March 24, 2017 Arts & Culture Papa the Investor By Andrea di Robilant How Hemingway became a major shareholder in a venerable Italian publishing house. Ernest Hemingway, with pigeons, in Venice, Italy, 1954. Ernest Hemingway had a rough time with his Italian publisher, Einaudi, the venerable Turin-based house that still prints a good portion of his titles today. The issue, as is so often the case, was money: Einaudi, Hemingway complained, were communists looking for any excuse to withhold his overdue royalties. After 1947, he’d grown so exasperated that he refused to publish another book with them. So it’s all the more startling to discover that in the spring of 1955, he quietly agreed to convert a large part of his growing credit with the house into company stock, becoming a major shareholder overnight. Hemingway was usually very prudent with his money—and the chronically mismanaged Einaudi was hardly a safe investment. But having a stake in the publication of his own books, he hoped, would make it easier to get his hands on his growing pile of Italian cash. As an author, Hemingway had gotten a late start in Italy. During the twenties and thirties, when the Anglophone world consecrated him as one of its brightest talents, he was persona non grata in the country. His blacklisting started as early as 1923, when Hemingway, still a young reporter for the Toronto Star, described Mussolini as “the biggest bluff in Europe.” In 1927, he wrote a few sardonic sketches on Fascist Italy for the New Republic. But it was the 1929 publication of A Farewell to Arms, with its antimilitarism and its powerful description of the rout of the Italian Army after Caporetto, that made him an enemy in the eyes of the Mussolini regime—a reputation further sealed by his support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Read More
March 24, 2017 On the Shelf The Cows Will Kill You, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Henri Rousseau, Scene in Bagneux on the Outskirts of Paris, 1909. Go ahead and laugh at the cows, with their multiple stomachs, their indolent cud chewing, their superfluity of feces. The cows will kill you. Deep in a cow’s soul is an existential rage, a hatred of its own cowness that, once activated, generates an unslakable thirst for blood. And it is human blood they crave, for it is humans who have made their condition one of endless bondage. The statistics bear me out on this—at least in the United Kingdom, where, as Glen Newey writes, you’re more likely to die under the hooves of an angry steer than you are at the hands of a terrorist: “The HSE [Health and Safety Executive] logs seventy-four ‘fatalities involving cattle’ in the UK in 2000–15, compared to fifty-three deaths caused by Islamist terrorism in the same period. Many of the victims were farm workers, while eighteen were ‘MOPs’ or members of the public. These victims were disproportionately older people (only one was under fifty, thirteen were over sixty and as many as five were over seventy). More chilling still, as the HSE report makes clear, is the specific threat posed by out-of-control mothering cows. Of incident reports where the gender of the assailant was identified, ten involved cows with calves, and only one a bull. Hence it emerges that predominantly older people are being targeted by nursing cattle. Vegans seem largely to have been spared. But nobody is wholly safe from this civilizational threat, not just to our persons but to our old, carnivorous values.” Since the election, Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here has been having a moment, as Americans continue to wrap their minds around the basic irony that it has, in fact, happened here. But Steven Michels recommends another book by Lewis—his 1919 novel, Free Air, which is one of the earliest iterations of road-trip literature and presents, Michels says, “Lewis’s most affirmative vision” of freedom: “Free Air is the story of two young people, Milt and Claire. Milt is a small-town mechanic and garage owner, and Claire is from Long Island and in the middle of a coast-to-coast trip to Seattle with her father. Like many Northeasterners, Claire believes that the rest of the country is filled with folks who are good but simple. Milt knows better. He had been plotting an escape from its dreary doldrums, but is enthralled with Claire when she comes through town, and he ends up following her and her father on their journey west. Claire quickly falls for the heartiness of the outdoors, even though she sees Milt more like a brother than a romantic partner. ‘There is an America!’ Claire cheers by her tent, after she and Milt forgo her usual hotel … Once they get to their destination, however, they discover that everyone is obsessed with ‘the View’ and ranks houses accordingly. What’s worse is that everyone builds and buys from the assumption that houses ought to resemble the East Coast as much as possible.” Read More
March 23, 2017 From the Archive Low Tide on “The Brown Coast” By Daniel Johnson Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. If you ask me, there’s nothing funnier than a man seeing all that he’s created—built, grown, accrued, whatever—brought to ruin by the simple, ruthless, infuriating existence of his hapless neighbors. Such is the fate of Bob Munroe, the tragic hero in Wells Towers’s short story, “The Brown Coast,” from our Spring 2002 issue. Bob wakes up on his face in his uncle Randall’s shack along the muddy beaches in Florida, where he’s been granted quarter while he works things out with his wife, on the condition that he fix the place up. Walking the beach one day, he finds a wondrous tide pool tucked at the reaches of a jetty. At low tide, it’s teeming with exotic sea creatures, which Bob—destitute and in need of beautiful things—collects and deposits in an aquarium in Randall’s shack. Read More
