October 6, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Caterpillars, Cells, and Charlottesville By The Paris Review From Fabiola Ferrero’s photo-essay on Venezuela, linked in Todd Pruzan’s Tinyletter. All week, Sadie looks forward to the stern diktats and severe pronunciamentos in Sam Sifton’s cooking newsletter (“I loathe accounts of slaves peeling shrimp”). Me, I like to take it a little easier with Todd Pruzan’s Superb + Solid, a TinyLetter devoted to Pruzan’s long-held interests in graphic design, politics, music, and whatever catches his eye and ear. In the current issue, Pruzan reprints a photo-essay on Venezuela; he also reprints a psyops flyer dropped over Europe during World War II; and he reviews the score of an ambient iPhone game. I don’t even know what that is, but I have been following Pruzan’s interests since he helped start McSweeney’s, and even before that, and they are contagious. —Lorin Stein The first deception in Henry Green’s Concluding is the simplicity of the cover. There is nothing so minimal to be found within the novel, which is lush enough to get lost in. Green’s novel, written in 1948 and republished by New Directions this month, has tempting fairy-tale elements. The fog lifts on a glorious summer day on an estate in rural England. The “Great Place” has been converted to a girls institute for “Service” (Green’s use of capitalization creates an ever-rising totem of bureaucratic satire). The institute is run by two power-hungry matrons whose sworn enemy is an old, retired scientist, Rock, who is a parishioner on the school’s grounds. The novel takes place over one long day, the day of the annual dance. In the summer haze, there is plenty of shadow and light. At the start of the novel, two girls are missing from the school and, though this is sinister, their fate fades in and out of focus in a way that makes the reader fill complicit. There are plenty of distractions. Rock has three white animals: a goose named Ted, a cat named Alice, and a pig named Daisy. All the girls at the institute seem to have names beginning with the letter m, and there are approximately three hundred of them. Whether you will find this all fun will depend upon how much you like a high-hedged English maze and whether you can wink back at Green’s descriptions of scores of young girls slipping into sexuality. Green is pretty straight-faced: who the true innocents are is a matter of perspective. The book is at its best when it’s ambiguous: “Life and pursuit was fierce, as these girls came back to consciousness from the truce of a summer after luncheon before the business of the dance. For already the shadows were on the creep toward the mansion.” —Julia Berick Read More
September 29, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Fat Ladies, Flowers, and Faraway Lands By The Paris Review From The Paper-Flower Tree by Jacqueline Ayer. The Paper-Flower Tree is a tale from Thailand for children, but I bought it for my adult self last month. A young girl without much to her name encounters a peddler. The man doesn’t have too much either, but he does have a tree of mesmerizing paper flowers. The man plucks her a “seed” to plant so that she can grow her own paper-flower tree. The girl tends to it, but it doesn’t grow. When the paper-flower man reappears with a group of actors, she confronts him. He reminds her that he never promised it would grow. But as this is a children’s book, and happy endings are required, the girl wakes up the next morning to find a fully flowering tree. To an adult, or the kind of cynical child who knew early on there was no Santa, the story is about the ways in which magic is a pact between adults, children, and a suspension of disbelief. The book is also a testament to the graceful talents of the author, Jacqueline Ayer. The child of Jamaican immigrants to the United States, Ayer produced illustrations for Bonwit Teller and Vogue before moving to Paris and then Thailand with her husband. Ayer’s story, like that of her tale, is both satisfying and complicated. Her books, after a brief flowering, fell out of print. Enchanted Lion, a uniquely wonderful children’s-book publisher, has brought them back. And so after some patient tending, Ayer’s work is again getting the attention it deserves, including a show at the House of Illustration in London. Maybe you think you’re too old to enjoy a children’s book. Suspend your disbelief. —Julia Berick Read More
September 22, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Pranks, Prints, and Penises By The Paris Review Belkis Ayón, La cena (The Supper), 1991. Last Saturday, my roommate took us to El Museo del Barrio to see “NKAME,” a haunting retrospective of the late Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón. It is a show of paradoxes, crackling with stillness and intricate in its simplicity. Ayón’s work merges elements of Christian narrative with that of the founding mythology of the Afro-Cuban fraternal society Abakuá to establish an independent and forceful iconography of her own. Her prints are populated by androgynous, ghostly figures, featureless save for the almond-shaped eyes that peer out from their canvases in a resolute, subtly confrontational stare. One piece reimagines Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, but many of the scenes are more deliberately abstract, and those are the ones that are the most viscerally evocative. The show includes one of her color prints, but the rest are the result of her midcareer decision to work only in grayscale. Ayón’s true virtuosity is in her command of this palette, and the nuance of patterns she weaves into her prints is captivating. These patterns imbue the stillness of her scenes with a buzzing energy just below the surface, underscoring the archetypal uncanniness of her hybrid mythology. It was my roommate’s third time seeing the exhibition, and it is certainly one to pull you back again and again. Spend time with each print; the experience of each is a slow, mysterious revelation of masterful detail. —Lauren Kane Read More
