{"id":119069,"date":"2017-12-08T13:00:21","date_gmt":"2017-12-08T18:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=119069"},"modified":"2017-12-08T16:42:29","modified_gmt":"2017-12-08T21:42:29","slug":"staff-picks-wade-water-weiwei-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/08\/staff-picks-wade-water-weiwei-williams\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Interwar, War, and Postwar"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Tracy K Smith<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cOur bodies run with ink dark blood. \/ Blood pools in the pavement\u2019s seams. Is it strange to say love is a language \/ Few practice, but all, or near all speak?\u201d So begins Tracy K. Smith\u2019s poem \u201cUnrest in Baton Rouge,\u201d from the forthcoming collection,\u00a0Wade in the Water<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0Like many of the poems in this slim yet searing book, \u201cUnrest\u201d is at once a haunting testimonial of the foulness on which the country was built and an homage to the love\u2014however scant it may at times feel\u2014that\u2019s persevered despite it all. From start to finish, the collection traverses American history, comprising imagined letters between slaveholders, between black men or women and \u201cMr abarham lincon\u201d or \u201cMy Children\u201d or \u201cExcellent Sir\u201d; erasures, using the Declaration of Independence as source material; and poems about \u201cour magnificent roads, \/ Our bridges slung with steel, \/ Our vivid glass, our tantalizing lights \u2026 \u201d But Smith writes, too, of more personal moments\u2014the wonders of motherhood, the terrors of womanhood\u2014so that by the collection\u2019s end, we\u2019ve listened to a choir of voices from generations past and present who have shown us the beautiful alongside the monstrous. In the poem \u201cNew Road Station,\u201d Smith writes that \u201chistory is not a woman,\u201d but in\u00a0Wade in the Water<\/i>, she most certainly is. \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I have carried Joy Williams\u2019s The Visiting Privilege<\/i><\/a> <\/i>around with me for the past year and a half as though it were my bible. For all intents and purposes, it is: Williams is a powerhouse of a writer, one who could level an entire city with a single sentence, and I feel a devotion to her work that borders on dogmatism. Yet as with most spiritual matters, the exact cause of this fierce allegiance eludes me. After sixteen months with Joy, I don\u2019t think I\u2019m any closer to articulating, or even understanding, why I love her stories so much. What I can say is this: in each of the tales collected in the career-spanning\u00a0Visiting Privilege<\/i>, there is a sense that something is shifting just behind the veil.\u00a0The machinations of daily life take on an Old Testament weight. Things mean what they mean until, suddenly, they don\u2019t. The protagonists are alien to everyone they encounter, alien even to the reader, and their fundamental unknowability captures the desperate isolation of our modern era. I started reading The Visiting Privilege<\/i>\u00a0in August last year. Over the months, I\u2019ve bounced my way through story after wonderful story, scratching my head, drinking in the sentences, trying to hold on to each word just a little longer than usual. And now, here I am, interning at The Paris Review<\/i>, <\/i>who\u00a0just announced this week that Williams will receive the 2018 Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. This whole chain of events has a whiff of the beyond for me. Surely, this means something, I say, and then I turn the page, knowing it either does or does not, and making peace with this lack of understanding all the same. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

With teasing ellipses, distraught lovers, and a long-lost notebook, Sabahattin Ali\u2019s Madonna in a Fur Coat<\/em><\/a> could have easily tipped into excess and yet never does. First published in Turkey, in 1943, Madonna <\/em>is about Raif, a Turkish expat in Berlin in the 1930s, and Maria, the bohemian-minded half-Jewish woman for whom he falls. It is an advent calendar of surprises. Maria\u2019s assessment that Raif is a little girl offers a much more calm, interesting gender meditation than any D. H. Lawrence riff. Madonna<\/em> is especially insouciant about religion: as the half-Jewish love interest says, \u201cNothing in the world tries my patience more than those pine trees decked out in candles and stars \u2026 It goes without saying that I don\u2019t have any time for Judaism either.\u201d Madonna <\/em>reminded me of some of the most lasting interwar novels. It has some of\u00a0the fevered gender drag of Nightwood, <\/em>while its cool detached misery also reminded me of Jean Rhys\u2019s writing, especially Good Morning, Midnight<\/em>. Ali offers the story of what continues to be a small miracle\u2014a man and a woman from different cultures, languages, and religions meet and fall in love. More importantly, they understand each other. \u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

The drawings in Leslie Stein\u2019s new book, Present<\/i><\/a>, are prismatic, loopy, and effervescent. Her handwritten dialogue, squiggly forms, and watercolor washes are irresistible. In October, she was interviewed by her mother<\/a> for\u00a0The Comics Journal<\/i>, and it\u2019s pretty wonderful stuff; one of the questions is \u201cDo you know how much a gift you are in my life?\u201d So I was caught off guard by the aching loneliness that permeates the book\u2019s autobiographical stories. Stein is optimistic, even when things aren\u2019t going her way (and sometimes wary when they are), but every now and then her optimism wanes, just barely and only for a flash. When she seats herself at a long bar and spies a lovely woman at the other end, she wonders why that woman is there alone. \u201cThen it hit me,\u201d she writes. \u201cThe bar was not very long \u2026 At the end there was a giant mirror. The girl was me.\u201d These moments accumulate and all the while feel tonally contradictory to Stein\u2019s exuberant drawings; by book\u2019s end, the loneliness feels companionable, like your reflection in a mirror. \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Seagull Books has recently released the first in their new Hungarian list, a series edited by Ottilie Mulzet. The book collects the first two novels of G\u00e1bor Schein, The Book of Mordechai<\/i> and Lazarus<\/i><\/a>, in one edition. I made it through the first this past week. The Book of Mordechai<\/i>, <\/i>originally published in Hungary in 2002 and translated into English by Adam Z. Levy, tells the story of a Hungarian family through snapshots of their lives\u00a0from several generations\u2014both before and after the Holocaust\u2014interwoven\u00a0with the biblical story of Esther. The novel jumps between the family\u2019s story and that of Esther in nearly every paragraph, resulting in a disorienting read. The reader is displaced and ungrounded, just like the family at the heart of the novel, just like Esther and Haman. There\u2019s much to ponder in this book\u2014a grandfather\u2019s insecurity over\u00a0his wife\u2019s first husband\u2019s disappearance\u00a0during the Holocaust; a group of friends in Budapest in 1951 and 1952 whose \u201ctalk was full of the dead \u2026 the only thing in which they took absolute pleasure.\u201dThe Book of Mordechai<\/i> is a creative look into the horrors of the Holocaust and the effect it\u2019s had on the relationships between its survivors. It represents a wonderful beginning for Seagull\u2019s new venture. \u2014Joel\u00a0Pinckney<\/strong><\/p>\n

