TOBI'S DESK

  Hiroshi Sugimoto,  Norma Shearer , 1994. All photos courtesy of Damiani.   Hiroshi Sugimoto has spent a career photographing fictions. When he moved to New York from Japan in 1974, by way of Los Angeles, he intended to find work as a wedding photographer. Instead, he took his camera to the Museum of Natural History, where he developed a lifelong fascination with dioramas. He photographed the taxidermy there, already frozen in their meticulously staged tableaux, and, as he writes, “I realized that I too could bring time to a stop. My camera could stop time in the dioramas—where time had already been halted once—for a second time.” This doubling of perspective, which has since become a signature of Sugimoto’s work, can produce unexpected and uncanny transformations: a 1976 photo from his “Dioramas” series, for example, shows a stuffed polar bear on a faux icescape, looming over a seal, its teeth bared, as though ready to strike. Twice removed from its natu...

From the Jane Austen Society of North America’s 2013 Netherfield Ball.   In Minneapolis that fall, while my mother lay on a couch in upstate New York with her legs elevated as she healed from a recent knee replacement, it fell to me to deliver her paper at the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA). During the Q&A that followed my rendition of her paper, I was roundly congratulated for this service to my mother, though no one voiced the rather obvious question of why such an apparently dutiful son wasn’t where he ought to be: at her bedside. The answer would have been that I was working on a book, researching and trying to understand the Janeites, this intoxicating secret society of superfans that was beginning to feel like an unexpected birthright. But they were too polite to ask, and I would have been too guarded to offer the answer. At the grand ball in Minneapolis, my dancing showed certain improvements since the long weekend I had spent at the Jane Aus...

  1. Just to give you the essentials: Probably around 180 A.D. (which is to say probably during the reign of the emperor Marcus Aurelius), a novel was written in Latin. It really is a novel. Trot out any definition of novel : it’s that. Also, it’s the only one, complete, that we have from ancient Rome. Other similar books in Latin have been reduced, over the centuries, to rubble. The one I’m talking about is still whole. Corrupt, but whole. The author’s name was Apuleius. He was famous during his lifetime as a Platonic philosopher. There were statues of him in North Africa, where he was from. They’re all gone now. And we don’t know how many copies of the novel existed during his lifetime. We do know that every one of ’em had to be copied out by hand. The text requires about two hundred pages of modern type, I don’t know how many pages of Latin holograph. What’s in it. Well, a guy tells, in the first person, about traveling to the region of Greece that was most notorious...

1. Little cloud-white lambs wobble over the leas and paddocks, nibbling clover under a wooly sky. Ladies and lords and mustachioed manservants converse through the halls of castles. The subjects and soldiers in the hay fields out past the battlements are content, and peaceful in their boisterous way. There is a tallow candle in every midnight window, a sachet of herbs for every howling teapot, and a ruddy-cheeked family relaxing around every hearth. Welcome to the outskirts of London at the twilight of the 21st century. When Mary Shelley imagined the year 2100 in The Last Man , a lesser-known apocalyptic novel from 1826, she didn’t anticipate the rapid pace of technological and social change that would transform the world. Not only would penicillin prove to be a better cure-all than leeches, but mankind would also devise cell phones and cluster bombs, bitcoin and better long distance travel options than leaky sailboats. And so the frilled nobility and feudal economy of near future G...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will be in conversation with Hillary Clinton at the 2018 PEN World Voices Festival, where Clinton will be delivering the 12th Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture on April 22. Their dialogue—“about the future of women and girls around the world”—will take place after the Lecture, which Adichie herself delivered in 2015. […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2GRjjVV

Every week, the editors of  The Paris Review  lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by  signing up for the Redux newsletter . Jamaica Kincaid   This week, we bring you Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “ What I Have Been Doing Lately ”; James Salter’s story “ Bangkok ”; and part 1 of Robert Bly’s “ Choral Stanzas ,” from the very first issue of The Paris Review . You can listen to all three in “ Thunder, They Told Her ,” the final episode of the first season of  The Paris Review Podcast . But fear not, like the literary works we’ve featured in this first season, each episode is designed to be listened to again and again. Be sure to stay subscribed to our podcast channel—we may have some surprises for you before we begin season 2. And if you like what you hear, tell your friends. “What I Have Been ...

Monsieur Ara in his lamp workshop. Photo: Aysegul Savas.   T hrough wider labyrinths of lamplighted city. — Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde   Of the ten thousand books in the library of Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II, two thousand were detective novels. Abdülhamid also founded the first secret service and sent spies across the empire to report to him. Many sources cite these two facts—the Sultan’s love of mystery novels and his secret service—back to back. I agree that the story, told like this, stirs the imagination. * Inside a blue shop at the end of rue Flatters in Paris, lamps hang from every inch of the ceiling. There are globes and barrels, in brass and opaline, in marbling swirls of orange and red, dark green, blue, and pink. Lamps line the shelves, spilling over to the crimson carpet on the wooden floor; mantles, finials, and valves are stacked in every nook. The shop, however, is dimly lit, a faint smell of gas coming ...

  Willa Cather was not a flashy stylist, and though she was ambitious in her work, she did not attach it to a publicity-worthy life like some of her contemporaries, such as Ernest Hemingway  and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cather’s first book of poetry came out in 1903, when she was twenty-nine; her first book of stories followed a couple years later, when she was thirty-one. Her last novel appeared in 1940, and a volume of three more stories was published in 1948, shortly after she died. Forty-five years is a long career for a novelist, but she possessed an intensity of observation and a curiosity about human psychology, especially as it relates to nature, that never waned. My Ántonia is one of her best-loved books, and it displays all the characteristics that make Cather both elusive and fascinating even as it depicts a world that vanished almost as soon as the novel was published. Willa Cather was born in an interesting spot in the mountains of Virginia, near Winchester, on th...

After 17 drafts over two weeks, Elizabeth Bishop ’s poem “One Art” was completed on November 4, 1975. The poem began as notes, and evolved into a villanelle. She changed the title. She deleted words. She reached for possible rhymes. Brett Candlish Millier says the “effect of reading all these drafts together one often feels in reading the raw material of her poems and then the poems themselves: the tremendous selectivity of her method and her gift for forcing richness from minimal words.” Revision is art. Denise Levertov said it was dangerous to revise a poem unless “you are hot in it.” Some poets suffer through revision. Other poets find life in revision. All poets do it. Here are 15 poets on the worthy work of revision. “I revise incessantly. Usually when I’m starting to work on a poem, I don’t read it aloud—not until it gets to a certain point. You can lull yourself with your own voice; but I hear it in my head.” — Rita Dove “The energy of revision is the energy of creation and...