This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...morePosts Tagged: Paris Review
Here’s Your Beginning: A Conversation with Lynn Freed
Lynn Freed discussions her recent essay collection, The Romance of Elsewhere, the importance of a good first sentence, and the risks involved in writing irony.
...more
Drawing Close to the Void: Talking with Patty Yumi Cottrell
Patty Yumi Cottrell discusses her debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, how she accesses “the enraptured state” to write, and dreaming as an art form.
...moreThis Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreImagining Orsinia
I begin to find my way about, to feel myself at home, here in Orsenya, matrya miya, my motherland. I can live here, and find out who else lives here and what they do, and tell stories about it. And so I did. Over at the Paris Review, read an excerpt from the author’s introduction to Ursula […]
...moreHow Yellow Is Yellow Enough?
At the Paris Review, Monica Youn discusses her latest “Twinkie” poem, “Goldacre,” written after last year’s Best American Poetry controversy: It was around the same time that I first heard the insult “Twinkie”—yellow on the outside, white on the inside—a label I brooded over. New acquaintances seemed surprised, judgmental, to learn that I couldn’t speak Korean, had […]
...moreFiguring It Out En Route
Growing up does not mean we stop reading Marxist critiques or hating ourselves or feeling the grotesque contrasts writ large on every page of our petty lives. At the Paris Review blog, Sadie Stein offers a hilarious peek into her thoughts during a flight to San Diego, addressed to the teenage boy she sat next to […]
...morePublishing’s Culture of Positive
Recently, Jessa Crispin shocked the literary world by announcing she would be closing Bookslut, the literary blog she started fourteen years ago. Since then she has stirred some controversy, calling the Paris Review “boring as fuck” (the Paris Review took the critique in stride, offering a 10% discount with the code BORINGASFUCK) and attacking online literary […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Mark Leyner
Mark Leyner discusses his new novel, Gone with the Mind, about a failed novelist, Mark Leyner, who gives a reading to his mom in an almost-deserted food court.
...moreThe British and American Henry James
The memorial in Chelsea Old Church tactfully describes him as “a resident of this parish who renounced a cherished citizenship to give his allegiance to England in the first year of the Great War”—the “cherished” insisting from the grave that James had been a good American. The Paris Review marks the hundredth anniversary of Henry James’s […]
...moreWrit in Water
John Keats died on February 23rd, 1821. The Paris Review muses on the death obsessed poet’s life, and what he cryptically requested be written on his tombstone: Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
...moreStill Alive
Far from dying out, short stories have become more popular over the last five years. For the New York Times, Paris Review editor Lorin Stein articulates the value of literary solitude in a public world: You can’t be worrying how you sound. You can’t wonder whether you or your characters are likable or smart or […]
...moreRemembering Paul West
The Paris Review remembers Paul West, an absurdist author of over fifty books. Excerpts from his satire, Portable People, can be found here: Fat men are the wisest dreamers. I always ate up sleep, on my back or side virtually weightless, and here in a cell on the lip of oblivion I still munch the same […]
...moreOn Becoming: Thoughts from Sheila Heti
And I just thought, “I have to teach myself how to write in a new way.” … I just wanted so badly to figure this out, to figure out how to write. As part of the Paris Review’s “My First Time” series, the lovely and ingenious Sheila Heti reflects on becoming a writer, learning the […]
...moreA Classroom of Atticus F., G., and H.
It has been a bad summer for the iconic characters of Southern literature. Over at the Paris Review, Sadie Stein takes a look at the unfortunate facts: Atticus was kind of a racist, and Atticus is the most popular male baby name in 2015. Maybe, Stein surmises, it’s impossible to avoid baggage with any name. She […]
...moreThe Old Sad Soak
The Old Soak is a hauntingly one-note character, and one wonders exactly what about his alcoholism made him such a bankable franchise. Imagine the pitch meetings that followed: “He’s a lush, see? He wants to booze it up, but he can’t, because of that cursed eighteenth amendment!” Yuks ensue, contracts are signed, and everyone has […]
...moreI Have Wasted My Life
Over at the Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring talks about James Wright’s famous epiphanic poem Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota, in conjunction with Ann Beattie’s new story Yancey, and the general discussion and controversy of the poem’s famous last line: “I have wasted my life.”
