In a piece featured on the Paris Review’s website, Sadie Stein encourages readers to check out the New York Public Library’s exhibition “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter.” The exhibition features original sketches and manuscripts of beloved children’s books. All these characters are complex, somewhat insolent, defiant, desperate for attention and love, and […]
...moreEver droll, Sadie Stein writes in the Paris Review about the reaction we’re (all) prone to have when people recommend literature based on our professed likes and dislikes: When someone says I will like something, I tend to assume the something in question will be precious, tedious, and often aggressively eccentric. Sometimes I do like these things, which is […]
...moreI came from, not a small town, but basically not a very interesting place…So it was very important for me not to rebel but simply to get away, to go away. Travel writing doesn’t have to be lackluster. It can be smart and a pleasure to read, a form of literature in its own right, […]
...moreThe girls described in Emma Cline’s essay “See Me” are hopelessly lost in their shared desire to be noticed. Cline begins her essay by reflecting on her own adolescence experience of corresponding with a middle-aged man who promised to cast her in a film being made about his life. The two met on the streets of […]
...more“Why do writers find the train such a fruitful work environment?” This is the question Jessica Gross sets out to answer in a recent piece published by The Paris Review, in which she describes her experience on a train to Chicago. The journey is bounded… I know when it will end… My main job is to […]
...moreSadie Stein makes the worst coffee, or so she says in the Paris Review. Her coffee is always “awful in a different way,” sometimes too bitter, and at other times, too weak. Stein reflects on her childhood love of Sleeping Beauty: “I was fascinated by the notion that, no matter how far you run, you cannot […]
...moreDavid L. Ulin writes about his first book(s) in an essay featured by The Paris Review. He recounts boyhood ambitions, drafts that never came to be any more than that, and the labors that resulted in a book that he could call his own. The book scared the shit out of me; can I say […]
...moreBut what I loved most about Baldwin’s writing was that he didn’t make me feel, as a young white guy, that I had no right to be thriving on his work and taking it all so personally… I could see my large family and myself mirrored in the world of James Baldwin’s fiction. In an […]
...more“The Apparent Author,” Meriç Algün Ringborg’s latest exhibition in Istanbul’s Gallery NON, presents a sound installation of an author talking about “her artistic goals, ambitions, and potentials,” as Rumpus contributor Kaya Genc writes in The Paris Review. Genc makes a startling observation about the author’s workplace: there is “a shelf holding more than one hundred […]
...moreAs the saying has it, a dog is a man’s best friend, but dogs are not always the pets of choice among the literary greats. Ernest Hemingway had his six-toed cats, Flannery O’Connor had her peacocks, and Vladimir Nabokov had his butterflies as Rumpus contributor Tim Taranto illustrates in his piece “Author’s Best Friend: The […]
...moreThere are two Faulkners, and each of these Faulkners is embodied by one of the author’s two favorite drinks, as Robert Moor posits in a recent Paris Review article. The julep is High Faulknerian. Taking in the dense, lush language in his most lauded works—As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom!…But […]
...more“It’s even possible that there’s something retrospective in the nature of writing itself. Probably every writer’s first piece of writing, if it were possible to excavate such a thing, would be found to look backward. Writing tries to fix the past—to hold it in place and sometimes in imagination to improve it.” Author Caleb Crain […]
...moreSummer is the most appropriate time to reminisce about those “character-building” odd-jobs of yesteryear. Sometimes perusing a book’s dust-jacket, you learn that your literary idol endured some menial labor or surprising occupation and it confirms their humanity. In the spirit of this, the Paris Review Daily has got some anecdotal bits about authors and their […]
...moreBottles of infused vodka were upturned last night at Russian Samovar for the return of the FSG Reading Series. With Lydia Davis and David Means slated to read, the bar on the second floor was papered with poets, writers and confederates of the publishing industry.
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