September 12, 2023 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Fall Issue By Emily Stokes Sometimes, as the Review’s print deadline looms, I catch myself fantasizing about a return to university life. I should clarify that, in this fantasy, “university” is a quiet, spartan room, with a bed, an armchair, and a constant supply of paperback classics. It is entirely lacking in lectures, academic conferences, or tenure-track infighting, and also bears no resemblance to my actual experience as an undergraduate: a fog of nervous smoking, romantic dysfunction, and tearful struggles to conjure up an essay on, say, doorframes in the work of Henry James. Sadly, there is, to my knowledge, no program or job at which reading is the sole responsibility—and, of course, nothing complicates a love of books like the attempt to build a life around them. Not one but two pieces in our new Fall issue suggest, for instance, that even too much Shakespeare can have side effects: in Rosalind Brown’s “A Narrow Room,” a conscientious student on deadline for an essay about the Sonnets finds herself continually waylaid by an erotic triangle of her own invention, while Ishion Hutchinson recalls his undoing as a homesick sophomore alone in a windowless yellow closet in Kingston, Jamaica, obsessing over local folklore, Crime and Punishment, and Hamlet. And in Munir Hachemi’s rollicking “Living Things,” translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches, four arrogant, well-read young men spend the summer after graduation working in the South of France, searching for that “hazy, ill-defined thing that we coined experience,” only to find that their education has in no way prepared them for the outside world, with its onslaught of corruption, exploitation, and force-fed chickens. Read More
September 12, 2023 On Books Looking for Virginia Woolf’s Diaries By Geoff Dyer Photograph by Laura Kolbe. The Diary of Virginia Woolf brings into sharp focus the question of what to do with one’s life. I’m referring not to the text, to the content, to anything written on the pages, but to the objects: the books, the five published volumes. The first bit of Woolf merch I ever bought, in Woolworths in about 1975, was a beautiful Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Waves. On the cover was a portrait of the author by someone called Vanessa Bell. I couldn’t read what was inside, gave up after about five pages, and never tried again. Around the same time, I bought similarly lovely editions of To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, both of which I did get through, under compulsion, at university, though I struggled with the preciousness, the sense of someone walking—writing—around on tiptoe. That was pretty much it for me and Woolf’s fiction until the pandemic when I was nudged toward it by an unlikely enthusiast from the American West. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen Larry McMurtry writes of how, after a serious illness, he found, for the first time in his adult life, that he couldn’t read fiction—unless it was by Proust or Woolf. I picked up the novels again and, despite McMurtry’s lobbying, failed to make any progress. Which was surprising because I had, by then, come around to Woolf in several ways. In 2003 I’d gone to see Patti Smith perform at Charleston, the home of Virginia’s sister, Vanessa. This was one of several rustic hubs of Bloomsbury life, and it’s obvious, as you are shown around the bright rooms with their painted furniture, the sanctuary and liberation this place offered from the oppressive dreariness of English life between the wars. The handmade look is like a precursor of the make-do aesthetic I was familiar with from London squats in the eighties, which remains my ideal of interior design. This fitted in well with Smith’s performance when she read passages from The Waves, which sounded much better as Virginia’s clipped English “yellow” became Patti’s New Jersey “yellah.” If it sounded almost impossibly cool and contemporary that was because in places the original had given way seamlessly to Smith’s stream-of-consciousness improvisations. Read More
September 11, 2023 First Person Jets and Trash By Tao Lin In May 2005, I graduated from New York University with a degree in journalism. That fall, I got a job off Craigslist working for a twenty-nine-year-old Afghan man named Richard Zaher, who was creating a jet charter company called Paramount Business Jets, seemingly by himself. He lived in a dark, bare apartment in Lower Manhattan with his sister. I went there zero to four times a week over around three months. In his bedroom, we worked on his company’s website. The website’s purpose was to entice customers to call the company, which for a fee would facilitate travel by private jet. My job was to (1) copyedit the text he’d written; (2) find and Photoshop images of jets, jet interiors/cockpits, limousines, mansions, cruise ships, champagne, and other things to put on the website; (3) collect statistics and write descriptions for a hundred-plus types of jets. My work is still online, I recently learned. This sentence made me laugh a little, reading it in 2023: Richard was also an actor. His acting name was Baktash, which seemed to be his birth name. He’d been in two movies. He’d starred in FireDancer—the first Afghan film submitted to the Academy Awards, a film assistant-directed by his sister, Vida, who when letting me in the apartment a few times had seemed quiet and stoic, like her brother—and he’d appeared briefly in Spike Lee’s Inside Man. Read More