September 15, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Morphine, Martyrs, Microphones By The Paris Review McDermott & McGough, The Stations of Reading Gaol (IV. Oscar Wilde taking his constitutional.), 1917 (detail), MMXVII, oil and gold leaf on linen, 24″ x 18″. The other evening, after my colleagues had all gone, I slouched into one of our office reading chairs and dipped into Paul Yoon’s latest collection of short stories, The Mountain. I didn’t get far—I read “A Willow and the Moon,” which opens the book, and stopped—but only because Yoon’s prose is far too mesmerizing to rush through. The story, a beautiful amalgam of sorrow and longing and hope, follows a boy through to adulthood, from the First World War to the Second, from the sanatorium high in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, where his mother volunteers, to the basement of an English hospital, where bombs fall around him. As a boy, he looks on as his mother wrestles her addiction to morphine, as his father loses his interest in the family, as his best childhood friend falls ill, all the while making of himself what he can on his own. Though every page of the story heaves with lonesomeness and despair (for the lives that could have been had his parents never married or wars never begun), “A Willow and the Moon” nevertheless warmed my heart: the boy harbors neither resentment nor rage for the lot he’s been given, only sadness for all that’s happened and hope for all that’s still to come. —Caitlin Youngquist On Monday, I went to the opening of the Oscar Wilde Temple, an installation at the Church of the Village by artist duo McDermott & McGough. The temple’s Stations of the Cross depict phases of Wilde’s arrest, trial, imprisonment, and release; its altarpiece is a linden-wood sculpture of the author; and the walls are draped in fabrics and hues from the contemporaneous Aesthetic movement. It also includes a half dozen small portraits of LGBTQ “martyrs,” such as Brandon Teena, Sakia Gunn, and Martha P. Johnson. If the installation sounds minimal, its impact is otherwise: housed in a small room underneath the church, the temple feels consecrated, and also invigorating. Wilde celebrated his homosexuality openly, even in the face of persecution, and in him, McDermott & McGough have found a martyr and a saint for today’s LGBTQ community. The temple is a project the pair started thinking about in the eighties and have only now produced. But the timing is apt, McGough says; considering the political moment, he quotes Toni Morrison: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work.” Wilde’s example provides inspiration for resistance of all kinds: his subversion was public and powerful. —Nicole Rudick Read More
September 8, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cruelty, Obsession, Cheekiness By The Paris Review Larry Rivers, Vocabulary Lesson (Polish), oil on canvas, 22 1/4″ x 33″. Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery © Larry Rivers Foundation / Licensed by VAGA. What I know about the poets of my generation, I started to learn, in the late nineties, by reading the young critic Stephen Burt. Many of the poets he wrote about seemed forbidding, but he tried to make them inviting. His own poems were often disarmingly direct. One line, from his poem “Kudzu”—“like the body I hated then, and hate”—still rings out to me twenty years later from a blur of more elliptical work. Now Stephen also goes by Steph and Stephanie, and their new collection, Advice from the Lights, has been my subway reading for the past two weeks, especially “Sadder,” an elegy to the poet C. D. Wright, and Burt’s imitations of Callimachus, and the many evocations of childhood in a “wrong” body: O grapefruit (as color and flavor). O never quite rightly tied laces. O look, up there on the uneven climbing bars, too hot to touch where the sun touches, now that it’s spring, the shadow of a tarp, like a sail between sailors and thin swings that make no decision, like weather vanes. O think of the lost Chuck Taylors. The lost Mary Janes. —Lorin Stein Larry Rivers’s painting of Maxine Groffsky appears on the cover of our new issue, and I’m pleased as punch. I’ve long been an admirer of Rivers’s art and feel a kind of greedy affection for it: I never tire of seeing it. This week, “(Re)Appropriations,” a small survey of works—more than twenty paintings, collages, drawings, sculptures and relief paintings—opened at Tibor de Nagy in New York. The exhibition displays the changes in his work over five decades, but it’s hard not to get hung up looking at his life-size painting of a boldly nude (except for boots) Frank O’Hara, from 1954, and the collages from the early sixties, which are gorgeously tactile. I admire the way his representations of friends, cultural objects, and historical figures are only partially rendered on the canvas, as though they are already drifting out of River’s view just as he has turned to look at them. —Nicole Rudick Read More
September 1, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Degradation, Demolition, Disillusion By The Paris Review Brianna McCarthy, Garden of Lost Things. From the cover of Electric Arches. Eve Ewing is a sociologist of education, so it’s no wonder my favorite poem in her first collection, Electric Arches, observes the small, curious eddies of interaction in an elementary school. In “Requiem for Fifth Period and the Things That Went On Then,” she writes in the style of Greek epic poetry about invisible, individually insignificant moments—about the science teacher, for instance, watching fourth-grader Javonte Stevens telling the gym coach “that Miss Kaizer will be sending over three kids / who did not bring in their field trip money / and cannot go to the aquarium / is that okay”—that accumulate, by poem’s end, into an enthralling, powerful narrative. Elsewhere in the book, which also contains visual art and prose, Ewing writes trenchantly and tenderly of the demolition of a hospital (“the dynamite never says ‘but my uncle died / here … and I still smell the ammonia / and see the misshapen pound cake’ ”) and of her childhood neighborhood in Chicago (“once you got to about Albany and Fullerton you could see / every place my brother had ever been, if you knew where to look”). Her language is conversational, her verse lulling the reader into territory that feels immediately familiar, even when it isn’t—into a world of “Kool cigarette green,” “lime popsicles,” and “promised light.” —Nicole Rudick This week, I’ve been reading the first-ever English translation of Guido Morselli’s The Communist, a political coming-of-age novel about Walter Ferranini, a Communist party member and deputy in the Italian parliament. If that’s not the kind of escapism you’re looking for these days, trust me when I say that Ferranini is William Stoner reincarnated as Communist politician in 1950s Italy. Ferranini hates parliamentary proceedings; he finds them boring. He can’t seem to reconcile his political career, a reward for his years spent as a labor organizer, with his beliefs: he is having—has had, for most of his life—an existential crisis. The novel goes on like this, grumpy and disillusioned, sometimes funny and often sad. Morselli shot himself in the head in 1973, apparently out of despair that not a single publisher had accepted any of his manuscripts. Shortly after his death, all seven of his novels were published. —Jeffery Gleaves Read More