September 15, 2016 From the Archive Adam Reads The Guide to Western Birds By Patty Seyburn Patty Seyburn’s poem “Adam Reads The Guide to Western Birds” appeared in our Fall 2001 issue. Her latest collection is Hilarity. Read More
September 15, 2016 Books My Motherland By Ursula K. Le Guin Finding—and writing—the worlds where only I had been. Robert Walter Weir, watercolor, 8 15/16″ x 6 11/16″, 1825. In high school I was, like many American intellectual kids, a stranger in a strange land. I made the Berkeley Public Library my refuge, and lived half my life in books. Not only American books—English and French novels and poetry, Russian novels in translation. Transported unexpectedly to college in another strange land, the East Coast, I majored in French lit and went on reading European lit on my own. I felt more at home in some ways in Paris in 1640 or Moscow in 1812 than in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1948. Much as I loved my studies, their purpose was to make me able to earn a living as a teacher, so I could go on writing. And I worked hard at writing short stories. But here my European orientation was a problem. I wasn’t drawn to the topics and aims of contemporary American realism. I didn’t admire Ernest Hemingway, James Jones, Norman Mailer, or Edna Ferber. I did admire John Steinbeck, but knew I couldn’t write that way. In The New Yorker, I loved Thurber, but skipped over John O’Hara to read the Englishwoman Sylvia Townsend Warner. Most of the people I really wished I could write like were foreign, or dead, or both. Most of what I read drew me to write about Europe; but I knew it was foolhardy to write fiction set in Europe if I’d never been there. Read More
September 15, 2016 Inside the Issue Water Source By Susan Stewart The genesis of “Channel,” a poem in our Fall 2016 issue. “Channel,” as part of the “habitus” exhibition. Photos by Jessica Naples Grilli. I grew up along the Susquehanna, and taught for many summers along the Tiber, and today most warm early mornings you’ll find me rowing my shell on the Schuylkill. I learned to row in middle age because I wanted to see my city, Philadelphia, from the perspective of the river and to know what it would be like to be buoyed by its surface. Was this how I prepared? Or was it water plants and buried objects, Whitman and Wang Wei, Charles Cros and Works and Days, rhymes and chants, imagining how we pass in parallel at disparate speeds? “Channel” began and begins with the words “salt” and “sweet.” I had been churning them in my thoughts for months—streams and the sea, the tears in our eyes, and the moisture in our words. A desire, after a hard winter, to write a long poem about a river. “Channel”: from canna, canalis, a pipe, a groove, a reed, a bed of running water. As I sketched and made notes, I wondered what views the poem could open, and how much history, where it would emerge (somewhere in a spring and in Spring) and where it would end (eventually at Siracusa, site of the sweet/salt legend of Arethusa and dear to my heart). In other words, it started with some words, as most poems start. Read More
September 15, 2016 On the Shelf You Won’t Get Anywhere Taking the Stairs, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel, in a rendering by Forbes Massie-Heatherwick Studio. The Paris Review’s offices are in Chelsea, where we attract hundreds of thousands of tourists every day. (What, you thought all those people were here for the High Line?) But now there’s a new attraction in town: stairs. Lots and lots of stairs, beautifully arranged, and going nowhere. It’s part of an ambitious new sculpture that some have dubbed “the social climber”: “Big, bold and basket-shaped, the structure, Vessel, stands fifteen stories, weighs 600 tons and is filled with 2,500 climbable steps. Long under wraps, it is the creation of Thomas Heatherwick, forty-six, an acclaimed and controversial British designer … Mr. Heatherwick said Vessel was partly inspired by Indian stepwells, but he also referred to it as a climbing frame—what Americans would call a jungle gym—as well as ‘a Busby Berkeley musical with a lot of steps.’ ” If you’re not into steps, just visit the city for the pavement. There’s a lot of it—and if you squint a bit or take the right drugs or just give it a good long think, you’ll see how interesting it is. Edwin Heathcote argues that “the pavement is the skin of the city, a membrane that separates the veneer of civilization from the darkness of the earth … The pavement is a paradoxical thing. It begins as a symbol of civilization and liberation but also becomes a kind of final resort, the domain of the homeless, of beggars and of defecating dogs. A city’s attitude to its street surface reveals much about its ideas of civic space, of ownership and generosity … ‘I think that our bodies are in truth naked,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in The Waves. ‘We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.’ ” Read More
September 14, 2016 Sleep Aid Experiments on the Spoilage of Tomato Ketchup By Dan Piepenbring John George Brown, Sleeping Angel, 1859. It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: a chapter from Experiments on the Spoilage of Tomato Ketchup, a 1909 book by A. W. Bitting. Read More
September 14, 2016 Events Monday: Terry McDonell and Graydon Carter at 92Y By The Paris Review Terry McDonell and Graydon Carter. Join Terry McDonell, president of The Paris Review’s board of directors, next Monday, September 19, at 92Y, as he discusses his new memoir, The Accidental Life: An Editor’s Notes on Writing and Writers, with Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter. Tickets are available now. Terry boasts a daunting résumé: he’s worked at Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Esquire, Smart, Outside, and Sports Illustrated. The Accidental Life chronicles his career at some of America’s most influential magazines. “Every time I run into Terry McDonell,” Jeffrey Eugenides writes, “I think how great it would be to have dinner with him. Hear about the writers he’s known and edited over the years, what the magazine business was like back then, how it’s changed and where it’s going, inside info about Edward Abbey, Jim Harrison, Annie Proulx, old New York, and the Swimsuit issue. That dinner is this book.” Read an excerpt from The Accidental Life about our founding editor, George Plimpton.