March 23, 2017 Arts & Culture Hugo, Inc. By Nina Martyris Les Misérables was born of one of the riskiest—and shrewdest—deals in publishing history. An 1878 caricature of Hugo from La Petite Lune. Earlier this month, Penguin Random House bid more than sixty-five million dollars for the global rights to books by Barack and Michelle Obama, breaking the record for U.S. presidential memoirs. Despite the stratospheric price tag and the international headlines, the transaction lacked a certain excitement—it was a fantastic deal, but without frisson. After all, a behemoth publisher signing an iconic political couple, brokered by a top litigation firm … it’s merely another example of the establishment in lockstep. Compare this cozy corporate pact—one that epitomizes big publishing today—with the romance and risk associated with another record-shattering deal widely regarded as the publishing coup of all time. Signed in 1861 on a sunny Atlantic island, it tied an exiled French genius to an upstart Belgian house, resulting in the printing of that perennial masterwork, Les Misérables. In a new book, The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of ‘Les Misérables’, the professor and translator David Bellos condenses tranches of research into a gripping tale about Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Read More
March 23, 2017 On the Shelf We’ll Always Have Barf Bags, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The barf bag: a comforting cultural constant. These days, it often seems the world has tilted on its axis: nothing is the same, we’ve broken with the past, there’s no going back. But we’ve still got an old friend kicking around—the barf bag. In these uncertain times, Hollywood’s horror filmmakers still turn to sick bags as a primo promotional gag. For there is still vomit in this realm, and still a need to contain it in the face of extreme spectacle. Cara Buckley writes: “After a moviegoer apparently vomited during a Los Angeles screening of the French coming-of-age cannibal flick, Raw, the theater began handing out barf bags … The move is a vintage publicity stunt going back some fifty years. Among the standout bags in movie history: The keepsake vomit bag from the 1963 splatter film Blood Feast came with an encouragement, ‘Spill your guts out!’ ‘Guaranteed to upset your stomach!’ proclaimed the bag from the 1981 Italian film Cannibal Ferox. The bag for The Beyond (1981) came with the thoughtfully worded warning, ‘Individuals with sensitive constitutions may experience stomach distress,’ and advised that the bag be used only once and not overfilled.” For a while, Marianne Moore taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a dubious institution in Pennsylvania that aimed to “assimilate” Native American youth basically by flogging their culture out of them. This was not, as one might imagine, a bright spot for Moore’s career. Siobhan Phillips notes that “even at the time Moore taught there, the school’s obvious wrongs were noticed and decried. Moore knew of ‘cruel neglect and abuse,’ as her mother put it in a letter included in [Linda] Leavell’s biography. Moore did not protest. In 1914, federal investigators examined conditions at CIIS and dismissed the superintendent … Congress found financial corruption and mismanagement as well as incidents of wrongful expulsion and physical harm. A student in Moore’s department organized the petition requesting the investigation, which 276 students signed. Moore was accused of supporting insurrection, but she sidestepped the charge, as she reports in a letter to her brother: ‘I crush out disrespect and rancor whenever I see it, and I give the students as thorough a training in political honor as I can.’ When inspectors came to Carlisle, she dodged them. Her brother advised her not to say anything definitive or particular. She took his advice.” Read More
March 22, 2017 Whiting Awards 2017 Say Hello to the 2017 Whiting Honorees By Dan Piepenbring Honorees clockwise from top left: Phillip B. Williams, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Lisa Halliday, Simone White, Clarence Coo, Clare Barron, Francisco Cantú, James Ijames, Jen Beagin, Tony Tulathimutte. For the third consecutive year, The Paris Review Daily is pleased to announce the ten winners of the annual Whiting Awards. Drum roll, please—they are: Clare Barron, drama Jen Beagin, fiction Francisco Cantú, nonfiction Clarence Coo, drama Kaitlyn Greenidge, fiction Lisa Halliday, fiction James Ijames, drama Tony Tulathimutte, fiction Simone White, poetry Phillip B. Williams, poetry We’re proud to have selected writing from all the Whiting honorees, too. Click each name above to read on—you’ll discover work by some of the best writers of their generation, astonishing in its breadth and depth. If you need further evidence of their creativity, here’s a random profusion of the nouns they use: blue cheese, lotion, pantslessness, dark desert nights, the subjunctive, spoiled-milk breath, “Q-TIPS!!!”, infrastructure, pepperoni-size ear gauges, black-ass tumbleweed, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and one Mr. Disgusting. This Thursday, March 23, New Yorkers can hear all of these wonders firsthand, as the honorees read at McNally Jackson, introduced by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (Whiting 2013). If you’re wondering what all this “Whiting” is: Founded in 1985, the Whiting Awards, of fifty thousand dollars each, are based on “early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.” The program has awarded more than six million dollars to some 320 writers and poets, including Colson Whitehead, Suzan-Lori Parks, Alice McDermott, Akhil Sharma, David Foster Wallace, August Wilson, Tracy K. Smith, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Jeffrey Eugenides, and The Paris Review’s own Mona Simpson and John Jeremiah Sullivan. Click here for a list of all the previous honorees. Congratulations to this year’s honorees! For more great writing from past recipients, check out our collections from 2015 and 2016 winners.