June 5, 2018 Redux Redux: Celebrating Pride Month 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, to celebrate Pride Month, we bring you our 1988 Art of Fiction interview with Edmund White, Garth Greenwell’s short story “Gospodar,” and Sappho’s poem “Prayer to Aphrodite.” Edmund White, The Art of Fiction No. 105 Issue no. 108 (Fall 1988) It was a political act for me to sign The Joy of Gay Sex at the time. The publisher could not have cared less, but for me it was a big act of coming out. Charles Silverstein, my coauthor, and I were both aware that we would be addressing a lot of people and so in that sense we were spokesmen. We always pictured our ideal reader as someone who thought he was the only homosexual in the world. States of Desire was an attempt to see the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people—to show that gays aren’t just hairdressers, they’re also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks. Once I’d written States of Desire I felt it was important to show one gay life in particular depth, rather than all of these lives in a shorthand version. Read More
June 5, 2018 Bulletin Announcing Our Summer Issue By The Paris Review Our Summer issue opens with a selection from Jan Morris’s diary, begun in 2016, and each time I read it, I am struck anew by the capaciousness of her thoughts. In seventeen entries, she revisits ancient history and wonders about the near future; pulls in a constellation of people (Browning, Eliot, Wordsworth, Pepys) and places (Romania, India, Egypt); muses on her late cat, her cherished car, her beloved Elizabeth, and her advancing age. In the first entry, she dilates on the miracle of her garden: tucked away in a quiet corner of Llanystumdwy, Wales, and yet teeming with a rich assortment of life. My hope is that this issue is a version of Morris’s garden: a microcosm of the larger literary ecology, gathered (perhaps not too unassumingly) between two covers. We owe our sunny front cover to Edie Fake, the Review’s first trans cover artist. His paintings in the issue’s portfolio imagine queer spaces and invent “impossible” architectures as a metaphor for trans bodies. In the portfolio’s essay, Renee Gladman optimistically envisions in these spaces a speculative future—cities occupied by people “like new shapes arriving to some Euclidean page, wanting opposites and sames and inverses and transverses.” There are a number of firsts in this issue, not least a story by Ursula K. Le Guin. And not just any story, but a final Earthsea tale, written a year before her death. We also have work by two newcomers: Shruti Swamy’s atmospheric story in which a woman, distracted by her young daughter’s illness and another, vague distress, prepares to flee a wildfire; and Wayétu Moore’s portrait of a Vai girl cursed by village superstition and made to hide herself away. This issue’s fiction also includes stories by Ben Marcus, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Benjamin Nugent as well as the finale of Katharine Kilalea’s serialized novel OK, Mr. Field. Our interviews are with the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, known for his epically long sentences and narrative intensity, and the American essayist and Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Hilton Als, whose omnivorous writing merges and dissolves categories (he is only our third entry in the Art of the Essay; the second is Jan Morris, in issue no. 143). Rebelliousness and experimentation make their way into Kiese Laymon’s essay on the difficulty of pledging allegiance to self, family, and country, and into our glimpse into the personal library of the late feminist punk writer Kathy Acker. The issue’s selection of poetry is a spectrum of time and place: Iman Mersal (Egypt), Szilárd Borbély (Hungary), and Hilda Hilst (Brazil), plus the pre-Islamic warrior-poet ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, whose five declarative poems describe the arc of war. Sylvie Baumgartel composes a song of intense female desire, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips thinks of a world “on fire,” in which “A man hauls crate after crate of rifles / Into a hotel. A child is shot dead / On the spot … And where did / It all go so, so wrong?” We also have poems by Maureen N. McLane, Michael Robbins, and Jana Prikryl. After her peripatetic earlier life, Jan Morris finds in her garden a kind of exile she doesn’t mind living out. Whether you are wandering or anchored this summer, I hope this issue takes you places. —Nicole Rudick
June 5, 2018 Arts & Culture The Man Behind the Weegee By Christopher Bonanos Mannequins: Weegee with friends in a promotional store-window display at the L.A. Camera Exchange, 1951. Let’s talk about that name first. Or rather, those three names. Usher Fellig was a greenhorn, a hungry shtetl child from eastern Europe who spoke no English. When he came through Ellis Island in 1909, at ten years old, he reinvented himself, as so many immigrants do. In his first years in New York, Usher became Arthur, a Lower East Side street kid who was eager to get out of what he called “the lousy tenements,” earn a living, impress girls, make a splash. He had turned his name (slightly) less Jewish and his identity (somewhat) more American, as much as he could make it. As a young man, he was shy, awkward, broke, and unpolished, and at fourteen, he became a seventh-grade dropout. He was also smart, ambitious, funny, and (as he and then his fellow New Yorkers and eventually the world discovered) enormously expressive when you put a camera in his hands. Read More
