{"id":119919,"date":"2018-01-05T13:00:20","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T18:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=119919"},"modified":"2018-01-05T13:29:10","modified_gmt":"2018-01-05T18:29:10","slug":"staff-picks-dorothy-oz-arkansas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/05\/staff-picks-dorothy-oz-arkansas\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Dorothy, Oz, and Arkansas"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Anna Kavan<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

If a \u201cbeach read\u201d is light and easy reading for the warm summer months, then Anna Kavan\u2019s\u00a0Ice<\/i>\u00a0is its cold-season equivalent, a book to complement\u00a0the contemplative stillness of winter weather.\u00a0Ice<\/i>\u00a0was recommended to me by a colleague, and I picked up Penguin Classics\u2019 fiftieth anniversary edition<\/a> (it was originally published in 1967). Like the fine intricacy of frost on a window, Kavan\u2019s novel is hypnotically and delicately complex. The plot itself is deceptively simple: a nameless narrator seeks to rescue the object of his affection, the also nameless \u201cglass girl,\u201d from her abusive captor, referred to as \u201cthe warden.\u201d The quest traverses a frozen apocalyptic landscape, and the structure of the hero\u2019s journey is subverted by strange, hallucinatory scenes and shifts in narrative perspective.\u00a0The hero\u2019s antagonists are the totalitarian regimes and unrelenting frigid cold of his environment, but also the obsessive visions occurring in his mind. The introduction and afterword of this edition offer insight into the character of Kavan herself, and how the political and social allegories of the novel are layered with allegories for Kavan\u2019s personal struggle with trauma and addiction. Even half a century later, the concerns of the\u00a0Ice<\/i>\u00a0find serious foothold in the preoccupations of today, and, much like the substance for which it is named, brilliant and blinding moments are refracted through clear, sharp prose. \u2014Lauren Kane\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

When I picked up Rachel Ingalls\u2019s Mrs. Caliban<\/i><\/a>, I knew little about it beyond the pull quote on the front cover (\u201cA perfect novel,\u201d The New Yorker<\/i>). I slipped it into my carry-on because it was tiny, more novella than novel, and, ever the wild thrill seeker, I skipped the intro and read without any clue as to genre. But\u00a0Mrs. Caliban<\/i>,\u00a0<\/i>first published in 1982, <\/i>is genre-defying no matter how prepared you may be. It\u2019s a B-movie premise: Dorothy, a suburban housewife, encounters an aqua man, escaped from a laboratory, with the face of a frog and a smooth, green, muscled body. His name is Larry. Pulsing underneath the kitschy setup are soul and wit, longing and strangeness. Dorothy falls in love with Larry, who, on their first morning together, slips her nightdress from her shoulders with unabashed curiosity. Larry pronounces all the syllables of the word vegetables<\/em>, develops an adoration of avocados, watches television all day, and asks, of Dorothy\u2019s bathrobe, \u201cIs the dress you are wearing a garment of celebration?\u201d The plot races forward to perfectly plotted cataclysm. For all its merits, though,\u00a0Mrs. Caliban<\/i> has consistently failed to find its audience:\u00a0while beloved by writers like John Updike and Daniel Handler, it received little attention when it was first published. Now, thanks to New Directions, it’s back in print for the third time\u2014hopefully, this\u00a0one\u2019s the charm. It\u2019s a book you want to press into other people\u2019s hands. It has, in fact, been staff picked here before<\/a>: by my colleague, Caitlin, back in May. Immediately after finishing, I pushed it upon the person physically closest to me, my mother. She read it in a single sitting, then declared herself, \u201cunable to relate to stories about bored housewives.\u201d But the book is, I promise, so much more.\u00a0\u2014Nadja Spiegelman<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

It is 2018, and I am thinking about health and resolutions, but I\u2019m also thinking about nukes. I, like many, fear being blown into oblivion.\u00a0Command and Control<\/a><\/i>, a fascinating PBS documentary based on\u00a0Eric Schlosser\u2019s book of the same name<\/a>, bolsters this unease with a new thought: What if the warhead that dooms us is, in fact, one of our own? The film plays out like a thriller, carefully unfolding the tale of how a routine checkup on a Titan II missile nearly led to the decimation of Arkansas and the surrounding area in 1980. If that had happened, my parents, who met in Little Rock, wouldn\u2019t have, they wouldn\u2019t have met anyone ever again, and I wouldn\u2019t be writing this staff pick. (Which, depending on whom you ask about the last part, might be a good thing, but I count my blessings.) \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Carol Muske-Dukes<\/p><\/div>\n

