{"id":127503,"date":"2018-07-13T13:00:43","date_gmt":"2018-07-13T17:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=127503"},"modified":"2018-07-13T13:05:24","modified_gmt":"2018-07-13T17:05:24","slug":"staff-picks-sexy-pulp-blockheaded-heroines-and-terrifying-trees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/07\/13\/staff-picks-sexy-pulp-blockheaded-heroines-and-terrifying-trees\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Sexy Pulp, Blockheaded Heroines, and Terrifying Trees"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Virginie Despentes\u2019s \u201890s feminist punk pulp fiction makes for the best summer reading\u2014all of her sparkling rage goes incandescent in the sunshine with a glass of something effervescent. Luckily, Feminist Press will be publishing\u00a0Pretty Things<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(translated by Emma Ramadan) on\u00a0August 14th<\/span>. First published in France in 1998, it\u2019s the story two identical twins: Claudine, the hyper-sexualized man-eating \u201cpretty one,\u201d and Pauline, the bitter reclusive \u201csmart one,\u201d who dresses in baggy sweaters and has never before shaved her legs. Beyond a body, the only thing the sisters seem to share is an explosive anger at men and a complete disdain for each other. When Pauline decides to impersonate Claudine, she pulls on the trappings of femininity like a heavy high camp drag routine, taking shaky steps through Paris\u2019s 18th arrondissement in Claudine\u2019s high heels.<\/p>\n

She never thought it was possible to go out like that without someone shouting, \u201cWhere\u2019s the costume party?\u201d Her appearance, legs on display, silhouette transformed. And no one realizes that she\u2019s not at all like that. For the first time she understands: No girl is like that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s pulp in every sense: propulsively readable, violent, sexy, with all the satisfaction of an inevitable ending. And yet it\u2019s also a feminist parable, blunt and unrelenting in its wrath, and it feels as fresh now as it would have ten years ago. Despentes\u2014who is also a cultural critic and filmmaker\u2014was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International for\u00a0Vernon Subutex<\/em>, which will be coming out from FSG this fall. If you haven’t read her yet, it’s time to start at the beginning. \u2014Nadja Spiegelman<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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At this point in history, it\u2019s fair to say Louisiana folk know a thing or two about masks, so I was curious to watch \u201cMask Maker<\/a>,\u201d the latest video from Baton Rouge-to-Los Angeles duo Moon Honey.\u00a0I instantly recognized front woman Jessica Joy\u2019s vocals: her voice warbles like Joanna Newsom\u2019s, if Joanna had somewhere to be. Paired with Andrew Martin\u2019s psychedelic guitar, the duo\u2019s sound is pretty damn infectious\u2014and that\u2019s before pictures. \u201cMask Maker\u201d is live-action stop-motion, if I\u2019m describing it right, and does more with masks\u2014or specifically, one four-sided mask\u2014than anything I saw\u00a0in seven years<\/span>\u00a0of Carnival. I don\u2019t want to give away the plot of the four-minute video, but things do not go well for our blockheaded heroine, and the way the cubed mask spins, in time with a very catchy hook, does more to convey the breadth of human emotion than many a midcentury novel. \u2014Emily Nemens<\/strong><\/p>\n

Grief wanders hospital corridors; it sits in empty kitchens and wakes in the middle of the night; times passes as it stares out the window. It is a complicated and adult business, but the unhappy reality is that it is not the preserve of adults. Grief forces itself upon all ages. This is the compulsory truth of children\u2019s novel, A Monster Calls,<\/em> by Patrick Ness. Originally conceived by the author Siobhan Dowd during a period of ill health, the idea was taken up by Ness and illustrator Jim Kay following Dowd\u2019s death. It is the story of thirteen-year-old Conor and his struggles with his mother’s mortality\u2014like Dowd, the mother in A Monster Calls <\/em>has terminal cancer. As her condition deteriorates, an ancient and terrifying yew tree comes to life and visits the young boy. Readers slowly discover the reason behind these appearances, and when the inevitable lesson comes it is a suitably knotty one: guilt, we learn, is one of grief\u2019s horrors. This is not a traditional message for a thirteen-year-old protagonist; nor a common one for young readers. A Monster Calls <\/em>is a harrowing book. As a kid, I never quite got over Piggy\u2019s death in Lord of the Flies<\/em>; as an adult, I don\u2019t think I’ll get over Conor sitting on his mother\u2019s hospital bed, holding her hand. Wee laddies aren’t supposed to lose their mums. \u2014Robin Jones<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

