{"id":75439,"date":"2014-08-14T19:45:58","date_gmt":"2014-08-14T23:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=75439"},"modified":"2014-08-14T20:44:34","modified_gmt":"2014-08-15T00:44:34","slug":"beach-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/14\/beach-read\/","title":{"rendered":"Beach Read"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"coney-island-new-york-87\"<\/a>

Image via Urban75.org<\/p><\/div>\n

Over at the LRB <\/em>blog, Peter Pomerantsev has an affecting story about love, lies, and hair in Brighton Beach<\/a>\u2014you know,<\/p>\n

\n

the Russian ghetto where Brooklyn meets the ocean, a last stop on the subway from Manhattan. In the evening the boardwalk would be full of Russian immigrants with gaudy haircuts and fur-wrap finery, and as the light faded you could forget you were in America.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He tells of a time in 1982\u2014and this is a true story\u2014when an unemployed electrician named Lev found himself spinning a web of lies in pursuit of a beautiful young woman. What captivated him was her alluring, progressive hairdo: \u201cshaved at the back with a Siouxsie Sioux spiked mop on top. He couldn\u2019t stop staring at it.\u201d Lev told the woman he was an intellectual, a Soviet dissident\u2014he wasn\u2019t. He said he was single\u2014he was married, with kids. He said he\u2019d been arrested by the KGB\u2014he hadn\u2019t been.<\/p>\n

The story takes a tragicomic turn in the end that I won\u2019t spoil here, except to say that it involves the woman\u2019s haircut and has a singularly arresting image of a stroll on the Brighton Beach boardwalk. Read it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Those with no tolerance for shameless plugs can stop reading now, because I\u2019m only about to mention our subscription deal with the\u00a0LRB<\/em>, which is, like this story, a kind of summer romance, and is, unlike this story, not sad in the slightest. Subscribe now<\/a> and you\u2019ll save on both magazines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at the LRB blog, Peter Pomerantsev has an affecting story about love, lies, and hair in Brighton Beach\u2014you know, the Russian ghetto where Brooklyn meets the ocean, a last stop on the subway from Manhattan. In the evening the boardwalk would be full of Russian immigrants with gaudy haircuts and fur-wrap finery, and as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[14982,3935,14981,14984,14980,447,14983,14985,92],"class_list":["post-75439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-beaches","tag-brighton-beach","tag-haircuts","tag-lrb","tag-peter-pomerantsev","tag-russia","tag-salons","tag-subscription-deal","tag-summer"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Perfect Beach Read<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A story about love, lies, and hair in Brighton Beach\u2014as well as our subscription deal with the London Review of Books.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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