December 5, 2024 On Things Six Handbags By Simon Wu Photographs courtesy of the author. The big one was too big. And the little one? The little one was too little. I was looking for something in a place where it was impossible to find what I was looking for. I was in an Acne Studios store in Tokyo looking for a “work bag,” and I was delusional. A handbag that costs more than $1,500, made from the skin of an Italian baby cow, does not need to account for the dimensions of a thirteen-inch MacBook. It does not need to work for a living, commute via subway, or fly Spirit Airlines. It is a thing of fantasy. If I were truly searching for utility, I would use a tote bag. The “work bag” was an excuse. What I really wanted was not a work bag or even a handbag but a portal to a glamour so total it could engulf me. I know from both advertisements and experience that there are many such portals. But entry requires preparation and research. A lot of people are obsessed with bags. They talk, vlog, and post about them on the internet. But in real life, it is uncouth to talk about designer bags. It is couth only to have one appear on your arm and, when someone asks about how much it cost, to be nonchalant. I have trouble being nonchalant. I am usually flustered. I deflect, I stress how much of a discount I got. I worry people will think I am shallow, or that I have more money than I do. I just love design, I say, and even I am not convinced. This is how I found myself in an Acne Studios store, looking for a portal. Read More
December 4, 2024 Bookmarks Passion, Jealousy, Love, and an Unquestionable Disdain for Art By Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often, we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We often share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some of the curious, striking, strange, and wonderful bits we found, in books that are coming out this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Byung-Chul Han’s The Spirit of Hope (Polity): Acting out of fear is not a way of acting that supports a sustainable future, which would require a meaningful horizon and action that forms part of a narrative. Hope is eloquent. It narrates. Fear, by contrast, is incapable of speech. Read More
December 3, 2024 First Person Close Formation: My Friendship with James Salter By William Benton James Salter, at left, and William Benton in Paris, 1985. Photograph courtesy of Kay Eldredge. Life passes into pages if it passes into anything. —James Salter I glanced up from my desk as an attractive couple came into the gallery. We exchanged greetings. They made a cursory tour of the space. I’d seen only a postage-stamp headshot on the back of a book, but thought I recognized him. “Are you James Salter?” “Yes.” That monosyllable was worth recording. Uttered almost as an abrupt sigh. “I’m a great fan of yours,” I said. The conversation moved quickly beyond pleasantries (who and what I was: a poet, running an art gallery) to a level of reciprocal energies in both Jim—as he had introduced himself—and Kay, his partner, all underscored by my exuberance in meeting them. They’d driven down to Santa Fe from Aspen and had been in town for a day and a half. “We’re staying at La Fonda,” Jim said. “Come over and have a drink with us when you finish up here.” I’d read A Sport and a Pastime when it came out in 1967; then the two earlier novels, The Hunters and The Arm of Flesh—lesser, but with glittering veins of what he was to become—as well as a few brilliant short stories. My wife and I had read Light Years, his most recent book, almost to each other. It was a portrait of a marriage and in a certain way had followed us to Mexico, Santa Barbara, Key West, and, finally, Santa Fe, in the erratic trajectory of our own unraveling lives and eventual separation. It was now 1978—I’d been there for a year. La Fonda was three blocks from my gallery, at one corner of the plaza. Jim had given me their room number. I crossed the dark lobby with its ancient tiles and climbed the stairs to the third floor. “What would you like to drink?” Jim said. “What have you got?” “Everything.” Read More
November 27, 2024 The Review’s Review The Cookbook Review By The Paris Review Photograph by Pierre André Leclercq, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The Bean Bible is at once an apologetic for the world’s legumes and also somewhat apologetic about them. The Bible is dedicated to the author’s husband, who “never objected to endless nights of bean meals”; a blurb identifies its subject as the ultimate underdog: “oft-maligned, subjected to ridicule, and despised by children everywhere.” Twenty-four years after its publication, things have changed. Beans are no longer synonymous with flatulence alone, and the only reason you wouldn’t be able to purchase a quarterly heirloom bean subscription is because Rancho Gordo is sold out. When I find myself yearning for an ideologically purer legumania, however, I