April 27, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Smugglers, Lovers, and Dead Husbands By The Paris Review Some of the stories in Rita Bullwinkel’s debut collection, Belly Up, take place in a world that we could call real, and others take place in a world we could call supernatural, but in the hands of a craftswoman like Bullwinkel, both are somehow equal in their strangeness. While reading, I would arrive at the end of a story in which nothing truly paranormal had happened and be nonetheless filled with a sense of disquiet, a sense that I was looking at a photograph of my own world, the light and color settings tweaked ever so slightly. Reality, in Bullwinkel’s hands, is subverted with nuanced strokes of the surreal, in much the same way that David Lynch tilts our perception with his depictions of suburbia. The forms of the stories vary, and Bullwinkel is just as good in a longer traditional narrative as she is in a two-page piece of poetic prose. They’re joined by a macabre thread, peopled with dead husbands, teenage girls obsessed with the idea of cannibalism, and zombies. But even stronger is the sustained interest in the mystery of human connection; in “Harp,” a wife tests out a double life after witnessing a fatal car accident, and “Phylum” interrogates selfhood and intimacy. As much as Bullwinkel asks us to reconsider the strangeness of our external reality, she asks us to question our internal reality as well; this collection, which absolutely heralds an exciting new talent, takes place at a four-way crossroads between the mind and the body, the reality we can know and the reality adjacent to our own, which we can only glimpse through fiction. —Lauren Kane Read More
April 27, 2018 At Work Technical, Tactical, and Merciless: An Interview with Marcus Wicker By Alex Dueben Marcus Wicker. Although both his books are influenced by the rhythms of hip-hop and spoken word, Marcus Wicker’s second book of poetry, Silencer, is a noticeable departure. His first book, Maybe the Saddest Thing, looks at Dave Chappelle, RuPaul, and Kenny G in an exploration of masculinity and pop culture. But after the killings of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and so many others, Wicker decided to turn his second book toward the conversation around race and blackness in America. In Silencer, Wicker explores fear and rage, the need to be hyperaware of one’s surroundings, and the worlds of suburbia and academia—worlds that can sometimes lull people into a false sense of security. His poems find joy in language and nature, comfort in religion, and express both pride and vulnerability—often all in the same poem. In his first book, Wicker writes, as many writers do, about his faith in the act of writing. In Silencer, there are no such poems. Instead, he refuses to be silent and refuses to settle for easy answers with the confidence of a poet saying what matters most. I reached Wicker by phone in Memphis, where he teaches at the University of Memphis M.F.A. program. We spoke about code-switching, prayer, the power of individual experience to address political topics, and the Wu-Tang Clan. —Alex Dueben Read More
April 27, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Angela Carter By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The writer Angela Carter (1940–1992) had many guises as a novelist, fairy-tale writer, and feminist theorist but was always occupied with archetypes of womanhood; her heroines undergo dark, gory, and magical processes of becoming brides or lovers, wolves or girls. I’ve loved Carter since first encountering her book of cultural theory The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography at Brown in the nineties (for a course entitled History 99X: Pornography and the Politics of Culture!). In it, she argues that the work of Marquis de Sade has liberating feminist underpinnings, and in the process takes something dark and frightening, like being a young woman in a world where one’s body is a porn object, and molts it into something slightly better, a promise that sexuality can offer freedom too. Along the same lines, the book I’ve chosen to cook from this week, Carter’s 1967 novel, The Magic Toyshop, is a fable about a girl, Melanie, stepping out of the sane, safe, and sexless world of childhood and into the world of womanhood, which is “as distorted and alien as its miniature in the witch-ball.” She ultimately survives this dangerous transformation but only after being mock raped by the patriarchy—represented metaphorically during a puppet show where she plays Leda and her evil uncle controls the puppet strings of a swan described as having an “empty body … white and light as meringue.” After this climatic scene, Melanie burns the house down and escapes with her siblings, her lover, her abused aunt, and her self-respect. Read More
April 26, 2018 Comics Endless Summer Wells By Chris Reynolds The Welsh cartoonist Chris Reynolds has been creating Mauretania Comics since 1985. Short detective tales and poetic fragments like the one below thread through a future earth where aliens politely control humanity. On the surface, this world seems much like ours: a place of cool afternoon shadows and gently rolling hills, half-empty trains and sleepy downtown streets. But the closer you look, the weirder it gets. Mysterious figures suddenly appear in childhood photos, family members disappear forever without warning, power outages abound, and certain people gain the power of flight. The loosely plotted comics raise more questions than they answer, leaving behind a lingering sense of existential unease and dread. A new collection of Mauretania Comics, selected and designed by the acclaimed cartoonist Seth, will be published by New York Review Comics on May 1. Below, read “Endless Summer Wells,” a strange and melancholy comic that appears in the forthcoming book. From The New World: Comics from Mauretania, by Chris Reynolds. Excerpt courtesy of New York Review Comics.
