June 1, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Utopia, Lapsed Christians, and Artificial Intelligence By The Paris Review It may be the humidity this week, but I’ve felt as though in a fever dream while reading R. O. Kwon’s remarkable novel, The Incendiaries. Every page blooms with sensuous language—“paper-lantern strings pearled the lawn”; “plates leaped from the shelves, white fragments like giant teeth gnashing toward us”; “lawns floated wide, like magic carpets”—and the book’s mood is otherworldly, even if its setting, a wealthy college in the Northeast, isn’t. Chapters are distributed among three characters: Will Kendall, a scholarship student and lapsed Christian; Phoebe, a wealthy student guilt-ridden over her mother’s death; and John Leal, a would-be cult leader. Each plays out a different form of fanaticism, one no less dangerous than another, and Kwon weaves her characters’ lives together with one hand while unraveling them with the other. These are characters in quiet crisis, burning, above all, to know themselves, and Kwon leads them, confidently, to an enthralling end. —Nicole Rudick Read More
May 25, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sharp Women and Humble Turtles By The Paris Review Michelle Dean. What I like most about Michelle Dean’s book Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion is its cumulative effect. It’s not a biography of one or two or even three brilliant intellectuals, but ten: ten women writers (all are referred to by their last names alone, comme des garçons) who are variously funny, acerbic, insightful, opinionated, and complex. Together, they make a sisterhood, even though, Dean explains, most would likely balk at that notion. All were persistent in their rejection of ever-evolving accusations of aggression, vindictiveness, unseriousness, and facileness. In fact, the number and variety of stories in Dean’s book also illustrate how hard it is for women to find the “right” tone among male-dominated ideologies. (Dean’s primary subjects are white; a book about women of color would evoke other, unique difficulties.) Of Pauline Kael, Dean writes, “It’s plain she was hoping the brilliance of her work would be enough, as it would be for a man in her position.” Such a small desire, and still so fresh. —Nicole Rudick All happy gardens are alike, except that they’re not, not at all, a truth rendered in Penelope Lively’s thoroughly charming forthcoming nonfiction Life in the Garden. As with all successful nature writing, reading this book is like being taught a new way to see. What previously registered as a vague, general whole now registers as an abundance of individual parts, each worthy of their own attention. Lively’s nimble book is a captivating kind of memoir balanced on pillars of social history and art criticism, examining the role of the garden as a mainstay of modern culture (and as such, subject to the influence of waxing and waning trends and styles) and its significance in selections of literature and art (my personal favorite being the cameo of Mr. Noakes from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia). As a card-holding member of the New York Botanical Garden, I recognize that the color of my personal fascination with gardens is as an American, born and raised in a country where the garden is less an integral part of the cultural fiber than it is in Lively’s Britain. But Lively herself asserts that there is a magnetism to the garden that transcends nationality, hooking into themes of time, transience, and memory. —Lauren Kane Read More
May 18, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Garbage Gods, Bachelors, and Doinks By The Paris Review “Rammellzee: Racing for Thunder,” 2018. Installation view. Photo: Lance Brewer, courtesy of Red Bull Arts New York. © The Rammellzee Estate 2018. I first learned about the artist Rammellzee from Dave Tompkins’s book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach, and I saw his Letter Racer sculptures in an exhibition a few years ago (which Tompkins wrote about for the Daily). Rammellzee is easily one of the most unique and most overlooked artists of the past fifty years, but until seeing the survey “Racing for Thunder” this week at Red Bull Arts New York, I hadn’t realized the extent of his genius. It’s impossible to sum up the breadth and depth of his Ikonoklast Panzerism (in which language is armored for protection) and the prophetic Gothic Futurist project in a few sentences—overlapping modes of music, graffiti, collage, performance, sculpture, writing. He worked according to faith and intellect and intense creativity. Included in this show are his Garbage Gods, intricate costumes constructed from material found on the streets of New York. (His loft-studio, the Battle Station, was on Laight Street in Tribeca.) Each figure is composed of and encrusted with myriad small objects—belt buckles, calculators, radio antennae, jewelry, lots of random plastic stuff—but the individual items disappear into the form of the structure; the whole is the sum of its parts. In these costumes, the fluidity of Rammellzee’s vision is most apparent: in a bit of discarded nothingness, he saw not just a larger creation but a world, a system, and a future. —Nicole Rudick Read More
