March 1, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Hauntings, Hollywood, and Home By The Paris Review María Gainza. Photo: Rosana Schoijett. My favorite genre of novel is one I like to call “women interacting with art.” Membership is somewhat limited but disproportionately loved. On this shelf sits works such as A. S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Ali Smith’s Artful, and now María Gainza’s Optic Nerve. Although each book is unique, they employ a similar philosophy: a belief that life becomes entangled with the art we touch. Gainza’s novel, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, follows an Argentine woman alongside her beloved works of art, contrasting her memories with the history of her favorite paintings. Falling somewhere between essay and close personal narrative, Optic Nerve reads like a museum. It encompasses countless styles, eras, and characters, offering new stories and ideas for our narrator to follow down winding hallways. Considering artist legacies, Argentine culture, and the accuracy of perception, Gainza paints life and art as adjacent forces; fabricated images and stories become real, casting their shadows onto memory. At one point, Gainza describes the narrator’s childhood home filled with antique furniture, and the bathroom with “a pile of Sotheby’s catalogues dating back to 1972, the shelves bowed under their weight.” The image serves as an unlikely metaphor for Gainza’s book: built around everyday life but haunted by a history of art stacked high in the corner, quietly shaping the space where it sits. —Nikki Shaner-Bradford Read More
February 22, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Features, Films, and Flicks By The Paris Review Still from Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here. Photo courtesy of StudioCanal. You Were Never Really Here is a disturbing and poetic piece of cinema. I don’t know whether it’s my favorite movie of 2018—the experience of watching it was too uncomfortable for that—but even so, it strikes me that Lynne Ramsay’s omission from the nominees for best director at this year’s Oscars is difficult to justify. In You Were Never Really Here, Joe, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is a tortured, messy veteran and contract killer tasked with tracking down the kidnapped daughter of a senator. Often in movies of this sort, the pressure that builds by the threat of violence is somehow released when that violence occurs. There is no such relief here. In the pauses between violence, Joe returns home to his elderly mother (Judith Roberts) to fret over her health or help her polish cutlery; all the while the violence remains, like a ringing in the ears following an explosion. —Robin Jones Read More
February 15, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Medusa, Magic, and Moshfegh By The Paris Review T Kira Madden. Photo: Jac Martinez. T Kira Madden is magic. In her forthcoming memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, she uses language new and strange but always devastatingly right. One of my favorite lines describes weather not unlike our recent New York squalls: “It’s a nickel-slapping kind of rain, a silver bounce to it. It is not cold enough to snow.” Such sentences, in their brevity and clarity, whirl the reader through this book. Whether in a loud coffee shop or our lively office, I found myself completely ensconced. Other books might possess similar powers—to steal a reader’s attention entirely—but I do think this memoir’s pull is uniquely sonic. “Nickel-slapping” and “silver bounce,” for instance, possess that ear-thrum of diving underwater. I’m thinking also of Madden’s dialogue: she captures that particular blend of impatience and tenderness unique to conversation among family. From a flippant “abso-fucking-lutely” to the most thudding words and exchanges, Madden reveals the taut vulnerability in everyday speech, the feeling that we always say either too much or too little—our fear, but speaking anyway. —Spencer Quong Read More
February 8, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Death, Dávila, and Darkness By The Paris Review Amparo Dávila. Last Friday, when temperatures dropped into the bone-chilling teens, a crowd of about thirty people dipped out of the cold into Aeon Bookstore on East Broadway and Essex, where they sipped tequila with lime and listened to Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson read from their translation of Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest, the first collection of her short fiction to appear in English. The lead story, “Moses and Gaspar,” was first published in The Paris Review in 2016, and readers of the magazine will remember it for its strangeness: a man inherits what at first glance appear to be his dead brother’s two pets, but slowly they reveal that they are not pets at all but beings otherworldly and sinister. Harris and Gleeson read “Oscar,” which is about a family being slowly destroyed, both figuratively and literally, by whoever (or whatever) lives in their basement. The eleven additional stories in the collection are just as tense and creepy, bristling with uncanny subtlety. Dávila’s psychological realism is spare in style and, despite all the demonic creatures, grounded in deeply human paranoia and fear. —Lauren Kane Read More
February 1, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Steepletop, Sandra Bullock, and Celeste By The Paris Review Prabda Yoon. I’ve wanted to read the work of the Thai writer and filmmaker Prabda Yoon for a while now, and with The Sad Part Was—his 2002 collection, translated into English by Mui Poopoksakul and released by Tilted Axis Press in 2017—I’ve finally delved in. The stories are marvelous: witty and at times irreverent looks at life in contemporary Bangkok that are unafraid to ask the big questions concerning the human capacity for good and evil. They’re formally innovative, too. The first story, “Pen in Parentheses,” uses the parenthetical to an almost Woolf-like effect, while “Miss Space” ends with a note that its final sentence isn’t a conclusion but rather “a waiting period that doesn’t yet have a thought to succeed it.” By the end, I wanted more—and luckily, it looks like Tilted Axis has recently published another collection of Yoon’s stories. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
January 25, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Forensic Files, Fireflies, and Frigid Nights By The Paris Review Halle Butler. Photo: Jerzy Rose. Three pages into Halle Butler’s forthcoming novel The New Me, misanthropic Millie jokes about wishing she had a home intruder for company. Reading this, I immediately canceled dinner plans so I could finish the book in one sitting. Millie spends her days temping at a trendy design firm and imagining an improved version of herself waiting under layers of ill-fitting outfits and outward disdain. She oscillates between denigrating those around her and pitying their transparent desires with detached boredom. The New Me examines working womanhood, with all its privilege, ambition, objectification, and hierarchies, while confronting a nearly universal desire to build beautiful lives that society deems worth living. Every day holds a glittering future self, but reality diverges into nights of isolation, Forensic Files binges, and guilt-driven cleaning. To frame The New Me as the result of capitalism would unfairly simplify Butler’s depiction of contemporary workplace dynamics, but the implication stews as Millie considers her life’s purpose to “slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.” Regardless, in just under two hundred pages, Halle Butler made me laugh and cry enough times to feel completely reborn. —Nikki Shaner-Bradford Read More