May 21, 2015 At Work Meet Your New Neighbors: An Interview with DW Gibson By Lee Bob Black DW Gibson. Photo: Chiara Barzini In cities, trends come, go, and come again; causes rise to prominence, fall by the wayside, and emerge repackaged; neighborhoods flourish or fall out of favor. Condos, cupcake shops, and bike lanes become signifiers; shady buyouts and racist landlords fuel arguments about whether communities are being renewed or decimated. The word gentrification is in the subtitle of DW Gibson’s most recent oral history, but the author has trouble with it: it’s too broad, he writes, to adequately capture a wide variety of experiences, contexts, and meanings. Several interviewees in his book also seem at odds with the word. One says gentrification doesn’t describe anything in the real world. Another says he doesn’t need to be able to describe it because he knows what it feels like. To mark the release of The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the 21st Century, I spoke with Gibson, a journalist and documentary filmmaker, about bringing the human touch to the page, viewing a book as one long panning shot in a film, and the importance of using all the tools at one’s disposal, including cute daughters. How do you make gentrification something people want to read about? Most of the books out there are academic or have an academic feel to them. I think the way you get people to care about gentrification is to write about human beings. My goal was to show the human fabric of gentrification. People relate to people, to stories. Read More
May 21, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Pomp and Circumstance By Sadie Stein From The Cap and Gown, 1900. A young friend recently asked me if I had an old graduation gown she could wear for a third-grade play in which she was playing a Supreme Court Justice. I keep many of my old things and have a pretty decent dress-up chest at this point; I’ve helped with costumes before. But this time, I had to tell her I didn’t. You see, the morning of my college graduation, in Chicago, I was running late. I snatched what I thought was my gown from the closet—only to arrive at the gymnasium and discover that in my haste I’d grabbed my roommate’s black rain slicker. Read More
May 21, 2015 My First Time Introducing Our New Video Series, “My First Time” By Dan Piepenbring The Paris Review is known for its interviews. Our first issue, from Spring 1953, featured a conversation with E. M. Forster on the art of fiction, inaugurating a series that’s grown to include hundreds of poets, novelists, playwrights, translators, cartoonists, and screenwriters. These Writers at Work interviews have created a genre and canon of their own. In the spirit of that tradition, we’re proud to present “My First Time,” a new video series where writers discuss the trials of writing and publishing that first novel, that first play, that first book of poems. This is a chance to see how successful authors got their start, in their own words—it’s a portrait of the artist as a beginner and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. Next week, starting on Tuesday, we’ll launch the first four videos in the series, featuring Christine Schutt, J. Robert Lennon, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Gabrielle Bell. You can see a preview above, including writers from future installments of the series such as Donald Antrim, Akhil Sharma, Tao Lin, Ben Lerner, and Sheila Heti. And stay tuned—we’ll announce more writers in the months to come. This series is made by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling; we’re delighted to collaborate with them.
May 21, 2015 On the Shelf This Kid’s Got the Touch, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Anima dannata (Damned Soul), ca. 1619. Among the titles on Osama bin Laden’s bookshelf: Bloodlines of the Illuminati, Secrets of the Federal Reserve, an Adobe Acrobat manual, Noam Chomsky. Archivists at the University of Michigan have found fragments of Orson Welles’s unfinished autobiography; the working title was Confessions of a One-Man Band. This is a watershed moment not just historians of cinema, but for historians of amateur illusionism: “The unfinished memoir … was interspersed with other ‘weird stuff’ … including scripted patter for magic acts that Welles performed.” Further proof that your ambitions are too modest and you’ll never amount to anything: “In 1619, at the ripe age of twenty, Gian Lorenzo Bernini set himself the seemingly impossible challenge of carving the human soul in marble … Bernini was precocious, authoritative, and versatile: he had the touch no matter what he put his hand to. He could make limp swags of drapery swirl and throb as if some sort of lifeblood ran through them.” You know who else had the touch? Bob Seger, when he wrote “Night Moves,” which took him six months: “We drove over to the Palm restaurant, where Bruce Wendell [Seger’s label’s head of promotions] was having lunch with Paul Drew, who programmed all the RKO Top 40 radio stations in the country … He came out to the car and we played it for him. Two and a half minutes into it, he said, ‘That’s a smash.’ ” Tired of visualizing history with the same old boring timelines? Of course you are! Sebastian C. Adams’s Synchronological Chart of Universal History will shift your paradigm. It “outlines the evolution of mankind from Adam and Eve to 1871, the year of its first edition. The original timeline … stretched to twenty-three feet in length and was designed for schoolhouses as a one-stop shop for all of history.”
May 20, 2015 Bulletin New on the Masthead: Susannah Hunnewell and Adam Thirlwell By Lorin Stein Susannah Hunnewell. Photo: Stephen Andrew Hiltner Adam Thirlwell. Photo: Eamon McCabe Starting with our Summer Issue, the novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell will join The Paris Review as London editor—our first in ten years. In that time, we’ve been admiring Adam’s fiction and criticism, as well as his editorial work for McSweeney’s. (In 2010, we sent him to interview Václav Havel, alas too late.) We’re not the only ones, of course. Granta chose him as one of its best young British novelists—twice—and he was recently chosen by Salman Rushdie and Colm Tóibín for the E. M. Forster Award, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters to a young British writer. Despite his much-belaureled youth, Adam is the author of three novels and a study of cross-cultural influence in fiction, The Delighted States.* It seems particularly fitting, therefore, to launch his tenure with our special issue on the art of translation, featuring new work from half a dozen languages. In the same issue, careful readers will notice another change to our masthead. Susannah Hunnewell, our longtime Paris editor, has been named publisher of the Review. As Paris editor, Susannah interviewed Kazuo Ishiguro, Harry Mathews, Michel Houellebecq, and Emmanuel Carrère; in our new issue, she interviews the translating duo Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. A former editor at George and Marie Claire, Susannah began her career as a Paris Review intern, a fact she shares in common with our departing publisher, her husband, Antonio Weiss, who left the Review earlier this year to become Counselor to the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. (We won’t think of it as losing a beloved publisher or a brilliant foreign correspondent, but as gaining one of each.) We congratulate Adam and Susannah—and wish them joy in their new hats! *Full subtitle: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by Maps, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes
May 20, 2015 Listen Saul Bellow at the 92nd St Y By Norman Rush Saul Bellow backstage at the Poetry Center, 1988. Photo: Nancy Crampton, courtesy of 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center “75 at 75,” a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center’s seventy-fifth anniversary, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center’s archive and write a personal response. Here, Norman Rush reflects on Saul Bellow, who read from Humboldt’s Gift and Henderson the Rain King on October 10, 1988. 92Y will celebrate Bellow’s centenary tomorrow evening. Martin Amis, Janis Bellow, Jeffrey Eugenides, Nicole Krauss, Zachary Leader, and Ian McEwan will read from The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, “Something to Remember Me By,” Humboldt’s Gift, and The Dean’s December. Read More