September 20, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: YA, Sci-Fi, Street Art, and Zweig By The Paris Review Galvanized by the interview with Ursula Le Guin in our current issue, and recalling my love for her first three Earthsea books, I’ve embarked upon the second set in the series, which she began nearly two decades after the original trio. The long stories in Tales from Earthsea have been keeping me company late at night, the perfect companion for my recent bouts of insomnia. Though they function as back stories for characters and events in the earlier books, they’re also highly enjoyable as standalone narratives. What the best fantasy does—and what Le Guin does in spades—is give the impression that even when the book stops, the world inside its pages continues to exist beyond the bounds of the author’s invention. Upon her return to writing about Earthsea, Le Guin herself found that to be true: “What I thought was going to happen isn’t what’s happening, people aren’t who—or what—I thought they were, and I lose my way on islands thought I knew by heart.” —Nicole Rudick After Sadie wrote about The Disaster Artist last week, I couldn’t help but pick up the book myself. I had seen The Room years ago—and the film’s as inexplicable as you’ve heard—but I was captivated by the unlikely bromance between a struggling actor and an enigmatic filmmaker at the core of the story. Yes, there are plenty of hilarious making-of stories, but it’s a sincere portrait of the rewards and peril of having an artistic vision you’re 100 percent committed to expressing. For the uninitiated: check out the book trailer here. —Justin Alvarez Blek le Rat’s solo exhibition “Ignorance Is Bliss” lured me to the Jonathan LeVine Gallery this week, and his stenciled canvases have since been burned into my retinas. In these large, often monochromatic images, strewn with thick swashes of black, the viewer sees such forms as the oracle Sibyl from Greek antiquity, via appropriation of Michelangelo’s Libyan Sibyl. Grace permeates the canvas; Blek subverts this with a skull tattoo on Sibyl’s arm. In a six-foot canvas we see several children playing tug-of-war with one of his iconic rats. On a nearby pedestal is Blek’s first work in sculpture, a small bronze statue of David holding a Kalashnikov while a rat gazes up from below. Seeing the culmination of thirty years of the Parisian-born street artist’s work, we experience both its sociopolitical resolve and the familiarity of his tightly controlled spray-paint forms; he innovated stencils and rats, and others took cues from him, or, indeed, lifted his entire style. For those who know street art through Banksy, here’s what the famously elusive artist allegedly said of Blek: “Every time I think I’ve painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek le Rat has done it as well, only twenty years earlier.” And should you notice a stenciled Andy Warhol or a gas mask surrounded by rats on a wall in Brooklyn, that too, was Blek. —Adam Winters Long before I went to work at Jezebel, I was a devoted fan of Lizzie Skurnick’s late, lamented “Fine Lines” column, in which she paid tribute to unjustly forgotten YA classics. So, like many people, I was thrilled when I heard about Lizzie Skurnick Books, an imprint devoted to just these titles. The series kicks off with a bang: the great Lois Duncan’s 1958 Debutante Hill. The book, Duncan’s first, is a classic coming-of-age page-turner with a protagonist you root for. But like all her fiction, it deals with real issues of class, social consciousness, and growing up with seriousness and sensitivity, and is as fresh and engaging today as it was upon its publication. But then, that is what Skurnick has always understood about these books: at their best, they are literature in the true sense of the word, and by no means only for young readers. (Although it’s exciting to think of a new generation discovering them.) —Sadie Stein Since the current issue of The Paris Review features an excerpt from Jonathan Franzen’s upcoming translation of Karl Kraus, I figured it would be thematically appropriate to tout Stefan Zweig’s autobiography, The World of Yesterday. (A shame, incidentally, about that title translation. In English, it sounds a little too much like a depressing expo installation; the book’s elegiac tone is more successfully rendered in the German original, Die Welt von Gestern.) As Kraus’s contemporary, Zweig’s memoir is useful reading for anyone interested in the social milieu of fin de siècle Vienna, and the precipitous decline of the Hapsburg Empire. Zweig’s dewy-eyed recollection of the prewar years in Vienna, not to mention his gushing description of boy wonder Hugo von Hofmannsthal, also provide a nice counterbalance to the eternally acerbic Kraus. —Fritz Huber
