{"id":116220,"date":"2017-09-29T13:04:49","date_gmt":"2017-09-29T17:04:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=116220"},"modified":"2017-09-29T16:27:09","modified_gmt":"2017-09-29T20:27:09","slug":"staff-picks-fat-ladies-flowers-faraway-lands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/29\/staff-picks-fat-ladies-flowers-faraway-lands\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Fat Ladies, Flowers, and Faraway Lands"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

From The Paper-Flower Tree <\/em> by Jacqueline Ayer.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Paper-Flower Tree<\/em><\/a> 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\u2019t have too much either, but he does have\u00a0a tree of mesmerizing paper flowers. The man plucks her a \u201cseed\u201d to plant so that she can grow her own paper-flower tree. The\u00a0girl tends to it, but it doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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<\/em> before moving to Paris and then Thailand with her husband. Ayer\u2019s 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\u2019s-book publisher, has brought them back. And so after some patient tending, Ayer\u2019s work is again getting the attention it deserves, including a show at the House of Illustration<\/a> in London. Maybe you think you\u2019re too old to enjoy a children\u2019s book. Suspend your disbelief. \u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I recently wandered into a used bookstore for some browsing and, in a stroke of luck, ended up leaving with two paperback volumes of Richard Brautigan for less than what a sandwich costs in most parts of Manhattan.\u00a0Trout Fishing in America\u00a0<\/i>was, of course, included, but what I read this week was\u00a0The Revenge of the Lawn<\/i>. Published in 1971, it is Brautigan\u2019s only collection of short fiction, which includes \u201cThe Lost Chapters of\u00a0Trout Fishing in America<\/i>.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>The title story is, in true Brautigan fashion, the strange and comic tale of a man versus the almost sentient mess in\u00a0his front yard. \u201cThe Revenge of the Lawn\u201d is also probably the longest piece in the collection; there are sixty-three stories in total, all no more than a couple of pages in length. They aren\u2019t really stories at all but rather snapshots of life that have been slightly distorted in their development, like photos from a dark room where something in the process has gone every-so-slightly awry. There\u2019s nothing sloppy in the craft, though, and the true joy of these vignettes\u00a0is Brautigan\u2019s freshness of language. He renders images in poetic prose that is both unique and\u00a0precise. One of my favorite lines comes\u00a0when he is writing about the sky over the highway: \u201cIt was really sad with a cemetery-like chimney swirling jagged dead smoke in the air above it.\u201d \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

KGB Bar.<\/p><\/div>\n

This Wednesday, a dozen people gathered\u00a0in\u00a0the dimly lit KGB Bar on the Lower East Side. A floor above, a comedy show was taking place; a floor below, a stage rehearsal. The sounds filtered through the walls,\u00a0but here on the second story, the evening\u00a0unfolded with quiet, dedicated passion. In honor of National Translation Month, five translators read from their work.\u00a0Katherine E. Young read work\u00a0by Ukrainian poet Iya Kiva as-of-yet unpublished in English. I\u00a0retained, imperfectly, the lines \u201cIs there cold war in the tap? Is there hot war in the tap? We have been eight days without war.\u201d The translators\u2019 voices cut through the other sounds\u2014the laughter from above, the students in the bars below\u2014and\u00a0transported us to Romania, to Russia, to Iran, to Portugal. I was struck\u2014it was one of those almost embarrassingly profound realizations, deeply felt and yet never\u00a0as good\u00a0said aloud\u2014with how grateful\u00a0I am\u00a0to be able to read in translation all the languages I\u00a0will never speak, to be able to commune with a poet with whom I could not converse. I suppose this week what I\u2019m picking is translation, all of it, in general, but also this poem by Jos\u00e9 Luis Peixoto\u00a0from\u00a0A Child in Ruins<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>translated by Hugo dos Santos. At KGB bar, dos Santos read it first in the original Portuguese, then in English:<\/p>\n

when it was time to set the table, we were five:
\nmy father, my mother, my sisters
\nand me. then, my older sister
\nmarried. then, my younger sister
\nmarried. then, my father died. today,
\nwhen it is time to set the table, we are five,
\nexcept my older sister who is
\nat her home, except my younger
\nsister who is at her home, except my
\nfather, except my widowed mother. each one
\nis an empty place at this table where
\ni eat alone. but they will always be here.
\nat the time to set the table, we will always be five.
\nas long as one of us is alive, we will always
\nbe five.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014Nadja Spiegelman<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From Everywhere Disappeared <\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

