July 22, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Food, Fiction, and Summer Dresses By The Paris Review For anyone who loves to read, or eat, or both, Anka Muhlstein’s terrific Balzac’s Omelet is a must: the historian takes on the evolution of food in fiction—specifically Balzac’s—with results that I could (but won’t) call mouth-watering. I’m a total food-history nerd, but I don’t think you’d need to be to enjoy what’s ultimately a treatise on the making of modern French culture. —Sadie Stein The subject of summer dresses seems to be everywhere. Geoff Dyer described the “perfect summer dress.” And the Times did some serious investigative reporting on the fashion. But let’s not forget the classic short story by Irwin Shaw, “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” —Thessaly La Force Fist bumps to David Chang and McSweeney’s for their new food magazine Lucky Peach. Naturally, the first issue is on ramen. —Cody Wiewandt I’m anxiously awaiting the Los Angeles Review of Books’ next installment of Mike Davis’s serial “The Ghost of Wrath,” an account of the deliciously evil original LA Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis. —Ali Pechman I’m from Ohio, but I’m not from Donald Ray Pollack’s Ohio. His new book and first novel, The Devil All the Time, is as scary as it is good. —C. W. I’m quite enamored with Worn Journal, a smart, sassy, Toronto-based, antifashion mag with an emphasis on used clothing. I just got the latest issue and am finding it a total delight. —S. S. It’s summer, and there’s not a cornfield or a mosquito-infested pond in sight. If, like me, you’ve got the big-city blues, try paging through the lush architectural renderings in Marion Mahony Reconsidered for a respite from the skyscrapers and the carefully allocated greenery. —Clare Fentress Were you one of those people who hated summer camp? Or were you the kind that really, really, really loved it? Slate has a breakdown of the types. —T. L.
July 15, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Archaeologies of the Future, the Last Live Nude Girls By The Paris Review As a supplement to our science-fiction issue, I’ve been reading Fredric Jameson’s super brainy Archaeologies of the Future, his defense of SF as the last redoubt of utopianism. Jameson also makes some helpful distinctions between SF and fantasy, to the detriment of the latter (a nice antidote to Harry Potter mania). It has brought back memories of many childhood afternoons spent reading Asimov, Le Guin, and Frank Herbert—books I thought I’d forgotten but am happy to rediscover. —Robyn Creswell I’ve been fully immersed in Sheila McClear’s memoir The Last of the Live Nude Girls, about her time spent working in a Times Square peep show—eye-opening, gritty, and compelling. —Sadie Stein The theme of the summer issue of Lapham’s Quarterly is food, and by golly is it delicious! A taste of the issue’s excerpt from Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects: “Andrea presented an octagonal church like San Giovanni, but resting on columns. The pavement was formed of jelly, resembling a variously colored mosaic; the columns, which looked like porphyry, were large sausages; the bases and capitals Parmesan cheese; the cornices were made of pastry and sugar, and the tribunes of quarters of marzipan. In the middle was a choir desk made of cold veal, with a book of lasagna, the letters and notes being formed of peppercorns.” —Clare Fentress Inspired by a book-cover painting by Leanne Shapton, I’ve been reading a vintage Penguin edition of Bonjour Tristesse. If I can’t be in the south of France … —Thessaly La Force I’m contributing from the Palovista Ranch this week, where I’ve been writing but also rereading one of my favorite novels, Blood Meridian and, for the first time, Suttree. As expected, Cormac McCarthy is the perfect companion for long walks around the desert. —Natalie Jacoby If you get a chance to see the documentary Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, be sure to: it’s not just a portrait of the iconic Yiddish writer but also of a lost world. I found it deeply moving. —S. S. Dani Shapiro on the difference having a child has on a memoirist: “After all, one can’t write with abandon if one is worrying about the consequences. And to have children is to always, always worry about the consequences.” —T. L. I’ve got a girl crush on former Paris Review intern, Believer editor, and author extraordinaire Vendela Vida. Read her Guardian interview on lying, The Lovers, and why she and Dave Eggers don’t linger over dinner. —Mackenzie Beer
July 8, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Life, Summer, Candy By The Paris Review I finally picked up Keith Richards’s Life the other week, and it’s all I want to read when I have a spare moment. —Thessaly La Force Over the long weekend, I devoured Bella Pollen’s The Summer of the Bear—the story of a family moving to an island in the Hebrides following the death of the father, as well as the unraveling mystery of his life—and found it to be the perfect escape. —Sadie Stein One of the perks of having a kid is making time for books I otherwise wouldn’t make time for, especially the classics. Right now, we’re working our way through one of my favorites, Black Beauty. A good excuse to dig out my old Breyer set of Black Beauty, Duchess, Ginger, and Merrylegs. —Nicole Rudick I spent the holiday with friends in New England, and we played many a round of what I’ve always called “The Book Game” and Dwight Garner calls “The Paperback Game” and, either way, is about the most entertaining game in existence. (Hint: don’t play it with Terry Southern’s Candy, which has a seventy-word opening sentence. I speak from experience.) —S. S. Avi Steinberg on Mike Tyson. —T. L. Thanks to Maud Newton’s nostalgia for the Lone Star state (and my own), I’m making nachos this weekend. —N. R. If you haven’t already, read Jose Antonio Vargas’s personal confession of being an undocumented immigrant. “We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read.” —T. L. Don’t let these creepy ads for Children’s Hospital scare you away—it reacts to the Casey Anthony verdict. —Natalie Jacoby
