May 1, 2025 Bookmarks Souvenirs By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling in the back, a book of Corinne Day’s photos on the set of Sofia Coppola’s the virgin suicides, out from MACK this month. 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 sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Joan Copjec’s Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran: Corbin/Kiarostami/Lacan (MIT Press): As Ishaghpour puts it in his essay “The True and False in Art,” “It would be fair to say that, according to Kiarostami, the whole world has just one wish: being photographed, appearing in a film, being on the screen. So much so, that it would be necessary to change Descartes’s formula into ‘I have an image, [therefore] I [am].’ ” Why should women be exempt from this elemental desire to have an image—a desire so elemental that even the God of Islam is acknowledged to have pined for one. For want of an image he was hidden even from Himself. Those who protest against the assimilation of women to an image are right to do so, though it needs to be acknowledged that there is a critical difference between an image that assimilates what it depicts (or: reduces it to an object) and an epiphanic image. The latter—or “incorruptible”—form of the image performs an epiphanic function. It directs us to attend not merely to what it shows on its surface but also to what nestles in its shadow. One of the most famous illustrations of such an image is the painting of a veil by Parrhasios, which prompted those who looked at it to wonder what lay beneath it. The function of the image in this case is not merely to draw our attention to what is visible but also to what is not. Read More
April 30, 2025 First Person Meaning By Richard Russo Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. I’m walking, as I do pretty much every day, along the Eastern Promenade near my home in Portland, Maine, when I feel my wedding ring slip off. Luckily, my hands are in my jeans, so no harm done. I slip the ring back on without breaking stride and return to contemplating Casco Bay. I make it another ten yards or so before it happens again. When the ring slips off my finger a third time, I give up and leave it there at the bottom of my pocket. Though the jeans I’m wearing are relatively new, I double-check anyway to make sure there’s no hole in the pocket. Having read Tolkien, I know some rings want to be lost, others to be found, and I’ve already lost one wedding ring, though that was decades ago. The ring in my pocket doesn’t actually want anything, of course. It’s just a piece of metal and has no meaning other than what I attach to it. It’s sliding off my finger because it’s January and bitter cold and my skin is dry and—who knows?—maybe I’ve lost a couple pounds. As I said, it’s perfectly secure right where it is, yet here I am fretting about its safety and unable to reconcile its being in my pocket when it belongs on my finger. My parka has a tiny pocket with a zipper, and I consider putting the ring there, but that would further distance it from the finger it’s supposed to be on. Also, the zipped pocket of my parka carries its own risks. I’m seventy-three and my memory is becoming porous. Sometimes I have to page back through whatever novel I’m working on because I can’t remember the name of a character who’s been absent from the last couple chapters. And like many men my age I too often find myself in front of the open refrigerator, peering at its contents in the hopes of spotting the reason I’m standing there. Am I even in the right place? Is what I’m looking for in the washing machine? The silverware drawer? The pantry? If I put the ring in the pocket of my parka where it can’t possibly fall out, will I forget doing so? If so, then two or three years down the road the ring will go with the parka to Goodwill, and in the meantime I’ll be left to contemplate what it means that I’ve managed to lose not one but two wedding rings. To some people—maybe even to me—that might appear subconsciously intentional. My therapist, if I had one, would surely agree, which is why I don’t have one. Part of the reason I’m fretting is that this would be a terrible time to lose the ring. For the last several months my wife has been suffering from headaches that we’ve been unable to diagnose. MRIs and biopsies seem to have ruled out the most terrifying scenarios, but there’s something scary about not knowing, especially in the wake of the pandemic, which reacquainted all of us with mortality and the uncertainty of the future, realities that in the beforetimes we managed to sequester in the back of our brains. To lose my wedding ring at a time when my wife’s health is in question would mean something, wouldn’t it? Yes? No? Read More
April 28, 2025 On Books Man of the West: Akutagawa’s Tragic Hero By Geoffrey Mak A drawing of the Noppera-bō by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. On the night of July 24, 1927, Ryunosuke Akutagawa swallowed a lethal amount of Veronal, slipped onto a futon beside his wife, and fell asleep reading the Bible. The writer was thirty-five years old. Proclaiming himself an atheist yet preoccupied by Christianity, he had written, shortly before his suicide, “Man of the West,” a series of fifty aphoristic vignettes in which Jesus Christ is an autobiographical writer who has profound insight into all human beings but himself. Akutagawa was a prolific and celebrated writer and one of the first modern Japanese writers to gain popularity in the West. He was drawn to the son of God at a time when he suffered from visual and aural hallucinations, often accompanied by migraines. His wife sometimes found him crouched in his study in Tokyo, clinging to the walls, convinced they were falling in. Days before he died, Akutagawa wrote a series of letters to his family and friends. At a crowded news conference the day after Akutagawa’s suicide, his friend Masao Kume read aloud a letter addressed to him, “Note to an Old Friend,” commonly referred to as Akutagawa’s suicide note. The letter describes, in dark comedy, the practical banalities that undignify the grandiosity of arranging one’s own death: problems involving the rights to his work and his property value and whether he’d be able to keep his hand from shaking when aiming the pistol to his temple. It is also a portrait of the author’s interiority in his final moments. “No one has yet written candidly about the mental state of one who is to commit suicide,” the note opens. “In one of his short stories, [Henri de] Régnier depicts a man who commits suicide but does not himself understand for what reason,” he writes. “Those who commit suicide are for the most part as Régnier depicted, unaware of their real motivation.” Like the Christ-poet of his fiction, Akutagawa thought he could see into the souls of all men—except his own. Perhaps he couldn’t look; perhaps he did not want to, for where there is motivation, there is culpability: precisely what he wanted to abdicate in death. “In my case, I am driven by, at the very least, a vague sense of unease,” he writes instead. “I reside in a world of diseased nerves, as translucent as ice.” He mostly wanted rest, he wrote. In “Man of the West,” he writes, “We are but sojourners in this vast and confusing thing called life. Nothing gives us peace except sleep.” Read More