Lately, I\u2019ve been curling up with the newest collection of poetry by Carol Muske-Dukes,\u00a0Blue Rose<\/i><\/a>. Though it\u2019s a slender compendium, comprising no more than thirty-two poems, its thin spine belies the gravity of what\u2019s inside: much of Muske-Duke\u2019s verse kneads at the hardships of womanhood. She writes of the wives in hijabs who line up in Srinagar, India, for a medical procedure, their husbands cursing outside (\u201cThey come when the pain compels them\u201d); of having an abortion after Roe v. Wade (\u201cWhen my name \/ was called I went to have it done and then knew \/ I had my life back but covered myself with blood\u2014 \/ mine and some not\u2014but still of me\u201d); of marriages\u00a0that end when one partner dies. Alongside those are homages to women that came before: the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, the poets Ina Coolbrith and Adrienne Rich, and Catherine Sophia Blake, wife of William Blake\u2014inspiration to persevere. Though nearly every poem heaves with grief or torment or even, at times, profound love, the lines that rattle me most are those by a daughter visiting her mother in a hospice: \u201cYou brought me here alive. \/ You taught me everything but how to let you die.\u201d (NB: \u201cNo Hands<\/a>,\u201d a poem from this collection, first appeared in issue no. 208 of the\u00a0Review<\/i>.) \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m always reading online about how to unplug. But a few weeks ago, I came across some advice I decided to take. I went to Settings > General > Accessibility and turned my iPhone to grayscale. The idea was, I\u2019d spend less time on my phone, because everything is lamer in Kansas than in Oz. Well, cut to today, I still use my phone about the same amount as I used to\u2014that part failed. But there is certainly a change. When I turn the color back on, I recoil, blinded. It\u2019s like opening a USA Today while eating a whole package of Peeps. Close the drapes! What I like is that grayscale softens. Grayscale soothes. And it satisfies an instinct for self-denial without\u00a0<\/i>requiring that you\u00a0do<\/i>\u00a0anything\u2014just endure a general drabness that I, for one, naturally take to. What\u2019s more, it\u2019s also fun for photography. It makes you see in a different way. In this snowstorm, everything is grayscale. The streets and shops and parked vespas\u2014all grayscale. It\u2019s a drag in some ways, but it\u2019s also magical. It mutes traffic noise. It softens. It soothes. I don\u2019t recommend that everyone bomb-cyclone their smart device. (I\u2019m only talking about phones\u2014I\u2019m not about to set my laptop to grayscale. I\u2019m not Henry David Thoreau.) But if you\u2019re grayscale-curious, you know where to go.\u00a0 Settings > General > Accessibility. There\u2019s no place like home. There\u2019s no place like home. \u2014Brent Katz<\/b><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jamila Woods<\/p><\/div>\n

Last month,\u00a0in its 2017 recap of my habits, Spotify notified me that my most-listened-to artists were the feel-good jazz singers Corinne Bailey Rae and Norah Jones. That\u2019s embarrassing for a hip youth such as myself, perhaps, but I present it to you unashamed. In this bad-weather week,\u00a0my\u00a0R & B rotation is\u00a0in need of a serious Emergen-C boost. That is currently being provided by\u00a0Jamila Woods\u2019s 2016 album\u00a0HEAVN<\/i><\/a>, which infuses my freezing apartment with playground beats and black revolutionary spirit. \u2014Eleanor Pritchett<\/strong><\/p>\n

