This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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Posts Tagged: The Paris Review
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreDreaming of Oscar
Katherine you must come to my table. I’ve got Oscar Wilde there. He’s the most marvelous man I ever met. He’s splendid! Over at the Paris Review Daily, Dan Piepenbring posted an excerpt from Katherine Mansfield’s 1920 letter to her husband describing a dream in which she met the playwright Oscar Wilde.
...moreBorn-Again Penguins
If you could only bring one book to a remote island infested by penguins, what would it be? The Paris Review’s Dan Piepenbring has a write-up of Nobel Laureate Anatole France’s novel Penguin Island, which is pretty much what it sounds like.
...moreA Productive Unhappiness
Why is it that knowing how to remain alone in Paris for a year in a miserable room teaches a man more than a hundred literary salons and forty years’ experience of ‘Parisian life’? Over at the Paris Review Daily, Alice Kaplan, author of the new biography Looking for the Stranger, writes about Albert Camus’s […]
...moreOn the Road
In his monthly series “The Lives of Others” over at the Paris Review, Edward White introduces us to globe-trotting Turkish writer, Evliya Çelebi, and the esoteric but lively book of travel stories he penned almost four centuries ago: Evliya so adored the bustling energy of Istanbul that he dedicated the first volume of the Seyahatname to […]
...moreTome of Black Womanhood
One thing that interests me about Beyoncé is who her predecessors are, and how she’s a kind of symbol for all the different ways that black women are revered but also surveilled in a really intense way, put on display. Morgan Parker’s poetry collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, comes out in 2017. […]
...moreDigital Emotions
Over at the Paris Review Daily, Wei Tchou explores writers’ presentation of their emotions via social media, and what that means for how their work is judged. Tchou concludes: Overblown emotional posturing will go on, despite the occasional backlash, so long as clicks and voyeurism are the currency of the web. But perhaps with time, and […]
...moreHelen DeWitt’s First Time
Helen DeWitt is interviewed by the Paris Review as part of their “My First Time” interview series, talking about the disillusioning process of having The Last Samurai published.
...moreOrdinary Days of Grandeur
Don’t miss the weekly staff picks over at the Paris Review. Lorin Stein recommends Brenda Shaughnessy’s soulful and stripped down So Much Synth, Jeffery Gleaves praises “mother writer” Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors, and Caitlin Youngquist writes of Bernadette Mayer’s Works and Days, “Hardly any of Mayer’s days are spectacular, but her eye is so keenly […]
...moreWhat’s in a Name?
If there are indeed an infinite number of universes, it’s nice to think there might be one where all of the books we have come to know bear their original, author-intended titles. For the Paris Review, Tony Tulathimutte pulls back the curtain on the process of book naming to reveal that the title we see […]
...moreFrom Pen to Pentium
For many writers, after all, a word processor was as much an appliance as it was a deeply individualized instrument—more fax machine than fountain pen. … Still, the plastic, glass, and silicon devices had stories to tell, just as did the people pictured with them. Over at the Paris Review, University of Maryland Professor Matthew […]
...moreSerendipity in Life and Literature
Be unpredictable, including to yourself. So there’s the question of how do you go about finding things—or better their finding you? You have to be open to surprise and at the same time assiduous in pursuing the things you are really interested in. You have to be patient. And along the way when you are […]
...moreA Major Poet of Quiet
Keith Waldrop is a quiet major poet, a major poet of quiet. His accomplishment is difficult to describe because his work refuses, in Bartleby-like fashion, the twin traps of impassivity and affectation… Over at the Paris Review, Ben Lerner pens a great profile of poet Keith Waldrop.
