December 26, 2016 Best of 2016 What Kind of Name Is That? By Tony Tulathimutte We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! Characters in need of names. How to name your fictional characters. To me the most embarrassing part of writing fiction, aside from telling people about it, is naming your characters. Of course, even “real” names are made up, but in life our names are things we can alter only with a great deal of paperwork; in fiction, writers can line up names and identities as they please, dropping or trading them on a whim. Contriving a name for a contrived person seems terribly precious to me, akin to naming a doll. You want your characters to have names that aren’t too convenient but still memorable and meaningful, which isn’t easy. I spent about a year with a manuscript populated by memorable characters like [[ROOMMATE]] and ???????’s dad, swapping dozens of potential monikers in pursuit of the perfectly natural, unforced, graceful name. After rupturing a few blood vessels that way, I tried to figure out what other writers were doing. The question of what names mean, what they’re for, has been around in the West since at least 500 B.C., when the Pythagoreans developed a few rules of onomancy to divine human traits from things like the number of vowels in one’s name. (Even numbers signaled an imperfection in the left side of the body.) One of the earliest discussions about naming comes from Plato’s dialogue “Cratylus,” in which Socrates oversees a debate about whether a name is “an instrument of teaching and distinguishing natures” or whether it’s just a matter of “convention and agreement.” More recently, psychoanalysts like Wilhelm Stekel and Carl Jung posited that the “compulsion of the name” not only reflects but determines one’s future: that we’re all engaged, from birth, in a nominative determinism. (Anyone quick to dismiss this as Freudian bunk should look at the abundance of Shaquilles now entering professional sports.) Read More >>
December 26, 2016 From the Archive Denis Johnson’s Perfect Short Story By Jeffrey Eugenides 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. A short story must be, by definition, short. That’s the trouble with short stories. That’s why they’re so difficult to write. How do you keep a narrative brief and still have it function as a story? Compared to writing novels, writing short fiction is mainly a question of knowing what to leave out. What you leave in must imply everything that’s missing. If you’d like to learn how to do this, you’d be well advised to study Denis Johnson’s blisteringly acute “Car-Crash While Hitchhiking.” In this story—and indeed, in all of the stories in Johnson’s brilliant collection, Jesus’ Son—Johnson found a way to leave out the maximum in terms of plot, setting characterization, and authorial explanation while finding a voice that suggested all these things, a voice whose brokenness is the reason behind the narrative deprivation, and therefore a kind of explanation itself. Read More
December 26, 2016 Best of 2016 Here Comes the Moon By Martin Herbert We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! From Soft City. The hopeful dystopia of Pushwagner’s Soft City. Where does art begin? In the case of Soft City, the straightforward answer is this: it began in Fredrikstad, Norway, in 1969, in a sea captain’s house converted into a writer’s retreat by the novelist Axel Jensen, after Pushwagner had ingested Sandoz LSD. He doodled a man in a car, whom he intuited was called “Mr. Soft”—five years before Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel would have a hit song of that name—and, along with Jensen, envisioned a day-in-the-life narrative structure for the character, along the lines of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and James Joyce’s Ulysses. And then? A hiatus of some three years (hardly the only sharp left turn in Pushwagner’s tumultuous life), during which time he lived on virtually nothing in London (subsisting by selling drawings on trains for pennies) and Oslo, went back to his mother’s, was arrested for trying to board a flight to Madeira on his hands and knees, was institutionalized, walked back to Fredrikstad, escaped a hotel in Paris, sojourned in Lisbon, returned to London, and became a father. After these adventures, he once again began Soft City, with, he’s said, his beloved baby daughter, Elizabeth, on his lap, and with thoughts of the future in mind. Mr. Soft now had a family of his own, and a fearful projected dystopia to live in. Pushwagner finished the book, or rather the 269 bleak yet blackly comic ink drawings that would comprise it, in 1975; and then, after a few luminaries of the London music world had admired it (including Pete Townshend and Steve Winwood), he lost it. Read More >>
December 23, 2016 From the Archive All This Giving By Nicole Rudick Our new, redesigned website marks the debut of our complete digital archive: now subscribers can read every piece from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading our back issues right away; you can also try a free ten-day trial period. Read More
December 23, 2016 In Memoriam The Last Picture Show By Richard B. Woodward Nineteen volunteer fire departments on the East End of Long Island responded to an alarm that sounded shortly after six A.M. on December 15. A stretch of stores along Main Street in Sag Harbor was burning, the flames accelerated by whipping winds that the local fire chief, Thomas Gardella, later described as acting “like a blowtorch.” Working at first in the winter dark and then in smoke-choked early morning light, the dozens of firefighters needed more than four hours to put the fire out. Temperatures were so cold that water from the hoses froze on their uniforms and trucks. No one was killed, thanks in part to a Sag Harbor police officer, Randy Seyert, who went through the smoke to rouse two sleeping residents in the apartments above the stores. They have nonetheless lost everything, as have the owners of five local businesses. Ad hoc recovery funds have been gathered to help alleviate the shock of total loss. The destruction of one building, the Sag Harbor Cinema, has left a particular sting. Its white stucco facade and red neon Art Deco lettering were the face of the village. The black rectangular hole that now stands along Main Street is a public injury, as if someone has ripped out an eye or a tooth. Certain places retain their grip on memory out of all proportion to their social value or their function in your life, and the Sag Harbor Cinema did that for me. In an architectural landscape like New York, where nothing is safe from the forces of real-estate development, the theater had somehow escaped improvements. Its appearance and mode of operation changed barely at all in the more than three decades I was a patron. A proud ignorance of upheavals happening elsewhere in the industry was one source of the comfort the cinema provided. Read More