September 28, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 27 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “In the before times, we’d celebrate the arrival of the new issue with a party at the office. I’d greet attendees by shouting from atop the pool table (barefoot to protect the felt), and I’d invite a contributor up to share the shortest of readings before the party got back underway. This past week, we gathered online instead of on Twenty-Seventh Street, and I (still barefoot) welcomed readers from my Alphabet City living room. Sure, I missed the mingling, the hugs and hellos, but at the same time I was grateful for the extra space and attention our new format offered, for both our writers and our readers: no one was shouting over bar sounds and, importantly, proximity to the A train wasn’t requisite for attendance. And as I told that night’s featured contributors—Eloghosa Osunde (calling in from Nigeria), Emma Hine (reading from Denver), Rabih Alameddine (speaking to us from San Francisco), and Lydia Davis (reading from upstate New York)—while it had been a joy to read (and edit) their pieces, I found it truly exceptional to hear those works read by their makers. The office parties were known to get a bit crowded, but on Wednesday, the room was fuller than ever, with hundreds of attendees across several continents. If you weren’t able to attend, have no fear: a recording of the program is available below, and we’ve unlocked several pieces related to the event. Another thing I said Wednesday that is worth stating again and again as this new normal takes shape: it is a welcome relief and a small joy to know that while so much is in flux, there is still literature, and it is within our reach to celebrate that writing, to embrace existing traditions and to create new ones.” —EN Read along while you watch the complete event on YouTube now! Eloghosa Osunde’s “Good Boy” follows the journey of an unnamed protagonist as he builds a chosen family of queer friends in contemporary Nigeria. “I believe that the world we live in was first made, right?” Eloghosa says. “A big part of imagining other ways to be starts with the imagination, starts with what we write, starts with story.” Read More
September 21, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 26 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “It’s back-to-school time. This year, of course, that doesn’t mean everyone is actually going back to school. Many students and teachers are attending class from one side or another of the same screen that for months has been their primary aperture on the wider world. Some schools and universities are still completely remote; others have managed to bring students back in some capacity. And so this new school year begins with a roiling mix of excitement, trepidation, anxiety, and hope, for students, parents, teachers, and staff. No matter the situation, it’s not the same as a bunch of students sitting together in a room, carefree enough to focus solely on what they’re learning. But I like to think there are some aspects of education that can be practiced no matter where and with whom one finds oneself. Literature can offer deep, reflective engagement with the thoughts and feelings of others; a kind of call-and-response across space and time that is not unlike conversation; and opportunities to (safely) visit near and faraway places. In that spirit, this week’s The Art of Distance features interviews that celebrate education. ‘Singing school,’ as W. B. Yeats called it, is always open and available to all. May you find these interviews as enriching, enlightening, and sociable as a good school day. And let’s meet up by the lockers after third period.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director Photo: Douglas P Perkins. CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0). Unsurprisingly, writers have high regard for education, though also, nonconformists that they are, great ambivalence about it. But all the writer-teachers of this asynchronous virtual master class believe strongly in the dialectic encounter that can take place in a classroom or in conversation with a text. Please raise your hand if you have any questions. Read More
September 14, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 25 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “For many of us, the sudden shuttering of museums this spring was an upsetting jolt. Me, for one. Visual art has always been a part of my New York: my first job in the city was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the route from my basement office to my favorite Frankenthaler is still burned onto my eyelids. When MoMA opened after its renovation in 2019, I treated myself to a membership, which meant that when I found myself in Midtown I could weave through the crowds to look at one dear painting, or two, before heading on my way. And The Paris Review’s offices are in West Chelsea, New York’s premier gallery district, which meant my colleagues and I would often chat around the coffee maker about what we’d visited over lunch, installations coming in, and shows closing soon. My commute currently takes me past several bookshelves and a dog bed, but there hasn’t been a total vacuum of visual arts: over the summer we’ve seen art in the sky and on billboards, art in the mail and online. It’s been inspiring, yet I still miss the gallery view. Incrementally, museums here in New York are opening, with timed tickets and limited capacity. While some of us are queuing up, I know others, by dint of safety and geography, aren’t sure when they’ll be able to visit museums again. In anticipation of returning to museums and galleries—or, in some cases, as a substitute for it—this week we offer selections that remind us of those big white cubes and the art therein.” —Emily Nemens, Editor A drawing of Vincent van Gogh by Saul Steinberg. In John Tranter’s epic poem “Rain,” we meet a memorable, troubled artist whose work sounds like it would fit well into an abstract expressionist gallery. Here’s how Tranter describes the artist’s work: … He painted big canvases, twelve feet across, red, black and purple zigzags, then he’d blacken them with a blowtorch— trying to face up to the Americans, he said … Read More
