November 17, 2017 This Week’s Reading Contributor Picks: Doomed Bohemians and Death Masks By The Paris Review In place of our staff picks this week, we’ve asked six contributors from our Fall issue to write about what they’re reading, watching, listening to, and enjoying. Still from Personal Shopper. In his films, Olivier Assayas often makes use of reflective surfaces: glass walls, windows, mirrors, screens, Hollywood stars. His distinctive recipe seems to be mixing them with dark, strange themes that enter his scripts obliquely. So if you start watching Personal Shopper expecting a satire on personal shoppers, you will be confused and disappointed. Better to expect a peculiar ghost story. Even better, prepare yourself by watching some of his back catalogue: Irma Vep, Late August Early September, The Clouds of Sils Maria. I couldn’t decide if the final scene was a botched job or a masterpiece, but the choice of Anna Hausswolff’s haunting “Losing Track of Time” on the soundtrack was certainly inspired. Also: one of the best portrayals of ghosts in cinema I have seen in a while. —Isabella Hammad Read More
November 10, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cats, Combat, Conversationalists By The Paris Review Notebook pages from Éric Chevillard’s autofiction. The other night, sprawled on the floor of my apartment, I opened the newest issue of Music & Literature and found myself quickly smitten with one of its featured artists: the French writer Éric Chevillard. This is neither the first nor the second occasion M&L has introduced me to work that has left me in awe of its author—it’s happened before, with the fiction writer Ann Quin and the poet Alejandra Pizarnik. But this time felt different. Why? To start, Chevillard has accomplished what few writers, in my readings of them, have: he got me to laugh … aloud. The pages devoted to him flaunt his impeccable range—there’s Chevillard the critic, the novelist—but my favorite bits are those doused in humor, the short snippets of prose that take as their subjects such peculiar things as Hegel’s cap (“it’s a must-see … a thing to behold”) and Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (where its audience “ends up definitively and permanently associating the instruments with the characters they arbitrarily play in the story”). Then of course there’s Chevillard’s piece “Autofiction,” in which he subs the word ejaculating in for writing: “To be honest, what I ejaculated back then was worthless. Inconsistent. Peanuts. Flan. Eggnog.” Chevillard’s prose brims with outrageous wit, sophistication, and fun, the likes of which I’ve never read before. —Caitlin Youngquist Julia pressed the most recent issue (for American readers) of the London Review of Books into my hands, demanding I read a short piece titled “Cat-Brushing,” by Jane Campbell. Julia and I talk about cats regularly, and why wouldn’t I read an article about cat brushing. But feline grooming is only a metaphor and jumping-off point: the story (I later discovered it was fiction) is a reverie by an older woman of her past lovers, of deeply pleasurable sex, of growing old and losing all of it. She calls aging “a process of dispossession, of rights, of respect, of desire, of all those things you once so casually owned and enjoyed … Once, when I arched my back and let out little miaows of pleasure my lovers thrilled with the knowledge of their potency. Now, I offer a few inches of knitting to my son. It is a terrible loss.” I don’t know that I’ve ever read a story in which an older woman’s loss of sexuality and independence was written so preeningly and with such elegant mourning. “I was loved and feared in return,” she recalls of her catlike fierceness. “It was a good place to be.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
November 3, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Snoopy, Sappho, and Shikaze By The Paris Review Still from 120 BPM. In need of a pick me up this week, I went to see a French movie about AIDS. 120 BPM is paced like an electrocardiogram, a steady bum-bum of a heart beat, without any sappy manufactured climax or resolution. Instead, you are plunged into the relentless every day lives of the members of ACT UP, an AIDS-advocacy group in Paris in the 1990s, as they throw blood around the offices of pharmaceutical companies, interrupt high school classes to distribute condoms, and stage die-ins. Rather than romanticize their youth, beauty, and “coolness,” as a film about ACT UP easily could, it lingers on the group’s disorderly planning meetings, their internal feuds and diverging ideologies, their moments of misplaced rage at each other, and the indignities of their slow deaths. It is not a documentary, but it feels so real, more real than a documentary ever could—heartbreakingly realistic without ever straining for an overly gritty “realism.” The director, Robin Campillo, and his co-screenwriter, Philippe Mangeot, drew on their own experiences as members of ACT UP, and the film won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival this year. I can’t say that it made me feel better, exactly, but it did leave me replenished in that way that an encounter with truly good art can. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
October 27, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Millepied, Monk, and McPhee By The Paris Review I knew, when I was a little girl, that I wanted to walk up the steps of Lincoln Center in the gathering dusk. Last night, my man and I put on our finery and stepped into the travertine at Lincoln Center to see the American Ballet Theatre. The evening’s first dance, “Souvenir d’un lieu cher,” by Alexei Ratmansky, felt like a warm-up for Benjamin Millepied’s world premiere of “I Feel the Earth Move” (others disagree). The lights came up after “Souvenir” and we watched a tech cross the floor without cover of a curtain to direct a slow undressing of the stage. Up came the wings and the fly and then, with no music, no light change, no cue discernible to the audience, a battalion of dancers crossed the stage. What followed was some of the most beautiful and fully realized dancing I’ve ever seen. An accomplished dancer, choreographer, and former director of the Paris Opera Ballet, Millepied uses everything he knows and everything the dancers do, too. The piece nodded to traditional corps de ballet movement and to synchronized swimming, to sociology and to the high drama of the theater. The principal, Misty Copeland, covered the stage with hovering energy; Herman Cornejo, also a principal, became my second favorite athlete. The music was Philip Glass. At intermission, members of the American Ballet Theatre’s Studio Company and of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School took over the Promenade for Millepied’s “Counterpoint for Philip Johnson,” the “first work to be performed by ABT outside the proscenium setting of the Koch Theater.” There was contagious delight and many iPhones held outstretched. When we settled back into our seats to watch Millepied’s “Daphnis and Chloe,” I was impressed again by his fluency. When nearly everything had been said, Stella Abrera danced volumes about sexual consent. The curtain came down eventually, of course, but with the feeling that Millepied was back there, still dismantling, in the wings. —Julia Berick Read More