April 25, 2025 The Review’s Review On Fish Tales: A Forgotten Erotic Novel of Raw Longing and Fierce Freedom By Danielle A. Jackson Nettie Pearl Jones, 1984. Photograph by Fern Logan. Fish Tales, first published in 1983, is a novel told in short, vivid vignettes. A woman named Lewis comes of age hardscrabble in early sixties Detroit. It was a difficult time to be born a girl. Teachers slept with students without consequence; an unexpected pregnancy meant you could be expelled. Secrets and illegal abortions, it seemed, were the best ways for a girl to hold onto her pride. The novel opens with an illicit scene between twelve-year-old Lewis and the “shit-yellow” older boy who impregnates her. Just pages later, she announces that she has aborted the child, “with a hanger.” It is clearly traumatic for young Lewis, but in the world of the novel, trauma is neither acknowledged nor named. Lewis simply goes on. She barrels headfirst into the arms of Peter Brown, her social studies teacher, beginning an affair that lasts for almost a decade. When he marries a woman closer to his age, Lewis is devastated and enraged. She visits their home and causes a grand, dramatic scene: “Desecrator, rapist, slimy child molester” spilled out of me into that quiet room. “Pete told me you were nuts,” [his wife] said from her bed. “He was right. He told me that he’s tried to help you since you were twelve.” “Help me?” I screamed out. “By fucking me? Huh?” Read More
April 24, 2025 Fiction Wild Animal Tales By Ludmilla Petrushevskaya Drawing by Bela Shayevich. For Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, who spent much of her childhood in Stalin’s Soviet Union shuttling between orphanages, Young Pioneer camps, and tuberculosis sanatoria, storytelling began as a form of survival. “Every night before bed I’d tell the whole ward a scary story—the kind that makes people hold their breath,” she told me when I interviewed her for The Paris Review’s new Spring issue. Petrushevskaya, who was born in 1938 in Moscow, went on to become a prolific writer, a darling, she says, of the noosphere, a cloud that dictated stories to her “down to the final phrase.” Beginning with her collection Immortal Love, which came out in 1988 and immediately sold out its first run of thirty thousand copies, Petrushevskaya has published dozens of collections of prose, drama, and fairy tales. A mother of three and, subsequently, a grandmother, Petrushevskaya was also always making up stories for her children. From 1993 to 1994, she published a series called Wild Animal Tales in the daily magazine Stolitsa. They feature a cast of recurring characters, including Hussein the Sparrow, Lev Trotsky, Rachel the Amoeba, a.k.a. MuMu (who splits into Ra (Mu) and Chel (Mu)), Officer Lieutenant Volodya the Bear, Zhenya the Frog, Pipa the Foreign Frog, and many, many others. As usual, Petrushevskaya’s work resists easy categorization; while all these creatures are childlike and cute, the things they get up to are squarely adult. How much should a child know about the prevalence of infidelity among mosquitoes? How old should she be when she learns about cockroaches, bedbugs, and flies huffing inhalants? In any case, it is never too late to find out the truth about the creatures who live among us. —Bela Shayevich A Domestic Scene When Stasik the Mosquito fell for Alla the Pig, she wouldn’t even look at him. She just lay there, totally nude on the beach, fanning herself with her ears—he was too scared to even try to fly up to her. Stasik laughed bitterly at his bad luck and his weakness. Meanwhile Alla the Pig had just one thing to say to him: “I know your type!” Stasik pleaded that he only ever had nectar, only his female relations drank blood, he never touched the stuff. Alla the Pig, whose physique was as vast as all our wide-open spaces, was having none of it. She refused to let Stasik land on her, not for just one little second. She had this terrifying habit of making her whole body quiver that caused the hovering Stasik to fall straight out of the air as though he’d been struck, but never struck dead, which was exactly what had him so hooked—he kept on falling and falling, but he could never hit bottom. Finally Stasik’s wife, Tomka, showed up to collect him; enough was enough. She tried to show Alla who was boss, which instantly landed her on the receiving end of an ear thwack. With the infinite patience of so many husbands before him, Stasik dragged Tomka off the battlefield, and on his way out, in passing, he finally managed to make a brief landing, brushing Alla’s incredible body with just the tips of his toes and immediately shooting back up like he’d been stung. Read More
April 23, 2025 First Person Style Is Joy: On Iris Apfel By Dorothea Lasky Iris Apfel sits for a portrait during her hundredth-birthday party at Central Park Tower on September 9, 2021, in New York City. Photograph by Noam Galai/Getty Images for Central Park Tower. Against the backdrop of a cold white room, Iris Apfel’s yellow outfit, which she wore on the occasion of her hundredth birthday, sings its own joyous song. Both here and elsewhere, Apfel, an artist and fashion designer, often paired gorgeous things sensually by color and texture, rather than by invoking some obvious theory or idea. She was not afraid to wear a yellow tulle coat with yellow silk pants (which she designed herself in collaboration with H&M). She celebrated yellow vivaciously; she took up space with yellow. With her arms raised in this picture, she looks like some sort of bishop or religious figure. Her open palms throw spectral glitter upon us. A spiritual icon. Just by looking at her, I feel her upturned palms manifesting my dreams. Read More