July 13, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sexy Pulp, Blockheaded Heroines, and Terrifying Trees By The Paris Review Virginie Despentes’s ‘90s feminist punk pulp fiction makes for the best summer reading—all of her sparkling rage goes incandescent in the sunshine with a glass of something effervescent. Luckily, Feminist Press will be publishing Pretty Things (translated by Emma Ramadan) on August 14th. First published in France in 1998, it’s the story two identical twins: Claudine, the hyper-sexualized man-eating “pretty one,” and Pauline, the bitter reclusive “smart one,” who dresses in baggy sweaters and has never before shaved her legs. Beyond a body, the only thing the sisters seem to share is an explosive anger at men and a complete disdain for each other. When Pauline decides to impersonate Claudine, she pulls on the trappings of femininity like a heavy high camp drag routine, taking shaky steps through Paris’s 18th arrondissement in Claudine’s high heels. She never thought it was possible to go out like that without someone shouting, “Where’s the costume party?” Her appearance, legs on display, silhouette transformed. And no one realizes that she’s not at all like that. For the first time she understands: No girl is like that. It’s pulp in every sense: propulsively readable, violent, sexy, with all the satisfaction of an inevitable ending. And yet it’s also a feminist parable, blunt and unrelenting in its wrath, and it feels as fresh now as it would have ten years ago. Despentes—who is also a cultural critic and filmmaker—was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International for Vernon Subutex, which will be coming out from FSG this fall. If you haven’t read her yet, it’s time to start at the beginning. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
July 6, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bandits, Revenge, and Decapitated Animals By The Paris Review Mona Chalabi is the data editor for the Guardian’s U.S. branch. Her beautiful Instagram account is a mixture of data, visual art, and, taken together, a kind of self-portrait in infographics, illustrating Chalabi’s preoccupations, curiosity, neuroses, politics, and sense of humor. You’ll find a chart on the “Probability of a White Christmas” (at least one inch of snow) from Michigan to South Carolina, and another of an outstretched leg, illustrating the downward slope in pantyhose sales in Japan. The caffeine content of various beverages is represented by stretched-open bloodshot eyeballs. Another chart, of penises, represents the “Average Time to Ejaculate During Vaginal Penetration”: “Median = 5.4 minutes”—though her caption notes, “This data comes from 500 heterosexual men in monogamous relationships for at least 6 months. So, not exactly representative. And it was collected by asking them to use a stopwatch which you’d think would kill the mood at least a bit. But still, interesting, no?” Yes. Also interesting: the spike in people googling “Will I Die Alone” around Valentine’s Day; the number of decapitated animals found in New York parks (with chickens and pigeons in the lead, ahead of goats and cats); the degree to which Trump campaign contributors profit from his policy of detaining immigrants; and the current disparity in earnings between black and white Americans. Some aren’t charts at all, just facts and drawings, like the one of two hands being pulled apart—one big, one small—posted alongside the fact that 1,995 children were separated from 1,940 adults at the United States–Mexico border between April 19 and May 31 of this year. Some artists are perfectly suited to the visual medium of Instagram. Others provide you with information that may broaden your perspective or at least redeem your procrastination. If these two types are in a Venn diagram, with varying amounts of overlap, then Mona Chalabi is a total eclipse. —Brent Katz Read More
June 29, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Trick Mirrors, Summer Beers, and Bedazzled Pianos By The Paris Review Photo: M. Sharkey All of the essays in Alexander Chee’s marvelous collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel are striking, but I found the shortest essay, simply titled “1989,” the most arresting. In four pages, he describes his participation in an AIDS protest in San Francisco—his first protest. As the procession moves into an intersection, the protesters block traffic; they are immediately surrounded by riot police, who begin to brutally drive them off. Chee climbs atop a newspaper box, with a view to the scene, and describes the rise and fall of batons with dispassionate shock, eventually climbing down from his perch to rescue a beaten friend. “This is the country I live in,” he realizes in closing. And I thought instantly of Pierre Bezukhov, in War and Peace, atop a knoll, observing the horrors of the Battle of Borodino. In shock and fear, he plunges down the slope and thinks, “Now they will be horrified at what they have done!” They aren’t, of course, and this seems to be the same conclusion Chee comes to: the feeling of incredulousness that violence and death are served up so openly—in a field, in a street—before so many watching eyes. Chee’s essay takes place during an AIDS protest but with other details it could easily be about the Holocaust, the Syrian war, or the United States, ca. 2018. —Nicole Rudick Read More