...moreThe Last Pilot
Most writers have imagined the scene of their own death—in the hopes of stylizing the moment or savoring the thought of someone sifting through and publishing their old manuscripts. It seems that James Tate, even in death, outdid us all by leaving his earthly post in the most writerly way possible: with a delightful last […]
...moreJust Dance
Well, that’s the point of being alone—it’s not anything to do with you. It’s about being something in someone else’s life, and no one ever knows the difference, or the truth. That’s why people like bad movies and bad fiction, and it’s worth it, it’s worth it, it’s worth it. Over at the Paris Review, Sadie […]
...moreHave Fish, Will Travel
Italian novelist, essayist, and scholar Umberto Ecco passed away last Friday. The Paris Review has republished an essay by Ecco that originally appeared in its pages back in 1994. “Traveling with a Salmon” is about traveling with a salmon, but also about communication: My recent journey was brief: one day in Stockholm and three in London. In […]
...moreBen Lerner’s First Time
If you’re referring to a bomb as a daisy cutter it’s easier to distance yourself from the embodied reality of the consequence of a policy. The Paris Review talks with Ben Lerner about his first book of poems, The Lichtenberg Figures: his first inspirations in Marjorie Welish and wine, the anxiety and self-doubt of the […]
...moreA Visual Guide for “How to Be Perfect”
Count among your true friends people of various stations of life. Do not exclaim, “Isn’t technology wonderful!” Learn how to whistle at earsplitting volume. Still hunting for a good New Year’s resolution? No worries! Over at the Paris Review, Rumpus illustrator Jason Novak has endeavored to help you out with some visual inspiration, taking a […]
...moreDisplaced in the Grotesque
O’Connor is so often remembered as a misanthropic homebody—but she was comforted by the idea of a God that gave preferential treatment to the most vulnerable among us. For the Paris Review, Dave Griffith writes about reading Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person,” a story of immigrants in O’Connor’s classic grotesque South, during the global refugee crisis.
...moreStudent and Teacher, Man and God
At the Paris Review, H.S. Cross analyzes Ernest Raymond’s 1922 novel, Tell England. He explores the unique and charged relationships between a schoolteacher, Radley, and his students, Ray and Doe. The boys have an unexpected and, at least initially, seemingly erotic reverence for their teacher, which, Cross concludes, reflects the confusing and sacrificial relationship between man and […]
...moreLorin Stein, Defender of Ambiguity
With a very few exceptions, everything in the book was written by someone in his or her 30s. Nowadays that seems to be the age at which many writers come into their own. The moment when they have something to say and the tools to say it. Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, on why […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Jenny Johnson
Poet Jenny Johnson discusses her forthcoming debut collection, In Full Velvet, phobias, courage, the dual consciousness of queer lovers, and what it means to belong.
...moreA Game About a Memoir About Games
Michael Clune learned about the space between our own minds and those of others through video games. You can bridge that mental space by reading Gamelife, his memoir of a childhood spent playing Suspended and The Bard’s Tale II. Or you can get into his head the same way he learned how to get out […]
...moreBeig’s “Disappearing World”
For the Paris Review, Matthew Neill Null wonders why American presses have yet to “take up” the catalog of German novelist Maria Beig, speculating that some might see her depiction of rural life as “too pat”: Will anyone in America give a damn about Beig? It’s hard to imagine our glittering zeitgest machine ever getting behind her, […]
...moreNancy Drew, Girl Detective and Mentally Unstable Shape-Shifter
In her many faces, the detective has always been both infinite and infinitely replicable, a paper-doll chain folded easily into a single entity, or expanded accordion-style into a string of captivating almost-duplicates. To become a top-rate teenage sleuth, you’ve got to prioritize: skip the movies and stick to the Morse Code manuals, no matter how […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Benjamin Percy
Benjamin Percy discusses his latest novel, The Dead Lands, why it’s all about keeping language fresh, and his dream job writing for DC Comics.
...moreThe Survival of Scripts
Newspapers might be threatened by e-readers, technology may have supplanted books, and recipes can be found online in abundance. But scripts? Scripts are necessary. Scripts are tangible. They bow before no millennial’s avowedly shortened attention span. The Paris Review argues that while everything else goes digital, scripts will always be in print.
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The Rumpus Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh discusses her first full-length novel, Eileen, betrayal, self-aware narrators, and the catalytic properties of friendship.
...moreDry Magazines
Desert managed, impressively, to publish lively, intelligent writing about a very dry place, month after month. Dan Piepenbring browsed through archive.org’s huge magazine collection to discover Desert, a publication from the Southwest entirely devoted to… deserts! You can read more and take a look at some of the magazine’s covers over at the Paris Review.
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