May 26, 2015 My First Time J. Robert Lennon on The Light of Falling Stars By Dan Piepenbring Welcome to “My First Time,” a new video series where writers discuss the trials of writing and publishing that first novel, that first play, that first book of poems. This is a chance to see how successful authors got their start, in their own words—it’s the portrait of the artist as a beginner and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. Kicking off the series today is J. Robert Lennon, who discusses his 1997 debut novel, The Light of Falling Stars. He explores the perils of reading one’s Amazon reviews, the process of finding an agent, and the experience of seeing the book’s cover for the first time. “Your first book is a thing that your entire life has gone up to creating,” he says. “You can’t preemptively decide upon the correct way for your book to be. You have to kind of discover it.” Tomorrow we’ll feature Gabrielle Bell—and later this week will come Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Christine Schutt. You can see a trailer with writers from future installments of “My First Time” here. This series is made by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling; we’re delighted to collaborate with them.
May 21, 2015 My First Time Introducing Our New Video Series, “My First Time” By Dan Piepenbring The Paris Review is known for its interviews. Our first issue, from Spring 1953, featured a conversation with E. M. Forster on the art of fiction, inaugurating a series that’s grown to include hundreds of poets, novelists, playwrights, translators, cartoonists, and screenwriters. These Writers at Work interviews have created a genre and canon of their own. In the spirit of that tradition, we’re proud to present “My First Time,” a new video series where writers discuss the trials of writing and publishing that first novel, that first play, that first book of poems. This is a chance to see how successful authors got their start, in their own words—it’s a portrait of the artist as a beginner and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. Next week, starting on Tuesday, we’ll launch the first four videos in the series, featuring Christine Schutt, J. Robert Lennon, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Gabrielle Bell. You can see a preview above, including writers from future installments of the series such as Donald Antrim, Akhil Sharma, Tao Lin, Ben Lerner, and Sheila Heti. And stay tuned—we’ll announce more writers in the months to come. This series is made by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling; we’re delighted to collaborate with them.
May 14, 2015 Video & Multimedia Work About Work By Dan Piepenbring Mika Rottenberg, Barbara from Mary’s Cherries, 2004, color photograph Mika Rottenberg’s installation NoNoseKnows, showing now at the Venice Biennale, focuses on production, as much of her work does: in the video, we watch an assembly line of women making pearls. They turn hand cranks; they manipulate knitting needles; they partake of the despondent rigmarole that is factory life. Soon enough, though, the images lurch toward phantasm. Some of the women are dozing peacefully at their stations; some have their feet submerged in whole baskets of pearls; and their labor is directed from underground by a kind of Pinocchio-nosed queen bee, an exhausted, frazzled woman with a nasty cold. Then, as Randy Kennedy writes in the New York Times, comes the denouement: the woman sneezes explosively, causing steaming plates of Chinese food and pasta to burst from her inflamed schnozz, which seems to provide the pearl workers’ sole nourishment; the process repeats, maybe endlessly. Yum. Read More
April 21, 2015 Video & Multimedia Nobuo Okano, Book Repairman By Dan Piepenbring Give him your dog-eared, your tattered, your musty tomes yearning to breathe free, the shelf-worn refugees of your teeming library. He will smooth their pages and mend their binding. For he is Nobuo Okano, book repairman. An episode of the Japanese series Shuri, Misemasu (or The Fascinating Repairmen—would that such programming arrived on these shores) documents his careful conversion of a battered, bruised English–Japanese dictionary to a state of just-published purity. (JAPANESE CRAFTSMEN STRIKE AGAIN, says one headline about his work, as if such people are invading our homes at night with bevel squares and handsaws.) Read More
February 25, 2015 Video & Multimedia You Talk Your Book By Dan Piepenbring Looking rather Führer-ish, Anthony Burgess appeared on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, where he was in rare form throughout—charming, funny, instructive, gently eccentric. The conversation ranges from England as a kind of bland utopia to Shakespeare’s “showbiz” skills and possible venereal disease, the perils of teaching writing (“The kids who want to write are usually very young, and their desire to write is usually a symptom of pubescence”), the insincerity of Milton’s Lycidas, and the distinction between pubs and bars: A bar is not a pub. There are one or two pubs I think in New York … a real pub is a place where all the social barriers come down. You can drink with a member of the aristocracy or the local dustman. You play darts, you drink, you talk, and by this means you generate an atmosphere of genuine democratic society. You get ideas, you hear stories, you talk. And this is useful for a writer. The only pubs you must not, if you’re a writer, go to are the pubs in Dublin. Because in Dublin you talk your book. You say, I’m writing a darling book. Ah, tell us about it, they say. Then you tell them about it. And by the time you tell them about it, you’ve spent the desire to write it … The book is finished. You close it. That Shakespeare book he mentions early on, by the way, received one of the most comically underdone blurbs I’ve ever seen, from Country Life, a magazine for which Burgess himself often contributed. “Of all the books about Shakespeare that 1964 will bring forth,” they wrote, “none is likely to make livelier reading than Anthony Burgess’s historical novel, Nothing Like the Sun.” There are small daggers in that “1964,” that “is likely to”: the most damning of faint praise. Dan Piepenbring is the Web editor of The Paris Review.
December 10, 2014 Video & Multimedia It Changes Nothing By Dan Piepenbring If you’ve never seen it, watch Clarice Lispector’s first and only TV interview, from February 1977, when she appeared on TV Cultura in São Paulo. She’d arrived intending to appear in a program about film, apparently, when the station’s director summoned his nerve and asked for an interview. She died later that year. Lispector is restless, and charmingly curt, throughout the interview—it seems as if she really, really doesn’t want to be there. Even under duress, though, she gives stronger, more meaningful answers than many writers give at their most accessible. “I write without the hope that what I write can change anything at all. It changes nothing … Because at the end of the day we’re not trying to change things. We’re trying to open up somehow.” At one point, the interlocutor asks, “What, in your opinion, is the role of the Brazilian writer today?” “To speak as little as possible,” she says, her head tilted, her thumb half-massaging her temple, a cigarette between her fingers.