June 15, 2022 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Summer Issue By Emily Stokes “In more than one language the words for love and suffering are the same,” observes the narrator of Sigrid Nunez’s debut novel, A Feather on the Breath of God. “I have hurled myself at men’s hearts like a javelin.” But Nunez herself, whose Art of Fiction interview appears in our new Summer issue, has no interest in effortful seduction. Speaking to the Review’s Lidija Haas in early May, she expressed impatience with writers who want to break their readers’ hearts: “There’s an arrogance to that that has always bothered me. You leave my heart alone!” Writing that beguiles and devastates often appears to do so casually, with the smallest of phrases or gestures, and those moments were what caught at us as we put this issue together: a little girl, in a debut work of fiction by Harriet Clark, patted down by her grandfather with a tailor’s respectful discretion on their Saturday visits to her mother in prison; a phone call from a former lover, his voice as jarringly familiar as “the feeling of my tongue inside my mouth,” in Robert Glück’s “About Ed”; that gentle “mm-kay” in a poem by Terrance Hayes written in the voice of Bob Ross. Read More
June 14, 2022 Correspondence In Occupied Cities, Time Doesn’t Exist: Conversations with Bucha Writers By Ilya Kaminsky Bucha after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Photograph by РБК-Україна / Віталій Носач. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. “Russian soldiers stayed in our building,” my friend, the poet Lesyk Panaisuk, wrote to me when the Ukrainian city of Bucha was liberated from Russian occupation on March 31. Some months before, as soon as the war ensued, Lesyk had left Bucha in a hurry, fleeing the Russian soldiers. Although the city is now liberated, it is still dangerous to walk around Bucha. Lesyk’s neighbors find mines in the halls of their building, inside their slippers and washing machines. Some neighbors return only to install doors and windows. “In our neighborhood, doors to almost every apartment were broken by Russian soldiers,” Lesyk emails. “A Ukrainian word / is ambushed: through the broken window of / a letter д other countries watch how a letter і / loses its head,” writes Lesyk in one of his poems. He continues: “how / the roof of a letter м / falls through.” While I read Lesyk’s emails, miles from Ukraine, my own uncle is missing. As bombs explode in Odesa, I email friends, relatives. No one can find him. Read More
June 13, 2022 Diaries Cambridge Diary, 2014 By J. D. Daniels Photograph by J.D. Daniels. Saturday. July. 7:15 am Yoga. Translating Bayard’s Peut-on appliquer la littérature à la psychanalyse? from a Spanish copy of ¿Se puede aplicar la literatura al psicoanálisis? One word at a time. Speed limit, 25 mph. To Cartagena with Jamie this 22-26 September. Tonight Jamie, Josh and Ellen will come for dinner. Humid, overcast, drizzling rain, 60˚F but feels much hotter. Sunday. 6:10 am. 68˚F Beginner’s Orchids. Phalaenopsis, cymbidium, oncidium. Reconciliation with the father. Henry IV, Part One. Ideas for essays on films. Sorcerer at Brattle vs. Clouzot’s Wages of Fear. Or Stark’s The Hunter vs. Point Blank. A man who knows nothing about movies writes these words about a movie he enjoyed. Cycled yesterday with Jamie through green Concord, in preparation for 2015 in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Ran three miles. Read More
June 10, 2022 The Review’s Review On Prince, Volcanologists, and Forsythe’s Ballets By The Paris Review Molten smooth pahoehoe lava flow erupted by Kilauea volcano in Hawaii. Photograph by y5RZouZwNsH6MI. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. There is a video of Prince that I can’t stop watching. It’s just over an hour long, shot in grainy black-and-white. It looks like a surveillance tape. This is Prince in 1982, before 1999, before Purple Rain and Sign “O” the Times, before there were stadiums packed with people demanding something from him. Three months earlier, he opened for the Rolling Stones, wearing thigh-high boots and bikini briefs, and got chased off stage by an audience throwing garbage. Now he’s playing in suburban New Jersey for a crowd of college kids who don’t know how to process what they’re witnessing. It’s one of the most miraculous things I’ve ever seen. Read More
June 9, 2022 Eat Your Words Cooking with Cyrano de Bergerac By Valerie Stivers Photograph by Erica MacLean. In the opening scene of the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, first performed in 1897, “orange girls” at a Parisian theater in the 1640s make their way through an audience of soldiers, society ladies, noblemen, and riffraff, selling orangeade, raspberry cordial, syllabub, macarons, lemonade, iced buns, and cream puffs. The handsome soldier Christian de Neuvillette and his friends sample their wares, drink wine, and eat from a buffet. A poet and pastry cook named Ragueneau banter-barters an apple tartlet for a verse. Then the poet and militia captain Cyrano arrives, and in a glorious, idealistic act, spends his year’s salary to get a bad actor kicked off the stage. The orange girls offer the hungry man nourishment, but he eats only a grape and half a macaron, staying to true to a kind of restraint that defines his character. Food, in other words, plays a major role in the play—one that culminates in act 4, when Roxane, the woman both Christian and Cyrano love, arrives at the Arras front in a carriage stuffed with a feast for the starving soldiers: truffled peacock, a haunch of venison, ortolans, copious desserts, ruby-red and topaz-yellow wine. Read More
June 8, 2022 At Work Infinite Novel Theory: Jordan Castro and Tao Lin In Conversation By Jordan Castro and Tao Lin Castro and Lin working on their novels in 2019. Jordan Castro’s forthcoming novel The Novelist takes place over the course of one morning in which the protagonist tries to write his first novel. During this time, he sometimes G-chats and emails his friend, Li. Tao Lin’s Leave Society is about someone named Li who is writing a novel documenting his recovery from dominator culture. Castro and Lin have been friends since 2010. This conversation was composed from October 31, 2021 to June 8, 2022 on Google Docs and sometimes on Gmail and G-Chat. That material has been shortened and then reorganized freely to suggest thematic continuities, but also discontinuities, in the time, mood, and medium of the interview. LIN It’s December 19, 2021. Yesterday, I opened the galley of The Novelist and looked for something to quote in my tweet of a photo of it. I flipped around a little and saw and chose this: “I opened Gmail. Li had emailed me again. ‘Fuck off,’ the email said, simply.” I wonder what readers of that tweet—who know my novel’s main character is named Li—thought about that quote. In the context of your novel, the “Fuck off” is playful, causing the first-person narrator of your novel to grin. What’s your narrator’s name? CASTRO I didn’t give him a name. But the name of the protagonist of the third-person, autofictional novel he is initially trying to work on is named Calvin, which is the name you gave to the character based on me in your 2013 novel Taipei. Read More