April 20, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Kendrick, Cardi Covers, and Cautionary Tales By The Paris Review Photo: Elise Swain, The Intercept. I thought radio plays went the way of rabbit-ear antennae, but this week I listened to an audio drama of Evening at the Talk House, adapted from Wallace Shawn’s 2015 stage play. The Intercept is presenting it as part of their podcast, in three thirty-some-minute episodes. The play opens as a group of actors and writers gather on the tenth anniversary of a play on which most worked; the setting is the Talk House, a once popular, now failing watering hole for the theater set. In the intervening decade, individual fortunes have shifted, in some cases radically. But as the conversation unfolds, we come to understand that the time in which the play is set is not quite our own: there is talk of everyday citizens, these players included, “targeting” foreign individuals who “would like to harm us”—that is, a government-sponsored program of murdering strangers because there is the vague possibility they don’t like us. Much more is revealed about this fascist state of affairs, but I don’t want to spoil it. In his review of the 2017 Broadway staging, Ben Brantley lamented that as a group portrait and in its clubby atmosphere, the play allowed the audience some distance from the “grim, all-implicating ironies.” But listening to the characters expose massive moral and ethical failings and then seek to relieve their guilt by implicating each other collapsed any distance between the players and me; I was overhearing a disturbing conversation to which I could offer no rejoinder. And my silence felt like complicity. —Nicole Rudick Read More
April 13, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Birds, Borders, and Broadway By The Paris Review Photo: Carl Fuldner and Shane DuBay. In 2009, Edwin Rist stole hundreds of bird skins from England’s Natural History Museum at Tring, which holds one of the largest ornithological collections in the world. Among the collection were a number of specimens collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist whose work is often credited with goading Charles Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species. Why did Rist steal them? To tie the world’s most exotic and expensive fishing flies. So begins Kirk Wallace Johnson’s charming The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, a truly bizarre tale that traces the history of exotic-bird collecting and the feather trade through scientific harvesting, millinery fads, the Victorian era’s fly-fishing boom, up to Rist’s caper and Johnson’s own attempts at retrieving the stolen feathers with the help of some international fly-tying elites. There’s a lot to Johnson’s book, and he ties it together well, reeling you into disparate historical subjects in a thrilling catch-and-release style. The book is The Orchid Thief for the fly-fishing and birding set: worth its weight in exotic bird feathers, which you’ll learn are very expensive. —Jeffery Gleaves Read More
April 6, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bardi, Baseball, and LSD By The Paris Review Though David Hockney’s major retrospectives at the Tate, the Pompidou, and the Met last year cemented his status as one of the greatest artists of our time, the breathtaking innovation on display at his new exhibit, “Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing]” is evidence that at the spry age of eighty, the man is only just getting started. The show includes eighteen new paintings on hexagonal canvases as well as two new works of computer-manipulated photography that each span a full gallery wall. As Hockney describes it, he once drove through a long tunnel under the Alps. There were no other cars, and the constancy of the road narrowing into the pinprick of light ahead, the tyranny of the one-point perspective, created an unbearable atmosphere of tension. Then the car emerged, and there were the mountains, there was the sky, there was the world, wild and unbound and everywhere around them. One painting in the show describes this with stark simplicity: the narrowing road below, the vista of mountains above. The rest capture the dizzying feeling of awe by playing with “reverse perspective,” Hockney’s technique in which the space bends, the edges fold in, and the viewer is granted the gift of peering around impossible corners and hovering over floors that reach upward. The notches on either side of each canvas are the inverse of the nose that generally interrupts our vision, a breaking open of the way we see. The show will be on view at the Pace Gallery until May 12. The colors, the sumptuous aquamarines of a Los Angeles swimming pool, the burnt sienna and iridescent yellow of the Grand Canyon, provide the perfect escape from this unrelenting New York winter. —Nadja Spiegelman Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images North America Dorothea Lasky’s latest collection, Milk, often feels like an optical illusion: simplicity in black-and-white, arranged so that it reveals something disorienting and complex in a way you can’t quite articulate. Each line is vibrant in itself, popping short and quick in sharply skipping staccato, individually crafted and yet still somehow seamlessly woven into the full piece. Lasky demonstrates her virtuosity time and again; like any artist truly confident in their medium, she doesn’t need much material to create a deeply stirring piece. If you’re still not sold on Lasky’s minimalist brilliance, you can take a test drive with the Review’s Spring issue, which features “A Hospital Room,” a poem from the collection. —Lauren Kane Read More
