December 28, 2016 Best of 2016 The Last Days of Foamhenge By Eileen Townsend We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! Photo: Brett Hanover. If you’ve ever taken I-81 north through Virginia, you’ve passed the town of Natural Bridge, in Rockbridge County—home to a ninety-foot limestone arch that extends over a gorge, a geological anomaly probably formed by an ancient underground river. Natural Bridge is an anachronism from the Route 66 era of highway travel, a place where you can pay twenty dollars to look at a rock, eat a rock-themed lunch, and then buy a shot glass illustrated with a picture of that same rock. As any respectable tourist trap must, the town hosts a constellation of other attractions: a petting zoo, a dinosaur/Civil War theme park, and the Natural Bridge Wax Museum (now closed, and former home to a ghoulish Obama tribute). Best of all is the featherlight, faux prehistoric monument known as Foamhenge. As its name suggests, Foamhenge is a one-to-one scale replica of Stonehenge, made of foam. It is identical to the original, save the flecked gray paint, the accompanying statue of a deadhead-ish Merlin, and the fact that it was erected several millennia later. For the past twelve years, the henge has been the most public of Natural Bridge’s draws, garnering a steady stream of visitors and enough press to be mentioned in the same breath as the area’s actual ancient rocks. Its creator, an artist named Mark Cline, calls it his “foam-nomenon”: the unlikely culmination of his career as a sculptor of roadside attractions. Read More >>
December 28, 2016 Best of 2016 Being Seymour Glass By R. J. Hernández We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! An illustration of Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by Jonny Ruzzo, 2013. Why I borrowed a name from Salinger. Ask someone who Seymour Glass is and they’ll tell you he’s a Salinger character: the eldest of the precocious Glass family, a misanthrope who shoots himself on vacation in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” But if that someone works in the New York fashion industry—specifically, in the editorial departments of select glossies—their response might be, Didn’t he used to work here? That’s me they’re thinking of. Read More >>
December 28, 2016 Best of 2016 I’ve Been Sick for Over a Year By Bailey Jean Thomas We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! Read More >>
December 28, 2016 Best of 2016 Overdrafts of Pleasure By Max Nelson We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! John Cleland wrote his (very) erotic novel, Fanny Hill, in prison. What did he mean by it? John Cleland’s sentences often resemble the sexual encounters he imagined in his best-known book—a two-volume novel called Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill, published when he was in debtor’s prison between 1748 and 1749, reissued in a censored edition the following year, and presented in both cases as an autobiographical letter by a former courtesan named Fanny Hill. A typical Cleland sentence goes on past any moderate end point, “wedging [itself] up to the utmost extremity.” It makes unexpected, spasmodic, sometimes baffling detours, “exalted by the charm of their novelty and surprise.” It drifts so far into the ridiculous that sometimes it seems “that on earth”—as Cleland’s heroine comments in one passage about the “women of quality” she and her colleagues once wanted to resemble—“there cannot subsist anything more silly, more flat, more insipid and worthless.” But then it keeps going, escalating until it seems to have been “driven forcibly out of the power of using any art.” Read More >>
December 28, 2016 From the Archive The Subtractionist By Sam Lipsyte 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-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. In the famous Mary Robison story “Yours,” an elderly man and his young wife carve pumpkins on their porch for Halloween. Hers are messy and mediocre, while the husband, a retired doctor and “Sunday watercolorist,” creates inventive, expressive faces. Later, after a startling turn in this very short story, the old man wishes he could tell his wife his truth, “that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little.” It’s a fascinating idea to consider in relation to Robison, one of the enormous talents (and great practitioners) of the short story in America. Maybe it speaks to her deep knowledge of the various ways life tears at us, that there are monstrous crushings—death, abandonment—and then there are constant abrasions. Most people learn to live with both. Most people, Robison’s people, also, while maybe waiting around for the pain to subside, or at least turn briefly amusing, laugh, console each other, make dinner, sit on a bench, and try new tricks for better candlelight. Read More
December 28, 2016 Best of 2016 Nauseating, Violent, and Ours By Chris Bachelder We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! An illustration by Jason Novak for The Paris Review’s serialized edition of The Throwback Special. Why do we still watch sports? When my ten-year-old daughter overheard me telling a friend that The Throwback Special is about a group of men that convenes each November to reenact the play in which Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann suffered his gruesome leg injury, she had a question. “Dad,” she said, looking serious and perplexed. “I have a question.” “What is it?” I said. “Isn’t that mean?” Read More >>