Is there room for nice people on television anymore? With brow-furrowed reporters in slick suits and endless hours of snickering late-night talk show hosts, turning your TV on is bound to confer dread. Morgan Neville\u2019s documentary about Mr. Fred Rogers\u2014who I remember from my childhood as a saccharine, sweater-wearing family man\u2014has been branded as a temporary remedy for the news cycle, transporting audiences back to a \u201csimpler time\u201d. Since the release of\u00a0Won\u2019t You Be My Neighbor?<\/em>, critics have raved about the heartwarming innocence that the film induces. At first, Neville\u2019s documentary seems to relief from current events, replacing presidents with puppets and politics with songs. His actual aim, however, is to uncover the truth about Mr. Rogers, a man who never wanted his audience to escape the problems of the world\u2014he wanted us to understand them. Through the various testimonials of those who knew Mr. Rogers, the doc drives home that despite what we like to believe, the Neighborhood wasn\u2019t without its flaws. Fear and conflict were as much a part of the Neighborhood as they are of the real world. Mr. Rogers wasn\u2019t smoothing over the difficult things in life, but teaching us how to deal with them. This disarmingly relevant film insists that even though our current situation (political or otherwise) may seem daunting, we can still be better towards one another. \u2014Madeline Day<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Oscar Wilde sailed to America on Christmas Eve, 1881, for a 50-date lecture tour, he had only a slim volume of poetry to his name. Mich\u00e8le Mendelssohn\u2019s new biography, Making Oscar Wilde<\/em>, offers an astonishing window into Wilde\u2019s American flaneuring, adding to what even extreme Oscar-obsessives like me thought they knew. In America, Wilde\u2019s androgyny didn\u2019t go over well with the \u201cgentleman\u201d classes, who grumbled when their wives took notice of the aesthete\u2019s gender-bending sex appeal. Equally concerning was his Irish background; Mendelssohn has uncovered numerous newspaper cartoons that reimagine Wilde as African. Without a doubt, these details of the lecture tour are Mendelssohn\u2019s chief update to Wildean studies; most of the rest is familiar. The title, Making Oscar<\/em> Wilde, <\/em>promises something much more expansive than what you get; it\u2019s not at all a study of Wilde\u2019s intellectual or scholastic development (there\u2019s very little on Walter Pater and John Ruskin, and not a word on J.K. Huysmans). Yet Mendelssohn makes a serious endeavor at excavating beyond Wilde\u2019s aphorisms, outfits, and scandals. This is a sociological biography, one that feels very current in its study of racist scapegoating in the U.S., and how that culture left an imprint on an eccentric foreign visitor with a fading Irish accent. \u2014Ben Shields<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

In her magnificent collection of essays, Sidewalks<\/em>, Valeria Luiselli utilizes relingos<\/em>, vacant or empty spaces, as a way to give meaning to gaps or erasures in text, in architecture, and in the self. Laura van den Berg\u2019s beautiful and unsettling new novel, The Third Hotel<\/em>, picks up a similar strand, constructing a narrative of memory, geography, loss, and emptiness. Van den Berg\u2019s novel is a palimpsest of B-grade Latin American horror films, the psychology of grief, and the very idea of narrative as a meaning-making enterprise. It is a dazzling novel in which Cuba is rendered a terrain vague, a kind of interstitial or liminal space between the world of the living and the memory of the dead. Julio Cort\u00e1zar could see himself walking the partially erased and re-inscribed streets of van den Berg\u2019s imagination, but in the end those streets are, without a doubt, van den Berg\u2019s own.\u00a0 \u2014Christian Kiefer<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Virginie Despentes\u2019s \u201890s feminist punk pulp fiction makes for the best summer reading\u2014all of her sparkling rage goes incandescent in the sunshine with a glass of something effervescent. Luckily, Feminist Press will be publishing\u00a0Pretty Things\u00a0(translated by Emma Ramadan) on\u00a0August 14th. First published in France in 1998, it\u2019s the story two identical twins: Claudine, the hyper-sexualized […]<\/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":[34697,32085,11045,12419,3920,34700,34695,34696,16530,1435,34694,34702,34698,34701,13781,842,34699],"class_list":["post-127503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-a-monster-calls","tag-emma-ramadan","tag-feminist-press","tag-jim-kay","tag-laura-van-den-berg","tag-making-oscar-wilde","tag-mask-maker","tag-moon-honey","tag-mr-rogers","tag-oscar-wilde","tag-pretty-things","tag-sidewalks","tag-siobhan-dowd","tag-the-third-hotel","tag-valeria-luiselli","tag-virginie-despentes","tag-wont-you-be-my-neighbor"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Sexy Pulp, Blockheaded Heroines, and Terrifying Trees 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