September 13, 2016 Bulletin In Which Our Writers Do Great Things By The Paris Review Detail from the cover of our new Fall issue, doubling here as a celebratory bouquet. On the shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize are two of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize winners, Ottessa Moshfegh and David Szalay. Szalay is nominated for his novel All That Man Is, two sections of which first appeared in the Review: “Youth” and “Lascia Amor E Siegui Marte.” In our last issue, he talked to our editor, Lorin Stein, about writing All That Man Is. The two will convene again for a discussion at McNally Jackson Books on Friday, October 14. Moshfegh, nominated for her novel Eileen, has published seven short stories in the Review: “Disgust,” from our Fall 2012 issue; “Bettering Myself,” from Spring 2013; “The Weirdos,” from Fall 2013; “A Dark and Winding Road,” from Winter 2013; “Slumming,” from Winter 2014; “No Place for Good People,” from Summer 2014; and “Dancing in the Moonlight,” from Fall 2015. And Paul Beatty, whose novel The Sellout made the shortlist, discussed the book at length in an interview last year with the Daily. Meanwhile, the National Book Awards have announced this year’s poetry longlist, and here, too, the Review is well represented: Peter Gizzi has three poems in our Spring 2015 issue and Monica Youn’s “Goldacre” appeared in our Summer 2016 issue; for the Daily, Youn wrote about what she refers to as “my Twinkie poem.” Solmaz Sharif spoke to the Daily this summer about her collection, Look. Finally, our poetry editor from 1953 to 1961, Donald Hall, has been nominated for his Selected Poems. Our congratulations to all the nominees!
September 13, 2016 On Design Flying Saucers Over the Art Department! By Jack Womack How the book designers of the fifties and sixties tackled alien invasions. A still from Forbidden Planet, 1956. It’s impossible to know what sort of cover design will make a book fly off the shelves. Through timidity, this often leads to a certain monotony in covers, especially when they’re genre specific—“If it worked before, it’ll have to work again, eventually.” At times the uniformity is comical: it’s hard for book people of a certain age not to remember, say, the gothic romance subgenre without bringing to mind the same cover that was on every one by the end of the sixties—a woman, at night, dashing (often in a white nightgown) from a darkened mansion in sinister woods. Familiarity bred contentment; every reader knew what to expect when they saw the lady running. Flying saucers as a phrase entered the modern English vocabulary at the end of June 1947, immediately after the initial sightings by Kenneth Arnold in Washington State—which, as it happened, turned out to be the first of thousands of such sightings. The subject was becoming more popular by the week, and publishing houses such as Henry Holt, Fawcett, and Citadel were quick to recognize the need for books on it. But what kind of a cover should go on a book about flying saucers? At the outset, there was no consensus as to what the saucers even actually looked like: they were described as blinking lights, purple blobs, flying wings, boomerangs, shiny metal balls, floating kerosene lamps, pie plates, hubcaps from an old Terraplane; in photos, during the first ten years, the most popular model resembled either the top of a chicken incubator, or part of the casing of a 1937 Electrolux vacuum cleaner. Read More
September 13, 2016 Our Correspondents Strophic Prose By Anthony Madrid Carl August Ehrensvärd, Birth of the Poet, 1795. Before we begin, I need you to search your heart and evaluate soberly whether you have ever had the experience of sincerely enjoying metrical effects in poetry. If you find in your bosom any doubts regarding this matter, I’m going to ask you to please rise from your seat and locate your nearest exit, keeping in mind that it may be behind you, or opening right now at your feet. You may ignore the smoke. Best wishes. Thank you so much. Now. The rest of you. We have a great deal to discuss, but I must be brief. I am going to advance a radical proposition. Read More