May 11, 2018 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Month By The Paris Review In place of our staff picks this week, we’ve asked contributors from our Spring issue to write about what they’re reading, looking at, and listening to this month. Still from Hereditary, 2018. For months now, I have been waiting anxiously for the movie Hereditary to come out. It’s supposed to be out on June 8, but I keep hoping that this is a publicity joke and that it will come out sooner. Like everyone else, I found out about the movie back in January, when they showed it at the Sundance Film Festival, and the audience lost their minds and reported back to the Internet. Everyone who has seen it has said that it is some sort of love child between Rosemary’s Baby (excuse the pun) and The Shining, maybe with some of The Exorcist thrown in. I don’t know how this could even be possible, but please count me in. As the weather grows warmer, the flowers bloom, and the date grows nearer and nearer to its release, I get even more lovesick and pathetic with longing to see it. I watch its trailers every day, sometimes many times, and have even watched the horror-fan YouTube videos people have made doing close readings of the trailers. I have theories about the movie I have written in several notebooks, and then crossed out most of them. I have visited the Etsy site the movie’s production company has made with beautifully odd dolls that one of the main characters, a supernatural child named Charlie, has made, a hundred times, hoping that they will list more for sale (the dolls sold out immediately). I wait and wait until June 8, begging most people I know to go see the movie with me, but knowing I will probably end up going alone, crying in the dark. Why am I so excited? It’s such an awful time right now. And I get so sick of things—books, movies, poems—that are hailed as great but have no source of catharsis. I want to burn and feel better. I really hope Hereditary lives up to the hype. I don’t know. I have faith. —Dorothea Lasky Lately, I can’t stop writing love poems. I write a short story—it’s a love poem. I start a new novel—long love poem. Sonnet, sestina, triolet: love poem, love poem, love poem. Maybe this is why “It’s Raining in Love” by Richard Brautigan keeps playing in my mind. I think I accidentally memorized it twenty years ago. It’s a kicky, self-conscious poem right from its opening stanza (“I don’t know what it is / but I distrust myself / when I start to like a girl / a lot”), and I adore the speaker for how cooly he winces at his crushing (“It makes me nervous,” he declares). All that’s A+, but then Brautigan goes on to discuss how crucial inconsequential questions become when you’re in love. Everything is code, sign, weather—even the weather, especially rain: If I say, “Do you think it’s going to rain?” and she says, “I don’t know,” I start thinking : Does she really like me? Rain, the speaker asides, shouldn’t be so weighty; it happies slugs, it’s a means of “programming flowers.” “Programming flowers”—! Did Brautigan proactively reclaim the word “programming”? I adore that. So affectedly casual elsewhere, when Brautigan starts “programming flowers,” he slides into rhapsody, reminding me how, enthralled by a lover, we all might become so programmed to bloom. —JoAnna Novak Read More
May 4, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Morgues, Mysteries, and Monster Meat By The Paris Review Kiki Smith, Spinners (detail), 2014. Stricken suddenly with a midspring virus on Wednesday, I had all my usual grouchiness about sick days delayed during the four blissful hours I found myself in bed with The Juniper Tree, by Barbara Comyns. I’m not the first Reviewer to discover my love for Comyns—Sadie Stein has written the foreword—but I nevertheless felt like I was charting new territory. When I picked it up, I wasn’t familiar with the Grimms’ tale of the same name, though the epigraph gives any reader a grisly hint. Never before have I read anything like Comyns’s fabulously readable, diary-like prose, which makes the most of simple meals and little pleasures. For example: the magnolia sapling that was a little more expensive than our heroine could manage; the sponge that maintained its shape when so many others sag in the middle; the Italian teacup, still intact. The book has an uncanny kinship to Helen Oyeyemi’s bewitching Boy, Snow, Bird. In fact, Oyeyemi’s blurb on the book’s jacket is a cunning little key to her own work as well as Comyns’s. I wish I had a whole week to make sense of the relationship of both novels to race and fairy tales. —Julia Berick Read More
April 27, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Smugglers, Lovers, and Dead Husbands By The Paris Review Some of the stories in Rita Bullwinkel’s debut collection, Belly Up, take place in a world that we could call real, and others take place in a world we could call supernatural, but in the hands of a craftswoman like Bullwinkel, both are somehow equal in their strangeness. While reading, I would arrive at the end of a story in which nothing truly paranormal had happened and be nonetheless filled with a sense of disquiet, a sense that I was looking at a photograph of my own world, the light and color settings tweaked ever so slightly. Reality, in Bullwinkel’s hands, is subverted with nuanced strokes of the surreal, in much the same way that David Lynch tilts our perception with his depictions of suburbia. The forms of the stories vary, and Bullwinkel is just as good in a longer traditional narrative as she is in a two-page piece of poetic prose. They’re joined by a macabre thread, peopled with dead husbands, teenage girls obsessed with the idea of cannibalism, and zombies. But even stronger is the sustained interest in the mystery of human connection; in “Harp,” a wife tests out a double life after witnessing a fatal car accident, and “Phylum” interrogates selfhood and intimacy. As much as Bullwinkel asks us to reconsider the strangeness of our external reality, she asks us to question our internal reality as well; this collection, which absolutely heralds an exciting new talent, takes place at a four-way crossroads between the mind and the body, the reality we can know and the reality adjacent to our own, which we can only glimpse through fiction. —Lauren Kane Read More