January 18, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Decadence, Doodles, and Deep Ends By The Paris Review Ana Luísa Amaral. Photo: Mattias Blomgren (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)), from Wikimedia Commons. If you think of poetry as a language at its purest and most distilled, and if you think of a language as, in a sense, a living thing, with a life story as unique and formative as any person’s, then the translation of poetry from one language (whichever) into another (whichever else) seems like the most impossible sort of transplantation: opportunity knocking twice, a miracle that repeats. A good way to see this lightning in a bottle is to pick up What’s in a Name, a collection of work by the Portuguese writer Ana Luísa Amaral. (Margaret Jull Costa’s side-by-side translation of the book will be published in March by New Directions.) Amaral has a remarkable gift for making the personal universal and the universal intimate, but for me the real joy of this book is seeing the conversation unfold between the Portuguese and the English, reflecting each other from left to right and back. Like creatures in a myth, nouns become verbs and verbs, nouns; syntax circles back and forth; subjects and voice change. They aren’t the same creature, the English and the Portuguese, but something like each other’s what-if selves. Having the opportunity to hold both before you at once is a truly remarkable gift. —Hasan Altaf Read More
January 11, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Broccoli Puzzles, Bot Poetry, and Banana Pudding By The Paris Review Emily Ruskovich. I spent Christmas with my boyfriend’s family in Hudson, New York. Among other goodies, my stocking was stuffed with books, and I squirreled Emily Ruskovich’s Idaho over to the wood-burning stove and ate through page after page as log after log went up in smoke and the iron became too hot to touch. The stove was etched with a MADE IN BELGIUM label, but it said America to me, like Idaho did: both anesthetizing in their beauty, dangerous and commonplace. Ever since reading Ruskovich’s essay about Watership Down, I wanted more. In that piece, she writes about those rabbits like she knows the insides of their den from long personal experience. And Idaho does bring us the dear interiors of the animal world, the musky quiet and the secrecy, but Ruskovich also brings human imperfection right to the surface of the novel without the tedium of other contemporary realism. I drove through Idaho, nine years ago now, with the same boyfriend on the way to California. It was beautiful and vast, and we quarreled there for the first time on our cross-country trip. As we rounded the switchback of a pitch-dark park-service road and saw the headlights of a lone pickup, I was terrified again of the land that could kill me quick and of the people who made their home there, who knew it and persisted. —Julia Berick Read More
January 4, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Frick, Fierce Femmes, and Fan Fiction By The Paris Review Still from the video game Doom, 2016. The striking thing about Doom (2016), a game in which the player enters a portal to hell and rips demons in half with an increasingly ridiculous arsenal, is the level of subtlety and care evident in its design. Doom is the dictionary definition of over-the-top, metal, and gruesome, but I’ve played few other games that even come close to matching its buttery smooth difficulty curve and firm sense of place. Resurrected by a sinister corporation that’s solved the energy crisis by harvesting the power of hell, the main character wanders corridors of abandoned space outposts, finding everywhere scenes of capitalism taken to its logical extreme: pentagrams scrawled on the walls, holograms cheerily pledging company dogmatism, ambiguous hunks of meat hanging from the ceiling. Level by level, the game slowly stirs in more chaos, ensuring that the player is always equipped to deal with enemy encounters—but only insofar as the player survives. Comfort is elusive, perpetually just out of reach. Never did I lose the rush of fear I’d feel when I saw a hell knight charging me from across the map, nor did I escape the jumpy, amphetamine-like rush of landing in a new arena filled with horrible creatures. Doom is loud, but necessarily so; it’s refreshing to find a work so thoroughly committed to raising the hair on one’s neck. —Brian Ransom Read More
December 14, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sports, Sontag, and Scheherazade By The Paris Review SLASH. Image courtesy of Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey. Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey’s play SLASH is so enjoyable it’s like having dessert for two hours with no intermission. One advertisement describes it as an “attempt to transcend the banality of identity and the terror of consciousness,” but I prefer the Instagram promo with an image of Camille Paglia in men’s clothing wielding a switchblade in front of a urinal. That’s much closer to the play’s prankish genius. Every dynamic (or adversarial) duo from popular culture whom you’ve probably been obsessed with at some point appears for a romping ten minutes or so, from Spock and Captain Kirk to Lennon and McCartney to Morrissey and Johnny Marr. The hints of homosexuality in these pairings are the source of a great deal of the comedy: it’s the most fun meditation on the collaboration eroticism since Wayne Koestenbaum’s Double Talk. The best bit is probably the one that’s getting the most hype, a reenactment of some shade from the early nineties thrown around by Paglia and Susan Sontag, but take my advice—wait for the real thing and don’t watch the clip of it online from last year. In person, Allan (Paglia) and Hennessey (Sontag) sound so much like their respective muses that if you close your eyes, you’ll have an opinion on The Volcano Lover again. SLASH runs through Thursday, January 31, at MX Gallery in Chinatown. —Ben Shields Read More
December 7, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Whisky Priests, World’s End, and Brilliant Friends By The Paris Review Still from Episode 1 (debut 11/18/18) of HBO’s My Brilliant Friend, “Le Bambole (The Dolls).” Photo: Eduardo Castaldo/HBO. I tend to be suspicious of film and television adaptations of my favorite books. This might stem from a kind of jealousy—the slow unraveling of a narrative or the exact right word used for the exact right idea are part of the pleasures of literature, but sometimes, as a writer, I wish I could borrow from film the immediacy of a jump cut or image. So it was with some apprehension that I began to watch My Brilliant Friend, HBO’s new adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Would this first season—eight episodes in total, dedicated entirely to portraying the first novel in the series—water down the source material, with its unflinching portrayal of the violence and poverty of postwar Naples and the simultaneous terror and joy of girlhood and female friendship? After devouring the first few episodes this past weekend, I can assure you that, so far, it does not. Rather, this is the rare adaptation that both hews closely to its source material and yet manages to escape any stiltedness. And while Ferrante’s novels remain first in my heart, there are moments in the television series—the visual shock of a red menstrual stain amid the otherwise muted color palette—that might work even better on film. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
November 30, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Good Guys, Goose Fat, and Ghosts of Mars By The Paris Review Kristen Roupenian. Photo: Elisa Roupenian Toha. There was a time when I found online dating apps addictive. It was a guiltless game: arbitrarily judging prospects by a series of photos, a far-fetched emoji or two, and a pickup line purloined from some seedy Internet forum. Does he like cilantro? (He should not.) Does he travel? (He should.) It’s no secret that the methods of modern romance have long been under fire. In retrospect, it’s equally unsurprising just how many people Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”—the New Yorker story that inundated the Internet last December—resonated with. In that story, Roupenian shows she has a disconcertingly accurate eye for the ways we misjudge and miscommunicate our desires in today’s perfunctory dating culture, often to catastrophic ends. Her forthcoming short-story collection, You Know You Want This, is destined to be even more devastating. Roupenian sets the scene in “The Good Guy,” one of her eleven new stories in the collection: “It was almost existentially unsettling, that two people in such close physical proximity could be experiencing the same moment so differently.” Her characters verge on being uncomfortably relatable—trying to break up with someone in an Olive Garden, obsessing over whether bug bites are actually bug bites—before they start to spiral out of control in pursuit of humanity’s nastiest and most self-destructive pleasures. Each story is a refrain of the private indignities that keep you lying awake at night, the things that leave you wondering, Am I a good person, despite wanting what I want? With a wry voice and an all-knowing smirk, Roupenian lances through the sexual anxiety that permeates much of contemporary literature and society. Look at who you are, she dares us. “Look at what you’ve done.” —Madeline Day Read More