August 31, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 24 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “Last week I wrote about the relative calm of the dog days of summer in NYC. But these same days of languor are hardly that elsewhere around the country and the globe. Wednesday I was rooting for Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season at the International Booker Prizes while Hurricane Laura bore down on Louisiana and Texas—a disconcerting coincidence, to say the least. The storm dissipated more quickly than expected, but that did not make its landfall in southwest Louisiana any less destructive. Earlier this month I felt an eerie prescience welcoming the publication of Shruti Swamy’s debut collection, A House Is a Body (we published the title story, about a mother’s evacuation from a wildfire, in 2018), as California fires flared again. And until a few weeks ago, the only derecho I knew was dance partner to izquierda. The Art of Distance began as a meditation on our social distancing during the COVID crisis, but this week, that same framework seems to emphasize the distance between here and there, the dichotomous feeling of at once wanting to rush in and help and feeling grateful to be out of harm’s way. But even from afar, we may find inspiration and empathy in literature that stares these disasters in the face, marks their dimensions with incisiveness and artfulness, and, sometimes, even imagines a way forward.” —Emily Nemens, Editor Saturday marked the fifteenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Claudia Rankine discusses writing in response to the disaster in her Art of Poetry interview. “They Called Her the Witch,” excerpted from Melchor’s Hurricane Season, explains the trauma of the land on which the Witch lives and grows her poisonous herbs: “They lost everything, right down to the stones of their temples, which ended up buried in the mountainside in the hurricane of ’78, after the landslide, after the avalanche of mud that swamped more than a hundred locals from La Matosa.” Read More
August 24, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 23 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “It was early in the pandemic and our Art of Distance newsletters that I mentioned my daily ambulations through Alphabet City with my pooch, Willow. Then, daffodils were blooming along the East River, seemingly oblivious of the sirens racing up FDR Drive. These days, in that same stretch of park, we’re waiting for the trees that were uprooted in Isaias to be cleared, but we’ve also found a rogue clutch of sunflowers. The city is quieter, by dint of lower viral rates and a certain amount of road-tripping neighbors, and there are picnic blankets dotting the lawns of the park. I used to complain about August here: it was sweaty and stinky and felt like the city went on hold. Everyone who could quit New York did, leaving the rest of us to brave that particular funk of the subway platform when the tunnel temperature crept above 90. But this year, as we brace for the fall’s uncertainty, viral and political, the dog days of summer are particularly welcome. Willow and I are walking slower, longer, and trying to hold on to this pause, this small peace.” —Emily Nemens, Editor There have been few bright spots through the ordeal of COVID-19, but for the staff of The Paris Review, one of them has been welcoming some new wolves into the pack: two colleagues have acquired pandemic puppies (Cashew and Penny). In celebration of our canine companions, here are some selections from the archive: “The dog was not demanding, it was modest in its requirements, although it drank a lot of water; it liked its water. It could square itself off like a package in a chair, it could actually resemble a package.” In Joy Williams’s “Substance,” Louise is delivered an unexpected furry gift. Read More
August 17, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 22 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “August is Women in Translation Month, an annual celebration centered around the #WiTMonth hashtag and started by the book blogger Meytal Radzinski in 2014. Though it’s worth reading literature in translation year-round, August provides an opportunity to shine a spotlight on this work. Even as the coronavirus pandemic puts new distances between people, travel to other places, other periods, and other perspectives is possible via literature. To read a book is to play a trick on space and time; though I may be physically sitting in the same small bedroom where I’ve spent most of my time since March, I am actually anywhere but. And so to celebrate Women in Translation Month, this week’s The Art of Distance lifts the paywall on works of or about translation. Happy reading, happy travels, and stay safe.” —Rhian Sasseen, Engagement Editor Margaret Jull Costa. Photo: © Gary Doak / Alamy Stock Photo. This Women in Translation Month archive dive begins with Margaret Jull Costa’s Writers at Work interview, The Art of Translation No. 7. Jull Costa is a legend in the world of translation, having brought work by Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Luisa Valenzuela, and more into English. As she tells interviewer Katrina Dodson, “I think translating is just what I do. I miss it terribly if we go on holiday, and sometimes take some editing with me as my security blanket. So I suppose I’m a translation addict. There are worse things.” (If you’d like to learn more about the process behind this interview, Dodson will be joining us for a live conversation on The Paris Review’s Instagram on Thursday, August 20, at 7 P.M. EST.) Read More