June 22, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Creek Boyz, Mechanical Chickens, and Trash Heaps By The Paris Review Jorja Smith’s debut full-length, Lost and Found, has taken up residence in my mind since its release last week. Between tracks, the twenty-one-year-old R & B singer wrestles with her self-worth (on “Tomorrow”: “The hardest thing I have learned is I can’t help myself / If I can’t trust my worth / Then I can’t trust my words”) and with the gaze of the UK police state (on “Blue Lights”: “I wanna turn those blue lights into strobe lights / Not blue flashing lights, maybe fairy lights”). Being young in the summer is difficult, but it’s easier when you have someone else living through it alongside you. Last year, there was SZA’s gentle Ctrl; this year, Jorja Smith takes on her demons with a jazzier vibe, more melancholy than anxious, and very, very matter-of-fact—almost like a diary entry. —Eleanor Pritchett On October 25, 1977, Roland Barthes lost his mother, Henriette Barthes. The next day, he began a “mourning diary,” writing each entry on a slip made from typewriter paper cut into quarters. He maintained the diary until September 15, 1979—a little under two years. Five months after this final entry, Barthes was hit by a laundry truck while crossing the road. He deteriorated in the hospital for a month before succumbing to his injuries. In the foreword to the English translation, we learn that Mourning Diary is “not a book completed by its author, but a hypothesis of a book desired by him.” This is borne out in the tangled reading of observations that range from the philosophically speculative to the quotidian. His suffering repeats, swells, and subsides, seemingly without design or reason: “What I find utterly terrifying is mourning’s discontinuous character.” At times, our participation in that mourning feels like an invasion—these notes were not intended for publication in their current form—and if anyone were to tell me they read this book for purely high-minded reasons, I would distrust them. But past the rubbernecking is something more significant, for here is grief at work on a brilliant mind. The result is disordered, clumsy, and at times prosaic. It also has the virtue of being true. —Robin Jones Read More
June 15, 2018 This Week’s Reading The Paris Review Recommends Anti-Beach Reads By The Paris Review This summer, we’re going long and hard. In anticipation of the solstice, the staff of The Paris Review has pulled together a list of anti-beach reads: doorstopper books, dense books, books that will tear a hole in your flimsy beach tote, flip over your canoe, and ground your propeller plane. You can’t hold them up to block the sun—you can barely hold them up at all. These are books that will empty the pool if they fall in. Books to swat a mosquito with and accidentally break a limb. Books worth the forty-euro heavy-baggage surcharge. Below is the final list, presented in order of page count, from fairly slim to downright menacing. Happy reading! Read More
June 8, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mermaids, Wrestlers, and Gawkers By The Paris Review I’ve had Evie Shockley’s latest book, semiautomatic, on my to-be-read pile since last fall and was finally spurred by her Pulitzer nomination to pull it out of the stack. I don’t know that I’ve encountered a poet for whom language is so mutable, a poet so adept at dismantling and reconfiguring it before the reader’s eyes. In the opening poem, she writes, “do i have the rite to write the body ? the right body to remain silent ? habeas corpus, to have the remains dans mes mains, my main man, handy man, unhand me, uncuff me, so i can speak in my sign(nifying) language :: signs, wonders, miracles, temptations.” Each word is a vessel to be drained of meaning and then quickly refilled with fresh essence—emphatically, rhythmically, and sometimes onomatopoeically: “war can’t amass a brass tack. war’s / all bad acts and lack, scandal // and graft. watch flags clash and tanks // attack camps. arms crack—rat-a- / tat-tat!—and ban calm.” Shockley’s punctuation acts like an electric current, shaping the flow of her lines: she uses colons, which suggest correlation; double colons, which imply analogous relationships; and tildes or swung dashes, perhaps indicating omissions (or, when stacked in pairs, making approximations). From “cogito ergo loquor”: “Unmentionables once were underwear : where / were the worst brutalities then?: buried under / under in the most vulnerable organs and held / down by that busy muscle the tongue :: in / silence unspeakable becomes unthinkable : a word / like numberless that runs can’t into won’t … thinkable : unthinkable.” Form is dictated by what the poem has to say and how Shockley chooses to say it. The poem “what’s not to liken,” for instance, is written as a multiple-choice questionnaire about the pool-party incident in McKinney, Texas, in June 2015, each question offering twinned options. Each choice is at once true and inaccurate, a remarkably sly blend of metaphor, fact, and anger. Was the girl shackled like “(a) a criminal” or “(b) a runaway slave”? In this case, was there a difference? —Nicole Rudick Read More