July 1, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Harriet the Spy, Happy Fourth of July! By The Paris Review In the embarrassing oversights department, I had been meaning and meaning to read the novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Why did it take me so long? His latest work to be translated into English, The Truth About Marie, is haunting, clever, funny. I can’t wait to read more … as soon as I finish Harriet the Spy. Where was she all my life? —Lorin Stein I saw a really interesting film recently: The Target, which was cowritten by Vladimir Sorokin. It’s a strange mix of Anna Karenina, sci-fi, and social commentary, but it works. Light viewing it’s not, but if you’re in the mood to stomach a dystopia in which love is a soulless illusion, it’s worth seeking out! —Sadie Stein Also, I’m going to see Le Rayon Vert—back at Film Forum by popular demand. —L. S. This weekend, I’m reading Rebecca Wolff’s The Beginners, a debut novel about a fifteen-year-old girl who befriends a new couple in town, the Motherwells. The Motherwells say they’ve moved to Wick, Massachusetts, to study the town’s history of witchcraft, but from the reviews, it sounds like spookier things start to happen. —Thessaly La Force Even though Monday is Independence Day, today is the ninetieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. Check out one of my favorite contemporary Chinese short-story collections, the irreverent and absurd I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen. —Ali Pechman Read More
June 24, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Wimbledon, Weeds, and Kreayshawn By The Paris Review With George Jonesian morbidity, I’ve been devouring the Wimbledon coverage—in Grantland!—by our sometime special tennis correspondent Louisa Thomas. (Come back, Louisa! We’ll quit our honky-tonking and running around, if you’ll just come back and keep writing the way you do.) —Lorin Stein I don’t usually laugh out loud when I read, but Iris Owens’s alternately hilarious and appalling After Claude was getting me strange looks on the A train. Incidentally, it’s one of the great NYC summer books, too. —Sadie Stein I picked up the charming Weeds by Richard Mabey, who suggests that our definition of the word is far more subjective and cultural than we would like to think. The book is sprinkled with entertaining anecdotes, like this one about the eminent rosarian Humphrey Brook, who became slightly belligerent after a few pints of beer at a local pub: “On the way back we passed a suburban garden where the owner was picking modern shrub roses whose shades were a farrago of Day-Glo reds and oranges. Humphrey stopped unsteadily, stared at the scene much as one might at a junk dealer gluing Formica onto a Chippendale table, and screamed ‘Vegetable rats!’ at the hapless grower.” —Thessaly La Force Chris Weitz’s new movie, A Better Life, opens this weekend in New York at Lincoln Center and the Sunshine. I’ve heard a lot about the film, and it’s not clear how long it will run—I’m not taking any chances. —L. S. I love you, Victor Shklovsky. —Nicole Rudick Why shouldn’t The Onion win a Pulitzer? —Cody Wiewandt I feel hypnotized, and also slightly agitated, when I watch these one-minute films of “beautiful young people … standing around looking beautiful” by Dennis Swiatkowski. —Natalie Jacoby I’d been waiting for Ben Loory’s first collection of stories, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, ever since I read “The T.V.” Just one question: which stories were meant for nighttime and which for daytime? —Ali Pechman A wonderful visit to Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium last week got me hankering for Jeffrey Yang’s An Aquarium. I like this 2008 poetry collection and abecedary because reading it is sort of like watching blue blubber jellies bounce around inside a light-up tank. —Clare Fentress If you don’t know who Kreayshawn is, now you know. —C. W.
June 17, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: T. S. Eliot and Friends, Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler By The Paris Review Every summer the good people at Oxford Classics sponsor a reading group in the Reading Room at Bryant Park. I joined them this week to discuss New Grub Street (1891), George Gissing’s novel about freelancers who haunt the British Museum. What I remembered—what everyone remembers—is the scary depiction of writer’s block. (George Orwell: “To a professional writer it is … an upsetting and demoralizing book, because it deals, among other things, with that much-dreaded occupational disease, sterility.”) What I noticed this time was the love story between Jasper Milvain, a slick young critic on the make, and shy, scholarly Marian Yule, the nicest, toughest, smartest person in the book. —Lorin Stein Galleys of the two-volume Letters of T. S. Eliot just landed on my desk. And everyone who’s anyone is here: Ezra Pound, Lytton Strachey, Edmund Wilson, and Conrad Aiken, but also Wyndham Lewis, Jacques Riviere, and James Joyce. How disarming, though, to see a letter addressed to Bertrand Russell as “Dear Bertie” and signed “Affectionately, Tom.” —Nicole Rudick I had the chance to do a Q & A with Carmela Ciuraru this week, the author of Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms. The book is a series of portraits of literary figures throughout history—the Brontes, George Eliot, O. Henry, Georges Simenon—who for one reason or another adopted pseudonyms. It’s fascinating—and, incidentally, piqued my interest in an author I hadn’t read, Fernando Pessoa. —Sadie Stein Aaron Sorkin and David Carr talk about cocaine, journalism, and The New York Times. —Thessaly La Force New Directions Pearls are small books on large topics: Fitzgerald on booze, Garcia Lorca on duende, Borges’s Everything and Nothing. The books are about the size of postcard, which means they fit in your back pocket and can also be used as fans or as bookmarks for bigger books. Right now I’m reading Joseph Roth’s The Leviathan, a longish short story about the coral merchant Nissen Piczenik and his holiday in Odessa. It’s a gem. —Robyn Creswell Molly Lambert takes on Kanye West over at Grantland and produces this glorious footnote: “Almost all classic West Coast rap is about being the world’s worst boyfriend. Too Short and Eazy-E would not be very good boyfriends.” —Cody Wiewandt I reread From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which I remembered even less well than Grub Street, but which brought to mind David Grann’s piece on Peter Paul Biro. —L. S. Tom Bissell reviews the video game L. A. Noire. —T. L. Because you can’t watch this too many times and, well, it’s Friday. —Peter Conroy