...moreA Novel Throwback
Back in April, the Washington Post suggested magazines should return to the days of Dickens and serialize novels again, recommending that the Paris Review lead the charge. Now, the Paris Review has answered the call by serializing Chris Bachelder’s new novel, The Throwback Special. You can read the first of four installments here.
...moreDante’s Horoscope: A Long, Prose-Filled Journey
This year marks Dante’s 750th birthday. But on what date should The Rumpus host our purgatorio-themed party? More importantly, what was Dante’s zodiac sign? If you’re a fastidious reader of The Divine Comedy and your horoscope, you should know the answer without a date: Dante’s journey to the Underworld is a classic Gemini move. More […]
...moreAuthors Dish on Their First Time
As a first time novelist, I thought it would be fun to read what people had said about my book [on Amazon]… One of them said that it read like an MFA exercise. And that really hurt, because it was an MFA exercise. That’s J. Robert Lennon, author of The Secret History, talking about writing […]
...moreHow to Buy Heidi Julavits’s Self on eBay
Author Heidi Julavits’s predominant self is hiding inside this matryoshka doll. Over at the Paris Review, in an interview with Leanne Shapton, Julavits answers each question with an eBay auction listing. What listing would you choose to answer the query, “What sort of highly valuable or beloved object would you feed to a shark to save […]
...moreThe Scatology of Karl Ove Knausgaard
Finally, the Paris Review answers the question we’ve all been wondering about Karl Ove Knausgaard and his mega-novel My Struggle: what’s with all the shitting? That gratuitous attention to detail may explain why these scenes jump out at readers, but it doesn’t explain Knausgaard’s minor obsession with shit. To be sure, the inclusion of these […]
...moreThe Narrative of Zelda
In response to the news that Nintendo and Netflix may be developing a Legend of Zelda TV series, Ted Trautman at the Paris Review blog examines the character development and narrative structure (or lack thereof) of video games and wonders if it’s possible for a video game to tell a good story.
...moreThe Multitalented Victor Hugo
Although Victor Hugo is best known for his novels, the author had an avid interest in the visual arts as well. However, Hugo didn’t publish his visual artwork, fearful that his drawings might interfere with his literary projects. According to his son’s notes about his father’s process, Hugo would often complete his drawings “with a […]
...moreChekhov in His Own Words
All that is nonsense though. Write what you like. If you haven’t facts make up with lyricism. In 1892, Anton Chekhov sent a letter to V. A. Tihonov including a fictitious 200-word bio. 123 years later to the day, the letter has been translated into English by Constance Garnett over at the Paris Review.
...morePlotting Plot
With the help of math and computers, a University of Nebraska English professor has been plotting the basic shapes of novels (spoiler: there are six), but this time in a new way. Instead of focusing on plot as action, Matthew Jockers is tracking the positive or negative charge of words to reveal plot as emotional […]
...moreSearching for Cervantes
After a Times article last March criticized Spain (and its literary establishment) for failing to unravel the mystery of the precise location of Miguel de Cervantes’s grave, a reinvigorated search may have finally yielded results. Cervantes was buried in Madrid’s Trinitarias convent, but the specific site was not marked (or not marked well); the discovery […]
...moreWord of the Day: Frigiferous
(adj.); bearing or bringing cold; from the Latin frigus (“cold”) There’s no denying it, as much as we might wish to: the Northern Hemisphere is in the midst of the coldest part of the year. We temper the icy storms with romantic images of thick woollen scarves and roaring fires and leftover roasted chestnuts, but […]
...moreMark Strand, 1934–2014
And when you report back to your own daily world after experiencing the strangeness of a world sort of recombined and reordered in the depths of a poet’s soul, the world looks fresher somehow. To pay homage to the passing of Mark Strand last Saturday, The Paris Review opened its archive and published a manuscript […]
...moreThe Disaster of the American Book Awards
In essence, the American Book Awards are to the National Book Awards as New Coke is to Coca-Cola Classic, i.e., a complete fucking disaster, one that all parties involved would prefer to forget. The Paris Review takes a look at the brief, dark moment when the National Book Awards tried to re-brand themselves.
...more