June 5, 2018 At Work My Own Boundaries Seem to Be Fading: An Interview with Lauren Groff By Lucie Shelly Photo credit: Megan Brown. “I still wouldn’t choose Florida as my home state, but I’m glad it chose me,” Lauren Groff replied when I asked why she had chosen to live on the peninsula full of snakes and rains, marshes and forest. Still, the author, whose works include the Obama favorite Fates and Furies and the acclaimed collection Delicate Edible Birds, named her new book after this unchosen habitat. Florida brings together eleven stories written over the course of the dozen years Groff lived in the state, but she never intended to pay homage. “The fact that these are all Florida stories comes out of the fact that I feel ambivalent or unsettled about the place where I live,” she said. It seems almost contradictory that ambivalence, as a mode, would be the seed for such potent fiction, but one of Groff’s distinguishing skills is the ability to write within such contradictions. Her work is subversive, but quietly—it captures what’s mysterious about the inevitable, what’s bizarre about the inescapable. This collection has some familiar motifs from her novels—long marriages, frightful domesticity, foreignness, and the surreality of motherhood. And while most of the stories have appeared elsewhere and received big awards, brought together, these narratives of young families, divorced couples, and unconventional women vibrate with something new. These are stories about how human nature is an extension of the natural world, how our relationships are contoured by greater forces, and how time is delivered by nature—regardless of the checks and measurements we superimpose. The rains in Florida are biblical, to say the least. The margins between earthly and celestial routinely dissolve. From the little girls abandoned alone on a tropical island in “Dogs Go Wolf” to the mother in “Flower Hunters” who reads the naturalist William Bartram while her children trick-or-treat in a storm, the characters in Groff’s stories experience the fluctuations of the outdoors on an elemental level. Nature is eroticized in a way that is not quite sexual yet wholly sensual. I asked the author for a word to describe this writing technique, one that transforms humans into phenomena, creatures—while at the same time placing, with precision, those characters in their environment. Her suggestion was wilding. This call-and-response between domesticity and nature animates quotidian banalities, such as adultery in “For the Love of God, for the Love of God” and “Eyewall,” parenthood in “The Midnight Zone” and “Yport,” and aging in “Above and Below” and “Salvador.” Groff takes the structures we mistake as essential to life and makes them look absurd before nature’s implacability. The stories in Florida suggest that the relationship between humans and our planet—that home none of us chose—transcends the power struggle of dominance and submission. I corresponded with Groff as she was bouncing between Iceland and the state that claims these stories. “I love Iceland—and yet I felt immediate relief on touching down here,” she wrote. “After twelve years, Florida has, despite everything, become home.” INTERVIEWER Many of the women in this collection are Florida transplants, once northerners “dazzled by the flora and fauna.” Do you still feel that sense of wonder? GROFF Most days, I have a moment or two of wonder. Yesterday, when I took the dog for a walk after dinner at sunset, there was a giant dead rat snake on the sidewalk that I marveled at, and then I came home in the dark through such a pungent smell of jasmine, which is in full bloom right now, and my head got a little swoony from the potency of the scent. Read More
June 4, 2018 Comics Et Tu, Brute? By Jason Novak Being an emperor in ancient Rome was a dangerous business. In the abstract, it sounds like a great gig, but it wasn’t all bacchanalia and parties in the hippodrome; it was a horrible job filled with violence and treachery. The emperor’s survival was predicated on an unthinkable (to us, at least) level of personal and public brutality. Et Tu, Brute? is an illustrated compendium of the deaths of the Roman emperors from the establishment of the Roman Empire to the fall of Rome. A selection of these illustrations is presented below. —Jason Novak Read More
June 4, 2018 First Person A Taxonomy of Wind By Ben Shattuck Jean-François Millet, The Gust of Wind, 1871. Alone and asleep last December, I woke to two men standing in the doorway of my bedroom. I saw their guns held by their thighs. A flashlight blinded me. “Everything all right in here?” one said, stepping into the room. I held out my palm to block the light. “Police,” he said. “There was an alarm going off.” I knew there wasn’t an alarm going off because it had been deactivated months earlier. I thought, This is not the police. This is a home invasion. When I turned on the bedside lamp and saw their uniforms, I thought, Those are fake uniforms. He told me to get out of bed. I stood between them in my boxers and T-shirt. “Why are there no clothes in here?” the other man said, pointing to the open drawers across the room. “What, you just move in?” They holstered their guns. “Yes,” I said. I’d just returned home to Massachusetts after half a year away. Rain crackled on the roof and lashed the windows. The day had been warm because of a southerly storm shoving up against the underarm of Cape Cod. Out the window I saw a third man standing on the patio, perhaps guarding the exits. “Come with us,” one of the men said. The house is down a long driveway on a fishhook peninsula. On one side is the ocean; on the other is a river that shares my middle name. The house is a loft my great-grandfather built for my great-grandmother. Hardwood floors. High ceilings. Wooden chandeliers hanging from wooden beams and permanently covered in a frost of dust. There’s a cluttered centuries-worth of old books, shells, and antique souvenirs and no insulation. When I walked into the main room, I saw that the overhead lights and lamps were on. The men had been there for some time. I’ve lived in the house since before I walked, and could lead a tour blindfolded. It’s not easy to find the bedroom. You go into the house, take a U-turn to a back hallway, pivot to another hall, and go through a door. You’d have to spend some time looking around for it. Read More