That I have never read the Bible has long been, for me, a source of considerable consternation. It is difficult to say why, given I was raised both Jewish and secular, only that it strikes me as one of those things a person is obligated to know about, like\u00a0Hamlet\u00a0<\/i>or the latest\u00a0Game of Thrones.\u00a0<\/i>So when I heard, on the first episode of\u00a0The Paris Review<\/i>\u00a0Podcast<\/em>, that Maya Angelou kept a King James Bible on her bedside while she wrote\u2014along with\u00a0a\u00a0Roget\u2019s Thesaurus<\/i>, a dictionary, yellow pads, an ashtray, and a bottle of sherry\u2014I took it as justification to pick up a copy<\/a> over the break.\u00a0A lapsed Presbyterian friend of mine\u2014who, though now a disenchanted atheist, retains a fondness for peppering his speech with scripture\u2014recommended that I read Ecclesiastes, in particular. I would like Ecclesiastes, he said, because \u201cit\u2019s just some straight-down-the-middle cynical existentialism.\u201d It was, and I did. Some of my favorite verses: \u201cFolly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place. I have seen servants upon horses, and princes walking as servants upon the earth\u201d; \u201cBut if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many. All that cometh is vanity.\u201d It is not hard to understand Angelou\u2019s admiration for such lines; contained in them are strains of Shakespeare, a hint of Hemingway, and most of Twitter.\u00a0Of course, my mother was unsettled to find me at the kitchen table on Christmas morning reading any kind of Testament, Old or otherwise. She needn\u2019t worry, though: next come the ashtray and the bottle of sherry. \u2014Spencer Bokat-Lindell<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

Early on in Nathaniel Rich\u2019s King Zeno<\/i><\/span><\/a>, Isador Zeno describes his relationship to music \u201cas a conversation with the Dark Unknown\u2014the dimension of the world that was hidden to the world, that bubbled beneath the surface, or above the surface, or in parallel to the surface, what Miss Daisy called the \u2018spirit realm,\u2019 or what he\u2019d once heard Kid Ory describe, in a set at Economy Hall, as \u2018the dominion of the imperceivable.\u2019 \u201d Zeno, a brilliant but down-and-out, mixed-race cornetist, finds himself in the middle of a criminal conspiracy while he tries to keep his head, his music, and his young family alive in New Orleans in 1918. Oh, and there\u2019s an axe murderer on the loose<\/span><\/a>, but the troubled detective William Bastrop, just back from the literal trenches of World War I, is on the case. In Zeno and Bastrop\u2019s New Orleans, secrets get buried deep in primordial muck. But the city is changing, and just\u00a0as the digging of the Industrial Canal exposes centuries-old forests under the swamp, that world beneath the surface\u2014the \u201cdominion of the imperceivable\u201d\u2014has a memory older than time; it only takes someone getting dirty to uncover its mystery. King Zeno<\/i><\/span><\/a> is a great detective novel, a fitting tribute to the Crescent City.\u00a0\u2014Jeffery Gleaves<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  If a \u201cbeach read\u201d is light and easy reading for the warm summer months, then Anna Kavan\u2019s\u00a0Ice\u00a0is its cold-season equivalent, a book to complement\u00a0the contemplative stillness of winter weather.\u00a0Ice\u00a0was recommended to me by a colleague, and I picked up Penguin Classics\u2019 fiftieth anniversary edition (it was originally published in 1967). Like the fine intricacy […]<\/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":[1628,32412,32409,14533,32411,1442,32413,32416,8589,32418,32414,7867,1320,3527,16879,32410,32415,615,9677,27714,10893,28693,5245,32417,31190,9247,28692,32419,948,126,4035],"class_list":["post-119919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-adrienne-rich","tag-ana-kavan","tag-blue-rose","tag-carol-muske-dukes","tag-catherine-sophia-blake","tag-christmas","tag-command-and-control","tag-corinne-bailey-rae","tag-daniel-handler","tag-ecclesiastes","tag-eric-schlosser","tag-game-of-thrones","tag-hamlet","tag-hemingway","tag-ice","tag-ina-coolbrith","tag-jamila-woods","tag-john-updike","tag-king-james-bible","tag-little-rock","tag-maya-angelou","tag-mrs-caliban","tag-new-directions","tag-norah-jones","tag-paula-modersohn-becker","tag-penguin-classics","tag-rachel-ingalls","tag-roe-v-wade","tag-shakespeare","tag-twitter","tag-william-blake"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff 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