TOBI'S DESK

“At a time when heated conversations about diversity and cultural appropriation in literature abound, The Loved Ones is a wondrous gift, a pleasant reminder that there are many thoughtful writers who can create believable characters of multiple races, ethnicities, and genders without relying on caricature or stereotypes.” We’re all warm inside from Necessary Fiction ‘s  lovely review  of Millions staff writer  Sonya Chung ‘s novel, which we featured in our second-half 2016 book preview . The post Loving The Loved Ones appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2g9m9Jb

Hurvin Anderson’s exhibition “ Foreign Body ” is at Michael Werner Gallery in New York through January 14. Anderson is a British painter of Jamaican descent: “The first time I went to Jamaica, I was fourteen,” he told Sotheby’s a few years ago. “ My elder siblings all came from there and I got to know the island through them . I wasn’t born there, so I didn’t actually fit in. I feel more British than Jamaican at times and vice versa. My painting is a dialogue between these two territories -trying to get these two places to meet. Hurvin Anderson, Studio Drawing 9 , 2012, acrylic on drafting film, 19″ x 33″ Rootstock , 2016, acrylic, oil on canvas, 110 1/4″ x 84 3/4″ Studio Drawing 13 , 2010, acrylic on paper, 6 1/4″ x 8 3/4″ Studio Drawing 15 , 2016, acrylic on paper, 94 1/2″ x 106 1/4″ Uhuru , 2016, acrylic on canvas, 51 1/4″ x 39 1/4″ Studio Drawing 20 , 2015, ink on drafting film, 16 1/2″ x 11 3/4″ The post Foreign Body appeared first on The Paris Review . fro

  Our new, redesigned website marks the debut of our complete digital archive: now subscribers can read every piece from The Paris Review ’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away; you can also try a free ten-day trial period .  We’re celebrating by offering a sample of some of our favorite writing from the magazine’s past. Today, a story from our Summer–Fall 1962 issue called “ Funes the Memorious ,” by some fella named Jorge Luis Borges. And I say “some guy” for the sake of contemporaneity: at the time, Borges was so little-known in the Anglophone world that the  Review  felt he needed to be introduced—so they tapped André Maurois, of The Silence of Colonel Bramble  fame, to tell an early-sixties audience what they were in for: Jorge Luis Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives . Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of inventi

“When they’re not at their day jobs, a great many of the island’s 330,000 inhabitants dabble in verse.” The New York Times attempts to understand why Iceland is chock-a-block with poets . A few years back we reviewed one of its better known practitioners (and  Björk lyricist)  Sjón . The post Ice Ice Baby appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2fEGqKr

In random-but-awesome news,  Geoff Manaugh ‘s  BLDGBLOG reports on a new project by Dutch earth scientists to piece together what they’re calling an “atlas of the underworld.” Using CT scans to visualize “invisible landscape features—the ghostly remains of entire continents—hidden inside the planet,” the project will reveal a surface within earth’s surface. The post What Lies Beneath appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2fM9if1

Danielle Dutton is a writer, editor, and publisher who might shift the way you read. Author of Margaret the First , SPRAWL , and Attempts at a Life , her writing is compact and quick as it contemplates the strange banalities of domestic life. Her prose finds wonder in the uniformity of the suburbs, or the particularities of 17th-century aristocratic life. It’s funny and full of strange consequence. Dutton also runs Dorothy, a publishing project , one of the best independent presses in the United States. Dorothy is dedicated to “works of fiction or near fiction or about fiction, mostly by women.” Dutton works on all components of each Dorothy release, including curation, editing, and design. In just seven years, with writers like Renee Gladman , Joanna Walsh , Joanna Ruocco , Nell Zink , Amina Cain , and more, Dutton has brought together the work of some of the most electric voices in contemporary publishing. Each Fall, Dorothy publishes two new books simultaneously. This year, Doro

William Powell Frith, Jonathan Swift and Vanessa , 1881   Jonathan Swift is 349 years old today. Which is to say he’s beginning his 350th year. What  was  he anyway? Or never mind what he was; what did he  think  he was?  Did he think he was mainly the author of  Gulliver’s Travels —? Did he think he was a journalist? Deep down, did he consider himself mainly a “Church of England man”? Maybe. I don’t believe he would have said: “I am a satirist.” I don’t think he thought that was a job. Or a life. Perhaps he mainly thought he was the cat who walks through the Wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone. Heaven knows that’s what  I  think, but I want to know what  he  thought. We know what Thomas Jefferson thought Thomas Jefferson was. He designed his own grave marker and spelled everything out:  HERE WAS BURIED THOMAS JEFFERSON AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND FATHER OF THE

Why not smoke what this guy did?   Even when an author’s life is over, his life style can live on. I don’t mean through his books—I’m not some starry-eyed undergrad! No, I mean through merchandise . Hunter S. Thompson died in 2005, but his widow, Anita Thompson, is now ready to bring his estate into the emerging market of boutique cannabis strains: a more lucrative field than any kind of publishing could be. Andrew Travers reports, “ Thompson said she … saved six different strains of cannabis that the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author actually smoked . She is now working with a cannabis company to grow those strains—or hybrids of them—and sell them to the public. She said she was glad that she held off on partnering on a marijuana brand until it could be done right … ‘I was always steering toward his work and away from his lifestyle, but now I feel like I can talk more openly about his lifestyle,’ she said. ‘I’m proud to do it now. Before, it was a little too risky.’ She add