still find myself turning to the Bible, a time capsule of the far more ascetic era of vegetarianism that raised me on black bean quesadillas and chickpea soup. Caveat here: The Bean Bible is not actually a vegetarian cookbook. (It includes nearly half a dozen recipes for duck alone.) But it reflects a world in which meatless staples were far less ubiquitous than they are today, purporting to introduce readers to “the Lebanese chickpea spread hummus” and canned beans from “the Puerto Rican brand Goya.” Directed at an adventurous but naive readership, the Bible remains worldly enough to have earned the ire of at least one Goodreads reviewer frustrated by the book’s focus on “East India cooking.” But I don’t read the Bible for its recipes. What makes it special is its systematic review of the legumes themselves, particularly chapter one’s genealogical (beanealogical?) charts, which I like to meditate upon as though they catalogued the names of my ancestors: cowpea, goober pea, lady pea; mortgage lifter bean and blue shackamaxon; beluga lentil and pardina lentil and speckled minisink. (Rumor has it that the European soldier bean and the French navy bean are still fighting it out on page eight.) Whether or not I ever cook any of those pedigreed varietals—almost certainly I will not—I’m honored to be just one of a long, long line of FODMAP enthusiasts. —Emmet Fraizer, intern Read More
November 26, 2024 First Person Windows and Doors By Laurie Stone Window in the west facade of the Lutheran Fishermen’s Church in Born auf dem Darß, Germany. Photograph by Radomianin, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Workers are installing sliding glass doors on the mudroom. Can you hear the drilling and hammering? I love when you can’t tell what season it is. Tables and chairs, usually on the deck, are sitting around the grounds, and I can’t do the things with the garden you’re supposed to do in the fall. I’m upstairs. Around my shoulders is the down comforter I bought at a yard sale in Scottsdale. Richard misses the warmth of Arizona, which to him was anywhere but cold, damp England, where he lived without central heating. Yesterday, I walked with a friend I’ve known almost all my life, and another friend I’ve known even longer sent me an email. Another friend got in touch, too. This third friend’s email was the place where train tracks switch and your life takes a different course, and I could see why the novel mistakes for meaning the beautiful patterns that form in a life. When you break a dish, sweep it up quickly and throw away the pieces. Sweep the floor where it broke and run your hand along the surface. When you buy a house, walk through the walls. When you meet a stranger, you are replacing the lost dish. When you think about friends who are out of reach, imagine yourself in a line of text, moving across a page, and each of the letters is a person you know, walking along briskly with you. Read More
November 25, 2024 On Books Rabelaisian Enumerations: On Lists By Andrew Hui Illustration by Albert Robida, from chapter seven of Pantagruel (1886). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Few are the authors whose names rise to the status of adjectives: Shakespearean profundity, Dickensian squalor, Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Rabelaisian—satirical, excessive, corpulent—joins these ranks. The French author François Rabelais’s first novel, Pantagruel, is a heady celebration of abundance in which sexual organs and epic feasts sit alongside scatological humor. Beneath the absurdity, however, is a deep critique of Renaissance learning. The plot is simple: Pantagruel, a giant, grows up, gets an education in Paris, makes many friends, and ends up fighting to defeat the Dipsodes, a rival group of giants who have invaded Utopia. In an early chapter, the eponymous hero heads off to the University of Paris and stumbles upon the Library of Saint-Victor, which he finds “most magnificent, especially certain books he found in it.” What follows is a long list of rather odd titles, among them: • Bregeuta iuris (The codpiece of the law) • Malogranatum vitiorum (The pomegranate of vices) • La couillebarine des preux (The elephant balls of the worthies) • Decretum universitatis Parisiensis super gorgiasitate muliercularum ad placitum (Decree of the University of Paris concerning the gorgiasity of harlots) • La croquignolle des curés (The curates’ flick on the nose) • Des poys au lart cum commento (On peas with bacon, with commentary) • Le chiabrena des pucelles (The shitter-shatter of the maidens) • Le culpelé des vefves (The shaven tail of the widows) • Antipericatametanaparbeugedamphicribrationes merdicantium (Discussion of messers and vexers: Anti, Peri, Kata, Meta, Ana, Para, Moo, and Amphi) • La patenostre du singe (The monkey’s paternoster) • La bedondaine des presidens (The potbelly of presiding judges) • Le baisecul de chirurgie (The kiss-ass of surgery) Read More