When it comes to the Internet, I remain on the whole unconvinced. Every now and then, though, someone thinks of a good use for it: about a month ago,\u00a0The New Inquiry<\/i>, <\/i>in partnership with the Bronx Freedom Fund, released a software program<\/a> that \u201cuses computer processing power to get people out of jail.\u201d In the crudest terms, Bail Bloc allows people to sublet the parts of their computer they\u2019re not using, the rent from which then gets donated to a bail fund for low-income New Yorkers. (It is difficult to overstate the exploitative nature of United States\u2019 uniquely harsh bail policies; you can read about New York\u2019s here<\/a>.) The New Inquiry <\/i>bills Bail Bloc as just one project in \u201ca series of situated, confrontational, rhetorically deliberate experiments through software.\u201d It is probably all of these things, but the semantics turn out to be rather beside the point: according to the panel on my computer, the app has raised $2,114 to date\u2014enough to bail two people out of jail. For them, and all the others it will fund, the project\u2019s\u00a0value will no doubt prove more physical than figurative. \u2014Spencer Bokat-Lindell<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

An installation from \u201cGood Fences Make Good Neighbors,\u201d\u00a0by Ai Weiwei.<\/p><\/div>\n

I recently had the pleasure of walking through Washington Square Park at night and was able to admire the lights on Ai Weiwei’s impressive sculpture under the iconic arch. So I was delighted to see that Brick<\/em>\u2019s\u00a0hundredth\u00a0issue<\/a> features an interview with\u00a0Ai in which he discusses traveling to refugee camps in Syria, growing up in China, and dealing with tragedy through art. The rest of the issue includes the voices of Gail Jones, Anne Carson, a conversation between Louise Erdrich and her sister, and fiction by C\u00e9sar Aira, among many others. Nicholas Ruddock\u2019s poem \u201cStorm\u201d is as tumultuous as its title, a tornado picking up the debris of modern life, and as it comes to a close, states: \u201cNo, we didn\u2019t ask for this, not directly, \/ aquifers of poison being sucked skyward, but here we are.\u201d Reading through the exciting litany of writers, one feels that important attention is being paid as much\u00a0to\u00a0the highly cerebral as it is\u00a0to the world that we live in. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

Julien Gracq\u2019s Balcony in the Forest<\/a><\/em> is the oddly relaxing and surreal account of Lieutenant Grange, who is charged with manning a bunker near the river Meuse, deep in the Ardennes forest, during World War II. The language flows smoothly, meandering like the Meuse, whose presence as a line of defense is felt throughout the book. Grange and his men mostly wait while the war wages far away, as if in a dream taking place somewhere else. Grange is broody and spends a lot of his time outside the bunker, considering the nearby forest and villages as the seasons change: \u201cAfter days of rain that turned the underbrush to jelly and stuck rafts of rotten leaves to their shoes, suddenly a dry, clear east wind swept the sky and hardened the roads, crackling the pin-oak leaves that still hung from the branches; it was as if a brisk and biting St. Martin\u2019s summer, already hemstitched with frost, had ventured into the very heart of December.\u201d The war does reach them, abruptly, in the end. Balcony in the Forest<\/em> is about detachment, how most humans react when the world around them is burning down. That\u2019s something we all know plenty about. \u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  \u201cOur bodies run with ink dark blood. \/ Blood pools in the pavement\u2019s seams. Is it strange to say love is a language \/ Few practice, but all, or near all speak?\u201d So begins Tracy K. Smith\u2019s poem \u201cUnrest in Baton Rouge,\u201d from the forthcoming collection,\u00a0Wade in the Water.\u00a0Like many of the poems in […]<\/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":[6713,3401,32064,32066,32062,32065,5774,1760,32063,32060,2122,19054,4444,7285,32067,19983,1482,32059,22336,23455,32058,21015,32061,5247,32057,19720,32056,5596],"class_list":["post-119069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-ai-weiwei","tag-anne-carson","tag-bail-bloc","tag-balcony-in-the-forest","tag-brick-magazine","tag-bronx-freedom-fund","tag-cesar-aira","tag-d-h-lawrence","tag-gail-jones","tag-good-morning-midnight","tag-hadada","tag-hungary","tag-jean-rhys","tag-joy-williams","tag-julien-gracq","tag-leslie-stein","tag-louise-erdrich","tag-madonna-in-a-fur-coat","tag-nightwood","tag-present","tag-sabahattin-ali","tag-seagull-books","tag-the-book-of-mordechai-and-lazarus","tag-the-new-inquiry","tag-the-visiting-privilege","tag-tracy-k-smith","tag-wade-in-the-water","tag-washington-square-park"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Interwar, War, and Postwar<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 reads Tracy K. 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