September 13, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Gas Stations, New York Stories, The Room By The Paris Review Forty-three years after his death, John O’Hara still holds the record for the most stories published in The New Yorker (247), a record all the more impressive when you consider that he spent a decade boycotting that magazine over a negative review. Wherever he published, one of O’Hara’s favorite subjects was New York City. He specialized in speakeasies, but he also took an interest in gentlemen’s clubs, Park Avenue apartments, dressing rooms, tenements—like Balzac, he aimed at a full panorama, in his case of the years before World War II. Now O’Hara’s New York stories have a volume of their own, thanks to the scholar Steven Goldleaf. My favorite is “Bread Alone,” about a father and son at a ballgame. Something tells me that it inspired the first chapter of Underworld. At least, it would be a worthy inspiration. I read The New York Stories as homework (Goldleaf and I will be discussing O’Hara this coming Monday with the novelist Lawrence Block) but it was a labor of love. —Lorin Stein “Imagine a movie so incomprehensible that you find yourself compelled to watch it over and over again. You become desperate to learn how (if) on earth it was conceived: Who made it, and for what purpose?” These words could only refer to The Room, a cult phenomenon frequently described as the Citizen Kane of bad films; they come from The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, by Greg Sestero and the peerless Tom Bissell. Sestero was coerced into participating in the project by its enigmatic, megalomaniacal writer-director-star, Tommy Wiseau, and served as reluctant intern, cameraman, casting director, and, ultimately, costar (“Mark,” to the initiated.) The book is hilarious, and the stories behind the making of The Room are even more bizarre than one might expect; truly, like the film itself, they must be seen to be believed. —Sadie Stein Read More
September 6, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Taxidermy, Heroines, Bad Ideas By The Paris Review There are moments, on a red-eye flight, when your brain is too jumpy and raw to figure out what, exactly, n+1 is arguing in its attack on “global literature.” When you can’t go back to your (global?) novel and don’t want to plug your head into a cooking show, and when sleep is out of the question. For such moments, pack Kevin Barry’s Dark Lies the Island—a story collection that roams over the Irish landscape during and after the Boom, and through several dozen varieties of bad idea, from selling meth, to having children, to organizing an ale-tasting excursion in Wales. At the risk of indulging in cultural stereotypes, Barry is Irish: when he writes a story, he tells a story, and he’s not afraid of a sentimental ending, if one presents itself. Along the way, he takes such contagious pleasure in his flawed, incorrigible people that I was happy to be on a plane. —Lorin Stein In Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker, Susan Howe writes, “I have loved watching films all my life. I work in the poetic documentary form, but didn’t realize it until I tried to find a way to write an essay about two films by Chris Marker.” The films in question are La Jetée and Sans Soleil. Howe splices her thoughts about these works together with childhood memories of watching Olivier’s Hamlet, the early history of Soviet cinema, an elegy to her husband, and the fallout of Hiroshima, among other subjects. It is an investigation, as she says, of “the immense indifference of history” and “the crushing hold of memory’s abiding present.” It is also, one feels, about the discovery of kinship between a documentary poet and a documentary filmmaker, via the essay—whose root meaning, as both Howe and Marker remind us, suggests experiment rather argument, and a commitment to the art of surprise. —Robyn Creswell Read More
