May 30, 2024 First Person Feral Goblin: Hospital Diary By Kate Riley Hospital corridor. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, public domain. When I entered the emergency room at 3 A.M., I knew only that the fragment of crab shell in my throat could not be swallowed, extracted, or solved with marshmallows (the glottal escorts recommended online). The actual solution was morphine and emergency surgery; up until I recovered consciousness, my visit to the hospital represented some of the most pleasant hours of 2024. When I woke, it was to a body with several new ports of entry, established so that my most tender innards could be tethered directly to the hospital bed. My gown was essentially a garrote with modesty bib attached, and mysterious things had been taped to my arms and legs; a tube to nowhere emerged from one nostril. I spent what felt like multiple twilit days wriggling up and down the bed, orienting myself by proximity to beeps, until my exovascular system got so tangled the nurses (themselves attracted to beeps) came running. I had been out of surgery half an hour. The nurses unwound me, retrussed me, and stupefied me with fentanyl just as a pack of surgeons materialized to deliver complex and consequential information about my health. A total of six surgeons comprised my “team,” and all six could have played background Kens in the Barbie movie. I remember humming to myself to drown out their talking; I do not remember repeatedly whispering “I’m asleep” while making eye contact with the lead surgeon, but I defer to his sober account. They summarized our morning: After extracting the fragment of crab shell in my throat, they found several smaller shards in my stomach, which they took for good measure. Then they glued shut the centimeter-long tear, as esophageal tissue is too fragile for stitches. They had pictures on their phones. Read More
May 29, 2024 On Books Anne Elliot Is Twenty-Seven By B. D. McClay Hugh Thomson, engraving for chapter 23 of Persuasion, 1987: “He drew out a letter from under the scattered paper, placed it before Anne with eyes of glowing entreaty fixed on her for a time.” Public domain. Anne Elliot is twenty-seven. She’s been twenty-seven since 1817, the year Jane Austen’s Persuasion was published. I, meanwhile, was somewhere around sixteen when I first read the book in my old childhood bedroom, with its green walls and arboreal wallpaper. I left the book alone after that, for almost twenty years, because it made me too sad. But when I turned twenty-seven I felt Anne Elliot slide into place alongside me. And when I turned twenty-eight, I felt her fall behind me. Persuasion starts after the end of a love story: Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth were briefly engaged eight years prior to the book’s beginning. Under pressure from an older family friend, Lady Russell, who did not view Wentworth as a suitable social match, Anne jilted him. But the years pass by, and the two are unexpectedly reunited. Anne has never stopped loving him; Wentworth, now a captain in the navy, has never forgiven her. “She had used him ill,” Wentworth broods to himself, “deserted and disappointed him; and worse, she had shewn a feebleness of character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure.” He’s done with her, he tells himself after they see each other again: “Her power with him was gone for ever.” Of course, he’s wrong. Over the course of Persuasion, he falls back in love with her (or maybe just admits he’s never stopped loving her) and she proves her steadfastness. They forgive each other—he for her weakness and she for his hardness—and Wentworth will eventually throw himself on Anne’s mercy in one of Austen’s most romantic scenes, proclaiming himself “half agony, half hope.” She takes him back, they marry, and all is happily ever after. Why did this story, which is so happy, make me so sad? Why did I forget so many details of Persuasion’s story over the years, but unfailingly remember that Anne Elliot is twenty-seven? When I was twenty-eight, I told a friend that I was in limbo between Anne and Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart, who is twenty-nine. Now my Lily Bart year, too, has come and gone. Read More
May 28, 2024 Dispatch At the Webster Apartments: One of Manhattan’s Last All-Women’s Boarding Houses By Tess Little All photographs by Tess Little. I am greeted by the same sight that greeted tens of thousands of young women before me, the same sight that greeted a younger self when my cab from JFK pulled up a decade ago, that greeted the department store girls arriving in the city with their belongings in trunks a century before that, and all the residents between and since: a red-brick facade towering over West Thirty-Fourth Street, its name proudly chiseled into stone, THE WEBSTER APARTMENTS. In 1923, the New York Times described this facade—“its white trimmings, its wide and numerous windows.” Now the trimmings have dulled to gray. From the sidewalk, I can catch a glimpse of the chiffon curtains in those wide windows. Charles Webster was the cousin of Rowland Macy and head of Macy’s department store. Upon Webster’s death in 1916, he left one-third of his wealth to build and maintain a hotel for single working women in Manhattan’s retail district—somewhere the Macy’s shop clerks could lay their heads at the close of each day’s shifts. Rent would be kept low enough for their meager earnings, with the apartments not run for profit. And so the Webster’s doors opened in November 1923 and, from then, its four hundred bedrooms were always occupied at near full capacity. It was one among many such boarding houses established during New York’s great era of commerce and industry. But over the next century, as other women’s residences closed one by one, the Webster stood tall on West Thirty-Fourth, a monument to the old ways of living. Still women-only, still affordable—until, that is, the building was sold off last April. Read More