There\u2019s always something I\u2019m missing out on\u2014of that I\u2019m sure\u2014but I didn\u2019t realize I was missing out on Patrick Kyle\u2019s short comics, which he\u2019s been publishing in small-run booklets since 2013. Luckily, a generous selection has been collected in Everywhere Disappeared<\/i><\/a>. In some stories, Kyle marries geometric precision with surrealist accumulation (and occasional painterly marks), meaning that those panels are disordered with orderly elements. That appealing chaos creates a unique architecture within and between pages and gives an elasticity to the way the narratives progress. Often, those narratives involve circularity or refraction: one story proposes the idea of art as \u201ca communicative invention used to encourage the layman to feel\u201d and then offers a white painting that allows one \u201cto look into nothing and forget.\u201d In another, a character kills a worm that has been ravaging his garden. The worm forgives the gardener and ponders reincarnation; the gardener, racked with guilt, cuts off his own head and reflexively and ironically notes that it \u201cwon\u2019t matter if I go. My garden doesn\u2019t need me anymore.\u201d If the comics seem abstract, the feelings underlying them aren\u2019t. In a story about Crocodil, a \u201cnonviolent dog,\u201d the animal is beset by a man who leaps onto its\u00a0back\u2014an action accompanied by the sound effect \u201cAgony\u201d\u2014and rides the dog\u00a0around. And that\u2019s the end of the story. Haven\u2019t we all been there? \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright.<\/p><\/div>\n

I recently discovered a cooking show from the late nineties\u00a0called Two Fat Ladies. <\/i>It starts with the ladies in animated form, popping out of a cookbook and driving a motorcycle across a table covered with breads, fruits, and olive oils. Then they arrive in reality, rumbling through Cornwall, Jennifer Paterson driving, Clarissa Dickson Wright in the \u201cdouble-wide sidecar.\u201d Throughout the show, they traverse England, squeezing produce and suffering no fools. They are flinty with vendors. They shop at quaint bakeries and graphic butcher shops and run into traffic jams of sheep. They are strict about keeping their heavy, gray-skied British fare disgustingly authentic. In the kitchen, they blend\u00a0their cooking advice with sex jokes, and their allusions are often too British for me to understand\u2014but the poetic flights of saltiness are unmistakable. They are a pair of Samuel Johnsons. You don\u2019t need to love food to be lit up by their table talk. The show\u2019s datedness adds to the charm as well.\u00a0In her memoir, Spilling the Beans<\/i>, Dickson Wright revealed that the two birdies (\u201cfoulmouthed, sweet old ladies,\u201d) butted heads off-screen and stayed in separate hotels throughout filming. I\u2019ve heard similar things about Hall & Oates. Sometimes collaborations are stormy. But when the ingredients are all in proportion, this funny, weird show still hits the spot. \u2014Brent Katz<\/strong><\/p>\n