August 30, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Wittgenstein, Hopper, Strangers By The Paris Review Edward Hopper, Office at Night Here, in no particular order, are things I hate about historical novels: exposition, walk-ons by famous people, anachronistic dialogue, imaginary letters from actual figures, physical comedy, the looming shadow of war/horrors of trench warfare/Nazi menace, “heated debates,” and Cambridge dons asking after one anothers’ small children—in the nineteen-teens—as if they taught Communications at Pomona. All of these things may be found in Bruce Duffy’s The World As I Found It, a fictionalized life of Ludwig Wittgenstein first published in 1987. Why on earth did I pick it up? Because at 558 pages, it was the longest New York Review Classic for sale at the Strand, and because if the New York Review decides to reprint an historical novel, I want to know why. Within three pages, I was addicted. Within three days, I was babbling about it to my friends. Here’s Bertrand Russell with his bad breath, phlegmatic G. E. Moore, and Wittgenstein—saintly, sympathetic, an angel of intellectual destruction—a hero so well written I kept forgetting he was real. —Lorin Stein I haven’t been to see the show yet, but the catalogue for the Whitney’s exhibition of Edward Hopper drawings is itself pretty fantastic. The studies for his best-known paintings—Nighthawks and Early Sunday Morning among them—are fascinating windows into his process, and the spare sketches of, say, a man’s suited back are strangely riveting, but my favorite works in the book are his watercolor portraits from 1906–1907 of various “characters” from the Paris streets: La Pierreuse, Le Militaire, Fille de Joie, Le Terrassier. In the figures’ heavy brows and deep shading, they strike me as a strange combination of William Pène du Bois’s drawings of bears and of Eric Powell’s The Goon. Hopper’s rather fashiony pen-and-ink sketches—pages of Figures in Hats, Man with Moustache and Women in Dresses and Hats, Diver, Sailors, Male Figure, and Arm—are also wonderfully chaotic and occasionally bizarre. —Nicole Rudick Read More
August 23, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: ABCs, Akrasia, Antiquity By The Paris Review “Loving you isn’t the right thing to do / How can I ever change the things that I feel?“ This sentiment—so memorably expressed by Fleetwood Mac in 1977—is as old as philosophy itself. The ancients struggled to explain akrasia, or why we love and do certain things against our better judgment. Who’s in charge of our desires? As the NYU philosopher Jessica Moss points out in this Q&A, the latest psychological research can sound a lot like Aristotle’s Ethics. —Lorin Stein I found the cover of Mary Beard’s Confronting the Classics—the torso of a marble Adonis that, at a cursory glance, looks sort of like an Abercrombie and Fitch bag—so off-putting that I took it off. (The British iteration, which features a bust of Athena in a pair of red sunglasses, is hardly more dignified.) But I understand that the publisher was grappling with the very same issue Beard, an eminent classicist, addresses in this book: how to engage with the classical tradition in a modern world. The book is both a survey of classical antiquity and a compelling argument for the classics’ contemporary relevance; Beard bridles at those who champion the canon from a romanticized or ideological standpoint. Anyone who has read Beard’s work in The New York Review of Books knows how funny and passionate a writer she is, and how convincing. (You can only imagine how much fun her Cambridge classes must be.) In her hands, the classics really do argue for themselves. So does this book. Sexy cover not required. —Sadie O. Stein Read More
August 16, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Roman Britain, Soccer, Karaoke By The Paris Review Thanks to the success of The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal is now a familiar name to readers. Less well-known is that of his grandmother, Elisabeth, a central character in that book and an author in her own right. Never published in her lifetime, Elisabeth de Waal’s The Exiles Return was recently rereleased by Persephone and, in this country, by Picador. The novel centers around exiles, like de Waal herself, returning to a vastly changed, postwar Vienna. It’s not always assured, but invariably interesting, often painful, highly absorbing, and a vivid picture of that moment in history—as well as the experience of displacement itself. —Sadie O. Stein Charlotte Higgins covers the arts beat for the Guardian, and is just the sort of reporter who makes Americans love that paper, with a love that is close to envy. She is witty, rangy, unapologetically goofy and erudite at once. All of these qualities inform her first book, Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, a sort of travelogue and essay on Roman ruins in the British imagination. Whether Higgins is walking Hadrian’s Wall or handling the “curse tablets”—fourth-century voodoo spells—recovered from the mineral springs at Bath, she is the best possible company. I have been reading her only very late at night, just to make the journey last. —Lorin Stein Read More