May 24, 2024 In Memoriam “What a Goddamn Writer She Was”: Remembering Alice Munro (1931–2024) By The Paris Review Alice Munro. Photograph by Derek Shapton. I reread “Family Furnishings” this morning because it is one of my favorite stories and because I will be discussing it soon with my students and because Alice Munro, possibly the greatest short-story writer there ever was and certainly the greatest in the English language, is dead. One of my teachers at the University of Montana introduced me to the story when I was an undergrad who had just begun to write and was utterly lost and did not know yet that these two things were one and the same. The story was so far beyond me I had almost no sense of what was going on except that by the end the narrator had been exposed to her own ignorance and arrogance and emotional irresponsibility in a way that was permanently imprinted on me, most likely because I understood it as a premonition of what was to come in my own life. But it is also a story about how the narrator becomes a fiction writer, about the ways a person from a small town might become such a thing, the ways high art will come into your life and separate you from the people who don’t live for art—this is most of them—and the things you must give up in order to commit yourself to the discipline of writing, the ways you will almost certainly piss people off back home when you finally find a way to fork the lightning of the sentence. Munro is one of the only writers whose work has haunted me not just on the first read but more and more as I’ve gotten older. A good story will hold your attention for a while, but a great story will open a new door in your head and then will change with you as you go and “Furnishings” is that kind of story. Each time I read it I see a thing I somehow did not before and understand something about life I did not before or had purposely forgotten; Munro’s best work is always a step past me and no matter what I do or how much older I get it remains that way and I hope it stays that way. What has not changed is my sense that the writer driving this story is clear-eyed to the point of cruelty but not unnecessarily so and that this way of seeing is extended to everyone in the story including the narrator herself and now that I have been reading and writing for some time I know this to be the mark of legitimate fiction. Otherwise the work is ersatz. When I was younger I tried to diagram the architecture of Munro’s stories because I believed this would help me get better as a writer; I gave up because I realized it was the architecture of her mind I was diagramming and that no one would ever do it like her again. It is revealing that when I think about how good she is, I have to go to the peak of literary Olympus to find her equals. I must go to Proust to find someone with her emotional and relational intelligence; I must go to Flannery O’Connor to find someone who so understands the shame and wry humor and darkness and strangeness of rural life; and I must go to Chekhov to find someone whose stories turn as strangely and by their close leave me as stripped and ragged and human. What a goddamn writer she was. Goodbye, Miss Munro. I am grateful to you forever. —Sterling HolyWhiteMountain Read More
May 24, 2024 Notes from a Biographer Inside Alice Munro’s Notebooks By Benjamin Hedin All images courtesy Alice Munro fonds, University of Calgary Archives and Special Collections” For her twenty-first birthday, in July 1952, Alice Munro’s husband gave her a typewriter. The present was as much a symbolic offering as a practical one. As Robert Thacker records in his biography, Jim Munro, a manager at Eaton’s, the Canadian department store, wanted to assure his young wife, who at the time had just a single publication to her name—a story read on one of the CBC’s radio programs—that she was the real thing and could act like it. Yet Munro, the Nobel laureate who passed away last week at the age of ninety-two, never entirely quit the habit of longhand. On deposit with her manuscripts, correspondence, and other papers at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, are several folders of notebooks. In them one finds a little bit of everything: fragments and false starts, alternate endings, even drawings. The notebooks were where Munro tinkered and experimented, made detours and sudden revisions—where she surveyed the whole field of possibility before committing herself to a full, typed version of a story. Read More
May 22, 2024 Dinner Parties Old Friends By Devon Brody From Cletus Johnson’s Details from “Winter,” a portfolio published in issue no. 68 of The Paris Review (Winter 1978). Marga was still living where she’d been at the time I’d left New Orleans, in a house shared with friends. On the first floor were Marga and her roommates, who I knew a little, though she continued to introduce us to one another. On the second floor lived more friends, and a piano, which one of them played sometimes, and which Marga and I could hear when we lay in her bed. It was February, I was visiting, and the city smelled of sweet olive, damp soil, and sometimes sweat. At sunset the light was as obscene as I’d remembered it, fluorescent oranges and pinks that someone once told me were so bright because of the chemical pollution. I had spent the week going on walks through the tall grass of the old golf course with people I hadn’t seen since I’d lived there, a span of a few years in which I had felt sometimes elated, often unhappy. I wasn’t unhappy anymore, which made things look and feel different, and made me wonder what it would be to come back more permanently, and who I could be then: if she would be a better version, or at least a version more able to appreciate her time. It was a work trip. I spent my first night with Marga, as planned, but then I moved to a hotel for a few days following a COVID exposure. My negative test on Friday allowed me back into Marga’s in time for the Shabbat dinner she wanted to host while I was in town, which was going to include us, Marga’s roommates, and a couple I’d asked Marga to invite, plus their dog. When the couple walked in, one half sat down and said to me, “It must feel so good to come back here and have a family waiting for you.” I was surprised, because I hadn’t really felt like that was true, but hearing her say it made me wonder if it was true: if I had left something behind that I hadn’t really realized I’d had, or if somehow in my absence it had thickened into something more real than what I had lived. Read More