March 23, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Strip Clubs, Lightning Rods, and Extramarital Affairs By The Paris Review On Wednesday, Anne Boyer received a 2018 Whiting Award for poetry and nonfiction. On the same day, shut in by the storm, with only my apartment’s clanging radiators for company, I dove into A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, Boyer’s forthcoming book of essays from Ugly Duckling Presse. From the first paragraph of the first essay, simply titled “No,” I was thoroughly captivated by Boyer’s language. Her prose is lyric and smooth. There is nothing labored about her discourse, which is conversational but incisive and often accompanied by a satisfying dose of arch humor. Two examples of Boyer’s particular genius are “Click-Bait Thanatos” and “The Harm.” The former is speculative and considers the eerie technological landscape left behind in a world no longer populated by humans; the latter is a meditation on trauma and how it occupies a person’s consciousness and daily life. Boyer’s essays are best experienced alongside one another; I suggest doing so in the thick of a snowstorm, but I suspect their impact would be equally forceful in any weather. —Lauren Kane This past Tuesday, I sat in my lottery-won onstage seats at the Public Theater and tried not to trip the actors. I was watching the first preview of a new musical called Miss You Like Hell. It’s up until May 6, and if you like musicals (as everyone should), you’ll want to catch it in this intimate setting before it inevitably moves on to a huge Broadway stage. With book and lyrics by the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes—whose previous works include In the Heights and Water by the Spoonful—Miss You Like Hell is at once heart-wrenching and joyous in the way only musicals can be. Beatriz, a woman on the verge of deportation, ropes her severely depressed sixteen-year-old daughter, Olivia, into a coast-to-coast road trip. The ensuing events address the subjects of policing, mental health, gay rights, the conservation movement, et cetera. But the play never becomes didactic and never loses its nuance—its beauty and power come from its graceful exploration of human relationships. It feels special to see a show like this at the beginning of its run, when the cast and crew are still finding their places. Miss You Like Hell brightened my snowy Tuesday, made me laugh, made me cry, made me call both my mom and my grandmom, and made me smile in my sleep. —Eleanor Pritchett Read More
March 16, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cucumbers, Chiropractors, and Kleptocrats By The Paris Review Kathleen Collins Ever since Nicole first handed me “Scapegoat Child,” the gorgeous yet harrowing piece of short fiction by the late Kathleen Collins in our Spring issue, I’ve found myself returning, time and time again, to the writer’s first posthumous collection of stories, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? The book’s cover, which features a collage by Lorna Simpson of a young woman with a wash of purple ink for hair, sets the tone, and the stories that follow are just as arresting. In them, we hear from people of all shades, each of whom experience torment and love in equal measure. Collins writes of an uncle who can’t keep himself from crying (“I began to weep for him, weep tears of pride and joy that he should have so soaked his life in sorrow and gone back to some ancient ritual beyond the blunt humiliation of his skin”); of a girl who cuts her hair (making her look, in her father’s words, “just like any other colored girl”) and later falls for her professor; of interracial love (“I want to be a Negro for you,” says a white boy to his girlfriend). Put simply, Collins is a marvel, her prose ethereal and haunting and sharp. As Elizabeth Alexander writes in the book’s introduction, “She flinches from nothing.” —Caitlin Youngquist Read More
March 9, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Berger, Brock-Broido, and Beauman By The Paris Review John Berger When asked to describe my literary interests, I used to say that John Berger was the first white man I loved, and also the last. Now he’s dead, but his final book is forthcoming. In May, Notting Hill Editions will publish Smoke, Berger’s illustrated elegy to cigarettes. If “collaborative consumption”— a lifestyle whose transactions include co-working, co-living, and ride sharing—is a poorly disguised marketing campaign designed to sell old habits of communal living to millennials with new income, Smoke imagines a reciprocity that’s for real. In fable-like prose, Berger describes a community of men, women, and children who pass around cigarettes, lights, and worldviews. When their habits are declared deadly, and they themselves are declared murderers, they retreat into the shadows. Though their love is illicit, they meander toward old haunts, where they are “happy,” in Berger’s words, “to encounter one another as outlaws.” —Maya Binyam On the site of a newly discovered temple deep in the jungle of Honduras, two groups of Americans enter a standoff that lasts nearly two decades. The first group, arriving from Hollywood to shoot a film, finds the second, sent by a Rockefeller-like tycoon character to dismantle the temple and bring it stateside piece by piece, camped out by the half-deconstructed ruin. Both groups have hired the same locals to help them. The characters in Ned Beauman’s Madness Is Better Than Defeat are, to the reader’s delight, haplessly out of place, and, it would seem, doomed. Take Jervis Welt, a film-theory teacher from Southern California who’s been sent on this mission by an enigmatic, Howard Hughes–like, Hollywood mogul (he has never directed a movie before). Before long, both groups become entangled with black-hat CIA operatives out to use them for their own geopolitical purposes and an ex–Nazi officer on the run. If some of this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Beauman’s layered treatment of familiar archetypes surges at you like a Pynchonesque detective novel with the slow-building surreality of Benjamin Willard in Apocalypse Now. Madness is a thrilling, dark, comedic romp through the jungle. —Jeffery Gleaves Read More