April 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Writing the Lives of Forgotten Women By Rachel Kadish Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610. When you need to tell the truth, sometimes nothing will do but lies. Thanks to the labor of women of all backgrounds who have raised their voices in the face of indifference or opposition, some of the silences in our culture’s narratives are now getting long-overdue attention. The labor of filling the gaps is under way in venues large and small—only last month, the New York Times launched Overlooked, its series of obituaries for unsung women. Yet while retrieving the facts of willfully forgotten lives is essential, some of the most necessary work of repair ultimately can be accomplished only by our culture’s most scrupulous liars: writers of historical fiction. This may sound like an endorsement of fake news, but in fact, it’s the opposite. Any history that doesn’t include women, and doesn’t make ample space for the lives of women of color, is itself fake news. The question, then, is how to correct our collective understanding of reality. And while the meticulously verified works of historians and journalists are essential to that goal, if we don’t set well-researched fiction by Louise Erdrich or Geraldine Brooks prominently by their side, we’ll miss one of the surest paths to repair. Read More
April 26, 2018 At Work The Child Thing: An Interview with Sheila Heti By Claudia Dey Sheila Heti. Photo: Sylvia Plachy. I met Sheila Heti at her home in the west end of Toronto on January 31, 2018, three months before the publication of her novel Motherhood. Heti opened her front door with one hand while the other gripped the leather collar of her dog, a Rottweiler named Feldman with a handsome boulder-size head. They led me up the stairs to a rambling second-floor apartment. Heti washed fresh fruit and made black tea before we retreated to her writing studio. We sat facing each other on a velvet couch, Heti’s desk and a hard chair in the opposite corner. She explained that her boyfriend had just rearranged the seating area and with the positioning of the armchairs, coffee table, and bookshelf, it was now much better. Feldman moved between the furniture, negotiating a space for his massive, shining body. He curled himself between us and panted heavily. When I listened back to the tape of our conversation, his breaths sounded as if something were being inflated. Heti explained that she and her boyfriend gave him the name Feldman so he wouldn’t seem so scary to others. Feldman eventually relocated to the floor. As we spoke, Sheila occasionally dropped fruit into his mouth. Sheila Heti was born in Toronto on Christmas Day in 1976 to Jewish Hungarian parents. After high school, she went on to study playwriting at the National Theatre School in Montreal (she dropped out after one year), then art history and philosophy at the University of Toronto. She began publishing in her early twenties with the short story collection The Middle Stories (2001) and went on to produce work in nearly every form: collaborations in The Chairs Are Where the People Go (2011) and Women in Clothes (2014); a play, All Our Happy Days Are Stupid (2015); a book for children, We Need a Horse (2011); and the novels Ticknor (2005), How Should a Person Be? (2010), and now, Motherhood. Alongside her writing, Heti cofounded the lecture series Trampoline Hall and served as the interviews editor at The Believer. In Motherhood, Heti takes on her most controversial and private debate yet—whether or not to have a child. A brilliant, radical, and moving book, it is sure to cause the cultural riot her earlier work has. Heti answered every question without hesitation. Her attention never wavered. We laughed often. At times, she turned the question on me. I was struck by her precision and curiosity. We edited the conversation over email for length, but otherwise, it reflects the hours we spent together in her studio as it darkened, neither of us wanting to move from the couch to turn on a light. Though its red glow did not enter the curtained room, it is worth noting that we met on the day of the rare astronomical phenomenon called the super blue blood moon. Heti and I talked about the noxious divide between mothers and nonmothers, art as a form of offspring, and how every book has its platonic ideal. We talked about the dog I dog sit, who inside the house is aloof and manly but outside becomes the cliché of a dog: leaping at other smaller dogs and peeing on pee. Heti and I agreed that writers must also have inside and outside versions of themselves. As Heti said, “Outside, you have to be a different dog.” —Claudia Dey Read More