{"id":164527,"date":"2023-06-06T11:00:48","date_gmt":"2023-06-06T15:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=164527"},"modified":"2023-06-06T10:37:31","modified_gmt":"2023-06-06T14:37:31","slug":"announcing-our-summer-issue-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/06\/06\/announcing-our-summer-issue-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing Our Summer Issue"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Not long ago, during a spring clean, I came across one of the dozen or so notebooks in which I\u2019d been keeping a diary back in 2020, and found myself sitting on the floor to read. I was expecting the writing to be disappointing (it was) and that I\u2019d feel a mixture of embarrassment and exasperation at my repetitive thought patterns (I did). I was more surprised to realize that, having faithfully kept a near-daily record of my life during one of the most eventful periods in recent American history, what I\u2019d written was almost exclusively about cars, and my monthslong efforts to buy one. \u201cB. offered to drive me to see the Yaris,\u201d a typical passage begins. \u201cI brought water, pears, chocolate, cigs. Talked about cars all the way. He seemed subdued.\u201d Another entry, in an apparently unconscious tribute to Daphne du Maurier, opens: \u201cLast night I got into Volvo C30s again.\u201d There are accounts of test drives: \u201cDriving the automatic: never quite being able to tell if it is off or just v. quiet.\u201d And moments of reflection: \u201cS. sent me a picture of his pickup and many planks of wood. Jealous of male agency.\u201d And then, in the middle of one September entry: \u201cMum asked if I had spoken to shrink about the car issue.\u201d <\/p>\n

We at the\u00a0Review<\/em>\u00a0take an especial pleasure, as readers, in the diary form: that peculiar mixture of performance and unwitting self-revelation, of shapelessness and obsessive (occasionally deranged) selectivity; that sense of a narrative unfolding in real time, almost without the author\u2019s permission. And while the\u00a0Review<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t do themes, as we were putting together our new Summer issue,\u00a0no. 244<\/a>, it was hard not to notice our partiality peeking through.<\/p>\n

In the issue, Lydia Davis shares\u00a0selections<\/a>\u00a0from her 1996 journal, and they often read like warm-up scales for her exquisitely off-kilter stories. (\u201cFor lunch\u2014a huge potato and a glass of milk.\u201d) You\u2019ll also find masterful uses of the diary as a fictional device. The Brazilian writer Juliana Leite\u2019s \u201cMy Good Friend<\/a>,\u201d translated by Zo\u00eb Perry, is an elderly widow\u2019s apparently unremarkable Sunday-evening entry\u2014\u201cAbout the roof repair, I have nothing new to report\u201d\u2014that turns into a story of mostly unspoken decadeslong love. And James Lasdun\u2019s \u201cHelen<\/a>\u201d features excerpts from the journal of a woman who lives in what the narrator describes as a \u201cstate of incandescent, almost spiritual horror,\u201d and whose crippling self-consciousness doesn\u2019t protect her from humiliations the reader can see coming.<\/p>\n

Also in\u00a0issue no. 244<\/a>, John Keene, in an\u00a0Art of Fiction<\/a>\u00a0interview with Aaron Robertson, describes how blogging heralded his recovery as a writer after losing drafts of several of the stories that eventually became\u00a0Counternarratives<\/em>. And Sharon Olds, in an\u00a0Art of Poetry<\/a>\u00a0interview, tells Jessica Laser about the need to keep one\u2019s art and biography separate, especially when they are clearly not. Keeping a diary might be therapeutic, Olds explains, but \u201cwriting a poem to understand yourself better would be like making a cup with no clay, or maybe like having the clay but not making the cup.\u201d She concludes, \u201cIf I had to choose between a poem being therapeutic and it being a better poem, I\u2019d want it to be a better poem.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe take an especial pleasure, as readers, in the diary form: that peculiar mixture of performance and unwitting self-revelation, of shapelessness and obsessive (occasionally deranged) selectivity.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2291,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[30430,67827,68676],"class_list":["post-164527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-letter-from-the-editor","tag-announcement","tag-featured","tag-issue-244"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAnnouncing Our Summer Issue by Emily Stokes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"June 6, 2023 \u2013 \u201cWe take an especial pleasure, as readers, in the diary form: that peculiar mixture of performance and unwitting self-revelation, of shapelessness and obsessive (occasionally deranged) selectivity.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta 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