Chicago gets two of its most famous nicknames from literature. Carl Sandburg deemed it the “city of broad shoulders,” while lifelong New Yorker A.J. Liebling tagged it the “Second City” in a 1952 New Yorker article. It’s a city that has given us or inspired novelists, poets, and journalists like Saul Bellow , Richard Wright, Nelson Algren , Studs Terkel , Sandra Cisneros , Mike Royko , Margo Jefferson , Aleksandar Hemon , and more than a few other great books . It’s a shining example of a truly great, often terrible American city. And then there are the Chicago suburbs. Everything around the city, all the way into Indiana and even up to Wisconsin, at some point or another has been labeled “Chicagoland.” These suburbs, more specifically the suburbs to the north of the city, have come to define what we see as the all-American suburbs in popular culture, for better — bucolic, quiet, safe — or worse — insular, bland, blindingly white. When you think of the suburbs in American litera

…but the powerful memories of Ake Festival, like a good old film, come at me, and I am too weak to fight them off.   TODAY is my first day at work after attending the 2016 Ake Arts and Book Festival. My mind is not here. I move about to distract myself but my mind […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2fBCSsj

Three months ago, we announced that The Miles Morland Foundation was accepting applications for a writer’s scholarship. The shortlist for the prestigious Morland Writing Scholarship is finally here, and there are few surprises. Of the 500 applications received from 37 countries, only 22 names representing 7 countries made the shortlist. In about two weeks, this […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2gvMjq1

The 1955 Citroen DS   Our new, redesigned website marks the debut of our complete digital archive: now subscribers can read every piece from The Paris Review ’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away; you can also try a free ten-day trial period .  We’re celebrating by offering a sample of some of our favorite writing from the magazine’s past. Today, an essay from our Spring 1958 issue by the Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti , who ventured to a French motor show (ahem, Salon d’Auto ) to answer a burning question: Can the “beauty” of a car be compared to that of a statue? Giacometti brings a gift for wry metaphor to his judgments: It is always difficult to see a car as a whole. The eye is usually attracted to one aspect or another, caught now by a headlight—that great mechanical eye with the look of an optical instrument, a giant microscope. A car nearby looked like dribbling marmalade …  It does happen sometime

Peter Tosh’s tomb and the roots of Rasta.   Peter Mackintosh was born in a small seaside village in Westmoreland. He was reared, like most Jamaicans, by his mother. He learned to play piano and sing, like most of the country’s musicians, in her church. Peter’s father was little seen in the village of Belmont (“a bad boy, a rascal,” Tosh described him, who “just go around and have a million and one children”). Gainful work was scarce too. Peter left the provinces to make a life in Kingston’s slums. When he met Bob and Bunny, his fellow Wailers-to-be, he was selling sugarcane juice from a cart by Parade. When his life later ended under decidedly “violent/ tragic circumstances” (he was shot in his home at the age of forty-one), his body was brought back to the sleepy town where he was born. Belmont is a teeny village by the turquoise sea, not far from the old Spanish slave port of Savanna-la-Mar, whose most notable site is its favorite son’s tomb. Tosh’s mausoleum is a cement box paint

Steve Bannon’s obsession with Shakespeare’s goriest play. Here’s the pitch: “Titus Andronicus” in outer space. You might have forced a smile, sitting through a meeting with Steve Bannon during his Hollywood years in the early nineties. Today, as Trump’s chief advisor, the world’s second-most-powerful-man-designate has other scenarios to sell. But before Bannon was merely taking over the free world, he was bent on conquering Tinseltown, and he had a serious obsession: he wanted to make a movie version of Titus Andronicus , Shakespeare’s bloodiest revenge play , rife with murder, rape, and disembowelment. Bannon succeeded, eventually. He optioned a well reviewed but audience-challenged 1994 off-Broadway adaptation staged by Julie “Lion King” Taymor—putting Bannon, an investment banker, in the “Bard biz,” according to a story I reported in 1997 while on staff at Variety . But at the end of Bannon’s decade-long campaign to get his favorite play onscreen, victory was Pyrrhic. Titus , t

Badoo closed the door of his room and sat on the bed with a sigh. He wanted his shoes off, he wanted his clothes off; he wanted to get in the shower and get some coolness. But he was tired. He could do all that later. For now, he could get the shoes off and […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2gFqljy

“Avoid using the term generically and without definition, however, because it is not well known and the term may exist primarily as a public-relations device to make its supporters’ actual beliefs less clear and more acceptable to a broader audience. In the past we have called such beliefs racist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist.” The Associated Press addresses the term “alt-right.” The post Call It Like It Is appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2gt8dKt

“I very quickly realized that if you want to seem as a serious writer, you can’t possibly look like a person who looks in the mirror.” Author, Boots spokesperson, and all-around badass Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks to The New York Times about beauty, feminism, and writing . The post Writing While Pretty appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2fyqWYb

A physician examines his uric haul. Don’t ever say I haven’t done anything for you. I found you this, this, this … lovely thing … this meditation on urine by Dr. Jonathan Reisman, which I will aver to be the finest piece of urine-centric writing produced in 2016: “ I practiced wielding the dipstick and centrifuge, and trained my eyes to recognize clues under the microscope … I began to comprehend urine’s enigmatic language … Today, thankfully, this is no longer necessary, though decoding urine still often feels like being a sommelier … By editing urine out of the bloodstream, kidneys preserve the primordial sea in our blood, maintaining the balance of salt essential to our survival. Without them, and without urine’s salubrious flow, our forebears could never have left the ocean to live on land, just as each newborn baby could never adjust to life outside its personal salty, amniotic sea—itself composed almost wholly from the unborn baby’s urine. So when urine flow slows in illness