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.
March 22, 2017 Look Portraits, Celestial Bodies, and Fairy Tales By Dan Piepenbring “Portraits, Celestial Bodies, and Fairy Tales,” an exhibition of Kiki Smith’s prints from 1990 to the present, is at Mary Ryan Gallery through April 8. Smith, best known for her sculptures, told BOMB in 1994, “Everyone’s figured out all the technology, how to combine different kinds of material together—you don’t have to make anything up. You just have to pay attention to what’s discarded, or disregarded … I like looking, seeing everything that everybody already knows and using it. Or you start making things, and then they start explaining to you while you’re making them, telling you more and more what it is that you’re doing.” Kiki Smith, Come Away from Her (After Lewis Carroll), 2003, aquatint, drypoint, etching, and sanding with watercolor additions, 50 1/2″ x 74″. Read More
March 22, 2017 Arts & Culture The Little Peach By Edmund Gordon Angela Carter’s travels in America. In the U.S., Angela Carter was astonished to find so much advertising for burgers. Edmund Gordon will discuss his book The Invention of Angela Carter, from which the below is excerpted, tonight at McNally Jackson with Christian Lorentzen. Angela Carter and her husband, Paul, flew to New York on July 29, 1969. They arrived in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots, when the city was fractious and twitchy in the midsummer heat. A few weeks earlier, the first American troops had withdrawn from Vietnam (an outcome Angela thought was “in human terms … the single most glorious event since the abolition of slavery”), but in August the headlines were dominated by gun battles between Black Panthers and police, the bombing of the Marine Midland building on Broadway by a radical left-wing activist, and the gruesome murders perpetrated by the Manson family in Los Angeles and the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco. Angela felt that the status quo “couldn’t hold on much longer. The war had been brought home.” She found Manhattan “a very, very strange and disturbing and unpleasant and violent and terrifying place … The number of people who offered to do me violence was extraordinary.” The trip was the basis for the Expressionist portrait of New York in her novel The Passion of New Eve—it’s depicted as a society in the last stages of moral and economic collapse—which she described as “only a very slightly exaggerated picture, not of how it was in New York but of how it felt that summer.” She met one of the models for Tristessa—the novel’s transvestite leading lady—in Max’s Kansas City, the legendary nightclub in the East Village where the house band was the Velvet Underground,and the clientele was composed largely of artists, writers and musicians, including such luminaries as Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, and Patti Smith. Angela and Paul spent three days in the city before traveling by Greyhound bus through Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Angela wrote to her friend Carole Roffe: Read More