. I want to make sense of the world in her spaces and on her terms. And I want to tell you about it. It isn’t so pretty. There is as much hell as heaven on this other—after the movement—side. Much has changed, some for better, some worse. Walking in the aftermath teaches this lesson. In the summer of 2017, I wondered somewhat angrily at the absence of a marker for Lorraine in Greenwich Village. But in October 2017, a red plaque was embedded in the rust-colored brick at 112 Waverly Place, in honor of Lorraine. Still, the Village is no longer hers. The multiracial lesbian bar (the only one that was multiracial in New York in the fifties) was a short walk away from her home, and it is gone. It is now a Mexican restaurant, which I don’t expect will last much longer either. It isn’t highbrow. Although the Village has a queer history and present, Lorraine’s presence is faint at best. She’s not really here. Nor is the Bohemia that once was, nor the poor who were there before that. They have been displaced by cool accumulation and edgy wealth. Read More
September 19, 2018 At Work Beyond Hygge: An Interview with Dorthe Nors By Alexandra Pereira Dorthe Nors. Photo: Astrid Dalum. The Danish writer Dorthe Nors lives alone with a black cat in a house so far west on the Jutland peninsula that she’s practically in Scotland. It’s not far from the rural parish community where she was born, in 1970, and raised by a carpenter father and a hairdresser-turned-art-teacher mother. She spent years poring over Swedish literature and art history at Aarhus University, harnessing a lifelong adoration for Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Lantern and his workbooks. Early on, Nors had hoped to infiltrate Copenhagen’s cliquey literati, but she soon realized this endeavor was a waste of time—time taken away from her writing. Scouted by Brigid Hughes, the former Paris Review editor and founder of A Public Space, Nors’s alarmingly succinct short-story collection Karate Chop—published to acclaim in Denmark in 2008—was received rapturously when it was published in English in 2014. A story from Karate Chop, “The Heron,” was the first by a Danish writer to be published in The New Yorker. Her staccato novella Minna Needs Rehearsal Space—which was published in the States alongside another of Nors’s novellas, So Much for That Winter—cemented Nors as an author who is able to thoughtfully admonish our digital generation. In it, Minna is a struggling musician who would be producing more work if she weren’t so taken with monitoring online activity. Minna’s staccato thoughts read like status updates. In 2014, Nors received the Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize. Her novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Being alone is not something that feels particularly natural in Denmark, a small, cozy country imbued with the national concept of hygge. Yet solitude is a recurring motif in Nors’s work. She often returns to lonely flaneuses who wander the shiny streets of Copenhagen, a city renowned for its happiness. Her protagonists navigate the locales they’ve outgrown, unfriend ex-lovers, reference long-dead Scandinavian writers, and gaze out onto the Øresund strait. Like Lorrie Moore, Nors writes heartrending and compact stories, though they’re punctuated with satire. Her tone is pensive, sardonic, and sometimes macabre. This interview took place while Nors was just up the coast from Copenhagen—where she lived for seven years—for the Louisiana Literature Festival. We met early on a Saturday, and the award-winning author guided me to a no-frills café. Bossa nova Muzak was playing. “The music and the food are terrible,” she told me, but this is where she found a writing sanctuary free of pretense or distractions and created some of the curiously existential, semiautobiographical characters who color her four novels and countless novellas and short stories. In person, Nors is as unfussy as her prose. She is undramatic, typically Nordic, and matter-of-fact, with a tendency to laugh and smile often. She seemed genuinely surprised and delighted that I’d read much of her work in preparation for our conversation. Her utterances are gentle. They lack the usual harsh Danish eeehhh—instead, she intersperses a soft om here and there among otherwise clear, direct phrases. Read More
September 19, 2018 Arts & Culture The Most Unread Book Ever Acclaimed By Meghan O’Gieblyn Like the holy books, long novels are more often maligned than read. Critics complain that they’re exasperating or impossible or not worth the time. But in the history of my reading life, I’ve encountered nothing like the caveat lectors surrounding Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. They feel less like user warnings or cautionary tales than being forced to gaze upon the skeletons of those who had previously made the attempt. When it was published in 1965, the critic Peter Prescott gave up after two days, even though his editor offered him four times the normal rate (everyone else had refused). The online reader reviews I found vary between naked revulsion and sheepish endorsement. One Amazon reviewer claims he gave a copy of the twelve-hundred-page novel to each of his friends and promised that if they finished, he would pay for their children’s college education. “I’ve paid for no one’s education!” he writes. Upon Young’s death in 1995, thirty years after the novel was published, the New York Times proclaims it “one of the most widely unread books ever acclaimed.” I came across Young by way of her essay “The Midwest of Everywhere,” a short piece about a series of bizarre sights she claims to have witnessed firsthand in the American interior: elephants browsing the banks of the Wabash River; an entire town populated by deaf people; a dead whale in a boxcar, stranded in the middle of a cornfield. Young was born in Indiana and spent many decades in the Midwest—at the University of Chicago, where she studied Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she taught fiction—but in the essay, she writes about the region in a way that is entirely unfamiliar. “For me, a plain Middle Westerner, there is no middle way,” she writes. “I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world—and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing.” I read the essay last winter at my home in Wisconsin. At the time, I was in a slump that was probably seasonal but felt dire and endless and linked, in a vague way, to the fact that I lived in a region that was bound up in the American imagination, and increasingly my own, with the television reboot of Roseanne. I have always lived in the Midwest and had often defended it against reductive stereotypes. But the notion that it was an economic and political wilderness had become such an insistent article of national consensus that I’d begun to doubt my own frames of reference. I was not in a particularly ambitious mood that winter, but I kept thinking about the strange consciousness I’d glimpsed in the essay. A couple days later, I found a copy of Miss MacIntosh. Read More
September 18, 2018 Redux Redux: Brooklyn Crossing 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. On Sunday, the staff of The Paris Review was at the Brooklyn Book Festival, hawking our wares and slinging subscriptions. For those of you who live too far away to have stopped by our booth, we bring you David McCullough’s 1999 Art of Biography interview, where he recounts how he began writing his book The Great Bridge; Jonathan Lethem’s story “Tugboat Syndrome,” whose protagonist “grew up in the library of St. Vincent’s Home for Boys in downtown Brooklyn”; and Pam A. Parker’s poem “Brooklyn Crossing.” David McCullough, The Art of Biography No. 2 Issue no. 152 (Fall 1999) One day I was having lunch in a German restaurant on the Lower East Side with an architect-engineer and a science writer. They started talking about what the builders of the Brooklyn Bridge didn’t know when they started it. The more they talked, the more I realized I had found my subject. I had lived in Brooklyn Heights and walked over the bridge many times; the Roeblings came from my part of Pennsylvania and I knew something about them because they plotted the course of the Pennsylvania Railroad through Johnstown. I left the restaurant and went straight to the Forty-second Street library and climbed those marble stairs to the third floor as if I had a jet engine on my back. There were over a hundred cards on the Brooklyn Bridge, but none described a book of the kind I had already begun blocking out in my mind. I went to Peter Schwed, my editor at Simon and Schuster, and said, I’ve got my next book. Read More