September 8, 2023 At Work Does Lana Del Rey Read The Paris Review? By Sophie Haigney Sam McKinniss, Lana Del Rey Reading The Paris Review, 2023, five-color offset lithograph with hot foil stamping on acid-free 352-gsm Sappi McCoy Silk, plate size 24 ½ x 18 ¾ in, paper size 30 x 22 in. The latest image in our recently relaunched print series is by Sam McKinniss and features the singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey—white-gloved, in a sun hat—reading the Review. The lithograph print, based on a painting by McKinniss, was made with the help of Dusty Hollensteiner at Publicide Inc.; on Friday, September 8, at 9 P.M., the print, made in a limited edition of twenty-five, will be made available for sale to the public at parisreviewprints.org. McKinniss and I talked on the phone a few weeks ago about his process, Lana’s latest album, and images of women reading on the internet. INTERVIEWER What led you to make an image of Lana Del Rey reading The Paris Review? SAM McKINNISS A friend of mine told me that once upon a time she was having a bad day, so her boyfriend bought her a copy of Lana Del Rey’s poetry book to cheer her up. It worked. Then I thought: What if Lana Del Rey has been photographed somewhere reading? I started googling for pictures of “Lana Del Rey reading,” and I found a photograph of her reading her own book of poetry. Based on that, I decided to make a picture of Lana Del Rey reading The Paris Review, which is not so hard to believe that she does, from time to time. INTERVIEWER What do you think she would be reading in The Paris Review? McKINNISS Poetry. Read More
September 8, 2023 The Review’s Review Sentences We Loved This Summer By The Paris Review Bonner Springs City Library, Bonner Springs, Kentucky, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0, A passage about LA (“ellay”) from Henry Hoke’s Open Throat, a novel narrated by a mountain lion: the bright world below the park at night is a blur to me when I try to look out over it but if I get close enough to a creature’s eye I can see what it sees and in the owl’s eye I see ellay clearly more lights than I could ever count stretch out into the darkness and don’t stop stretching I’m scared of how far they go —Spencer Quong, business manager Read More
September 7, 2023 Overheard “Practice Tantric Exodus”: Tuning into Burning Man By Ben Schneider Photograph by Dustin Faulk. Last Friday afternoon, the first in a series of downpours began in northern Nevada just as Burning Man was preparing to wrap up. Life in Black Rock City, the temporary settlement created for the event, ground to a halt as the hard-packed desert clay turned into a particularly sticky species of mud. Wheeled vehicles from bedazzled bikes to fire-breathing art cars instantly became useless. For approximately two and a half days, festival organizers forbade travel into and out of the city. Burners were asked to conserve food and water, and to live out their espoused principle of radical self-reliance. As the lockdown dragged on, news reports from Black Rock City were limited and at times sensational. (Rumors of an ebola outbreak on Saturday were quickly debunked.) Social media commentary on the waterlogged festival was, predictably, infused with heavy doses of Schadenfreude. But one source struck a slightly different tone. BMIR 94.5, a radio station which surfaces annually for the festival, quickly adapted its programming to the shifting conditions. The station—located in a DJ booth in the makeshift city—allowed walk-up studio guests to mingle with on-air callers from the “default world,” as attendees dub the universe beyond the Black Rock City gates. Over the long weekend, I periodically tuned in online from New York, listening for the vibes. Every ten minutes or so, BMIR played a series of prerecorded PSAs. Some were earnest exhortations, if slightly surreal: “Please do not climb on art. There are muddy, unsafe conditions on playa and very limited mobile emergency services,” one message went. “Also, refrain from entering the man.” (This refers to the towering wooden effigy ritualistically set aflame at the conclusion of every festival.) Read More