October 20, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Foxes, Unicorns, and Ghostworms By The Paris Review Yrsa Daley-Ward’s new collection, bone, opens with a small explosion, a two-line poem called “Intro”: “I am the tall dark stranger / those warnings prepared you for.” The poems that follow pick up the dual meaning here—of threat and of erotic desire. Often, the two are intertwined, as when she writes of an affair, “Remember on the right night and / under the right light / any idea can seem like a good one.” Daley-Ward, who was raised by her religious grandparents in a small town in Northern England, self-published bone in 2014; it sold more than twenty thousand copies, a staggering figure for a self-published book, let alone of poetry. Penguin reissued an expanded edition, with forty additional pages, last month. The excellent long autobiographical “It Is What It Is” describes her brother’s heated reaction to their father’s funeral, and the breathlessness as she narrates their swift escape along the highway, thinking of their separation as children, propels the poem to its painful close. “Today is the first day of the rest of it,” she writes in the last poem, resigned but also dogged, “Of course there will be other first / days / but none exactly like this.” —Nicole Rudick Assigned reading can be either tedious or life changing. Pastoralia, the second story collection from the 2017 Man Booker Prize winner, George Saunders, falls into the latter category for me. A little more than four years ago, I was a junior in college, a shy journalism student who didn’t especially identify with any of the newshounds surrounding me. I enrolled in a fiction workshop, and when that went well, I enrolled in another. The critiques, the meat of the class, were valuable, but what I long for now are those undergrad creative-writing syllabi, packed as they were with revelations: the full-moon beauty and madness of Kelly Link; the plinky, playful fables of Italo Calvino; the lyrical precision and tightly knotted emotions of Alice Munro. Those first encounters with the writers on those lists shaped the way I think about fiction. The author who struck me most, though, was Saunders, in whose work I found everything I’d ever wanted from writing but never known how to express. His stories full of arresting images and incredible heart, tales that were bitingly funny and dark without descending into cynicism. I fell under the spell of short fiction and began writing my own. And now I’m here—probably as the result of a number of factors, but I can’t discount the impact of stumbling across Saunders at the right time. I hope he wins every prize there is. —Brian Ransom Read More
October 13, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Witch-Hop, Typingpool, and Salkis By The Paris Review Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country is a deceptively narrow book. It seems to be the memoir of a young, untested journalist who finds herself in Turkey, almost by chance, and begins to learn about the U.S. involvement in the Middle East. In reality, it is a book about what it means to be white and American, in the world and at home. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I picked it up. Among its many virtues, it is the first book I’ve read that gives an honest account of what, for my generation, passed for history class at even a “good” high school. “I was in high school for the Rwandan genocide and the war in Bosnia, but I was conscious of none of it at the time. During my senior year, I learned twentieth-century American history through the lyrics of Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ … Many years later I unearthed a research project I made about the song.” If that doesn’t make you wince, then you may not recognize yourself in Notes on a Foreign Country. Not everyone will. If you do recognize yourself, then you may also recognize the connections Hansen draws between American exceptionalism abroad, white supremacy at home, and a national self-image based on virtue—a self-image that could survive in no other free country on earth, and that may finally be falling apart in ours. —Lorin Stein Maybe it was the cover image of Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing that prompted me to pick it up: the bare tree, icy lake, and snowcapped mountains might have been a subconscious relief for my all-too-conscious discomfort at this past week’s mid-October mugginess. Mieko Kawakami’s story, “The Flower Garden,” is aesthetically sparse and cool as well, yet far from simple. It is a brief story that pries with gentle force at the tight societal seam binding female identity and material possessions, and it begins in medias res: a woman is showing her house to a potential buyer, a wealthy, attractive woman much her junior. The narrator, a housewife, spent her entire married life decorating the house and curating its interior design. She feels for it a deep and maternal bond. Yet her husband’s business went bust, leaving them bankrupt, and she is forced to sell. Shortly after leaving, she begins stalking the house, sitting on the bench outside and going to tend the garden (her husband’s favorite thing about the house and maybe about her) after the new inhabitant has left for the day. In a few pages, Kawakami’s austere prose sketches the narrator’s rapidly growing infatuation with both the home and its new owner. Kawakami’s psychological realism is on the expert level of Henry James, suggesting ethereal and nuanced feelings through their material representations. However, unlike James, her mastery comes in the form of a skillful economy of language. The story blossoms hypnotically into a dark and strange ending. —Lauren Kane Read More