On Tuesday\u2019s<\/span><\/span> commute home, as passengers around me bemoaned the announcement of train delays, I secretly rejoiced. I was halfway through Thousands<\/i>, by Lightsey Darst, and I didn\u2019t want to stop. Darst\u2019s new collection is less a series of individual\u00a0poems than\u00a0an extended unfurling of the poet\u2019s inner and outer life. Divided\u00a0into five chronological sections, Thousands<\/i> follows the poet through the end of a marriage, a move, a pregnancy, and much more. Darst\u2019s poetry is searing and frank\u2014\u201cEven the wedding photographs can be thrown out without a word.\u201d Her poetry is also vulnerable and uncertain; there is no pretense in her work, and she\u2019s unafraid to address poetically unsexy topics: \u201cBe honest: it makes me ashamed that I\u2019m halfway to seventy & I can\u2019t \/ earn enough to have a child\u2014maternity care \/ isn\u2019t covered on my current insurance.\u201d One of the collection\u2019s strengths is how Darst weaves quotations, dates, and places into her work, making attributions in the margins. It allows the reader to feel both intimately involved as an observer, but also, somehow, present\u2014a presence the poet jarringly acknowledges at the end of the collection\u2019s fourth section with an invitation: \u201cWhat are you but passage, stranger? Be passage with me.\u201d Reading plunged me into reminiscence:\u00a0Darst makes attributions to Cocoa Cinnamon and Caff\u00e9 Driade, two college haunts of mine. But this is a collection in which all readers will recognize something, if in nothing else then in the humanity of the poet herself. \u2014Joel Pinckney<\/strong><\/p>\n

I knew a little about Grace<\/i><\/a> before I picked it up, having been to Paul Lynch\u2019s reading of his most recent work, but I was still taken aback at the subtle beauty with which he renders one girl\u2019s experience in the Irish Famine. Grace, the story\u2019s protagonist, is forced out of her home by her own mother, who cuts off her hair and tells her, \u201cYou are the strong one now.\u201d Lynch never shies away from the subject matter\u2014the impossibly grueling winters Grace faces, the people she meets and can never trust, the heartbreak of losing a family member\u2014but he entwines it all with prose that sways from brutally realistic scenes into the fullness of the landscape and back again in just a few words. Though the story could have been overwrought, in Lynch\u2019s deft hands I found myself enthralled as Grace cuts herself a path through a forbidding world. \u2014Johanna Zwirner<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Believer<\/a><\/em> is back. After a two-year hiatus from newsstands, the snarky offshoot of the Dave Eggers empire has returned to circulation, this time under the benevolent patronage of the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. Like many literary-minded millennials in Northern California around the turn of the century, I subscribed to two publications: McSweeney\u2019s<\/em> and its bizarre nonfiction cousin. At the time I understood very little of what I was reading. I\u2019d certainly had never heard of the likes of The Paris Review<\/em>\u2014what do they review anyway? As my introduction to literary magazines\u2014my Harvard, my Yale\u2014The Believer<\/em> seemed to arrive in my mailbox, situated on a dusty country road across from an irrigation ditch, like a creature beamed down from another planet. I\u2019m glad it\u2019s back, this time with an expanded comics section. The forthcoming issue features an illustrated version of Etgar Keret\u2019s short story \u201cSeptember All Year Long,\u201d drawn by Danica Novgorodoff. \u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019t have too much either, but he does have\u00a0a tree of mesmerizing paper flowers. The man plucks her a \u201cseed\u201d to plant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[30815,30829,30827,30822,131,30830,30819,7315,30816,30820,30823,25195,30826,1757,2784,30817,30825,30828,10618,658,30818,30813,30810,530,30824,30821],"class_list":["post-116220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-a-child-in-ruins","tag-black-mountain-institute","tag-caffe-driade","tag-clarissa-dickson","tag-comics","tag-danica-novgorodoff","tag-enchanted-lion-books","tag-etgar-keret","tag-iya-kiva","tag-jacqueline-ayer","tag-jennifer-paterson","tag-kgb-bar","tag-lightsey-darst","tag-lower-east-side","tag-mcsweeneys","tag-national-translation-month","tag-patrick-kyle","tag-paul-lynch","tag-richard-brautigan","tag-the-believer","tag-the-paper-flower-tree","tag-the-revenge-of-the-lawn","tag-thousands","tag-translation","tag-trout-fishing-in-america","tag-two-fat-ladies"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Fat Ladies, Flowers, and Faraway Lands by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 29, 2017 \u2013 The Paper-Flower Tree is a tale from Thailand for children, but I bought it for my adult self last month. 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