September 13, 2016 On the Shelf The Case of the Shrinking Mannequins, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring English mannequins ca. 1950. If you’re in New York, you’ve surely noticed them, those well-heeled people bolting down the sidewalk looking pissed off and holding enormous cups of coffee. That frisson of exclusion … that perfume of condescension: it’s Fashion Week! And what better time to remind ourselves that the industry promulgates a whole range of body-image issues, not just in the models it chooses but right down to the mannequins? M. G. Zimeta, at a shop in London, tried to get some answers about those mannequins: “Nearly a year ago I complained about the mannequins at the entrance of the ladies’ department in John Lewis on Oxford Street … Months passed, and I received no response … The ‘Fashion Queen’ mannequin range I’d seen in John Lewis is produced by Bonami in Belgium and has the following dimensions: height 185 cm (6’07”), waist 59 cm (23″), hips 87 cm (34″) and bust 87 cm (34″). A Fashion Queen mannequin is taller than the average British man, but with the waist of a ten-year-old girl in John Lewis sizes. Some of the clothes on the mannequins at John Lewis were discreetly pinned in place because the outfits would otherwise, even in the smallest sizes, be too loose for their frames.” When you’re considering which book to read next, remember this: you don’t have to read anything. You might, in fact, find it considerably more pleasurable to read nothing. In 2011, more than fifty thousand new novels appeared in the U.S., an abundance that makes it impossible, Amy Hungerford argues, to have a proper encounter with any of them: “While any given reviewer may be an excellent reader, and any book buyer may have excellent taste, the literary market as a whole is vulnerable to forces that have less to do with literary discernment and more to do with money, class, contemporary pressures on journalism, the geography of cities, and the social networks that circumscribe the reach of editorial attention or a bookstore’s clientele. These forces have a profound effect on what is celebrated and what remains culturally invisible among the masses of books written and published, and they affect the meanings that particular books come to have as they enter the stream of culture.” Read More
September 12, 2016 Look Time Speeds Up By Dan Piepenbring Amy Bennett’s exhibition “Time Speeds Up” is showing in New York at Ameringer McEnery Yohe through October 8. Bennett, who works in Beacon, New York, paints her landscapes after dioramas she’s painstakingly constructed at a 1/500 scale. She carves valleys and rivers into Styrofoam and freckles the map with wooden houses and wiry trees; over time, she adds farmland, grocery stores, and schools. “The creation and gradual alterations of these models allow Bennett to indulge a novelistic sensibility,” Eleanor Heartney writes in an essay to accompany the exhibition. “The settings she selects are precisely those in which the American ideals of freedom and security clash.” Amy Bennett, Lowlands, 2016, oil on canvas, 40″ x 56″. Read More
September 12, 2016 On Sports Play-by-Play By Max Ross Trying to make it as a sports commentator. Detail from the 1994 USA World Cup poster. The world’s third-largest youth soccer tournament, Schwan’s USA Cup, is held each summer on a vast stretch of converted farmland in Blaine, Minnesota. The complex comprises fifty-two full-size fields and an inadequate number of shade trees; it is a desert of grass. Throughout the week of play, parents huddled beneath umbrellas, protecting themselves from the sun, if not the heat. They shouted encouragement to their children and epithets at referees. On the final day of competition, John Hadden sat at a folding table beside field A-1. He’d been hired by a local public-access channel to call play-by-play for a U-19 women’s semifinals match. His pants were khaki; his loafers, shiny; his briefcase was leather with brass clasps—his appearance and bearing resembled that of an accountant. He estimated that no more than two hundred viewers would tune into the broadcast. “There’s an if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest quality to gigs like this,” he told me, “which, if your aim is to reach people, isn’t ideal.” Hadden’s aim is to reach people. He wants to announce for Major League Baseball one day and has spent the last decade traveling the country to call games for farm clubs: the Idaho Falls Chukars, the Yakima Bears, the New Orleans Zephyrs. Every summer he lives somewhere else. Winters he returns to Minnesota, his home state, and picks up whatever commentary work he can get. He has called Pee Wee hockey tournaments. He has called high school gymnastics meets. While he admitted he was somewhat disappointed, at thirty-one, to be working youth soccer, he took his assignment seriously. Before the morning’s game he’d done three hours of prep work, he said, researching the teams and their previous results, the players’ names, the facility, the weather forecast. Rain, for the first time all week, was predicted. The parents’ umbrellas would be put to new use. Read More