TOBI'S DESK

Photo: M. Sharkey   All of the essays in Alexander Chee’s marvelous collection  How to Write an Autobiographical Novel are striking, but I found the shortest essay, simply titled “1989,” the most arresting. In four pages, he describes his participation in an AIDS protest, in San Francisco—his first protest. As the procession moves into an intersection, the protesters block traffic and are surrounded by riot police, who begin to round them up and brutally drive them off. Chee climbs atop a newspaper box, with a view to the scene, and describes the rise and fall of batons with dispassionate shock, eventually climbing down from his perch to rescue a beaten friend. “This is the country I live in,” he realizes in closing. And I thought instantly of Pierre Bezukhov, in  War and Peace , atop a knoll, observing the horrors of the Battle of Borodino. In shock and fear, he plunges down the slope and thinks, “Now they will be horrified at what they have done!” They aren’t, of ...

Photo credit: Elena Seibert On a June afternoon, Tommy Orange, author of There There , one of this summer’s breakout books, stood at the foot of the stage at the Fellowship of Humanity, a lavender-interiored church on 27 th Street in Oakland, California. Behind him, a banner congratulated this year’s graduating class of East Bay Native American high school seniors. It read: “The students of today are the warriors of tomorrow.” Orange hates public speaking. With his head buried in his notes, he intoned, “As Native people we have a bad history with schools, with institutions. They’re still teaching history wrong. We still hear them saying: ‘just get over it already,’ even when they’re saying they know the feeling is there. Get over what? The mountain that is history?” Orange wore navy Nike high tops, a navy button down shirt to match, acid washed jeans and a black fitted cap with the iconic Port of Oakland crane (inspiration for the imperial walkers in Star Wars) and “The Town” in...

The five anonymous minibiographies below are drawn from the lives of writers in our  interview archives . Think you’ve got what it takes to identify them based on only the strangest and most idiosyncratic details of their lives? On our last quiz , only twenty-four percent of our readers got a perfect score — but we’re ruthless and haven’t made this one any easier. Be among the first to correctly identify all five and you could win a copy of The Paris Review ’s newest book, The Writer’s Chapbook . The winner will be drawn on Friday, July 6th, and contacted via email.   Loading… Matt B. Weir is a writer living in New York. These anonymous biographies are part of his larger ongoing series. from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/2lFt80N

SIBONGILE FISHER WAS hanging out with friends, eating burgers at Snack Boss, a restaurant in Tembisa, a township in the East Rand in Johannesburg, when she saw the link on Facebook: a post congratulating her. It was November of 2016 and she had won the Short Story Day Africa Prize. She had been absent from […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2MxKND2

Africa Writes 2018 is finally here! While at the festival, be sure to head to our international book fair. The fair offers readers a large range of contemporary African literature and rare finds. You can purchase copies of the books written by our festival guest authors and get signed copies after the book launch events. You will also find stalls selling magazines, arts and crafts, African inspired clothing and more. Excited? Then check out this sneak peek of vendors that will be featured at the book fair: New Beacon Books New Beacon Books is the official book seller for Africa Writes 2018. Founded in 1966, New Beacon Books was the UK’s first bookshop and publishing house to specialise in African and Caribbean literature. John La Rose’ founder, visionary, political activist and poet wanted to create a place that celebrated authors of colour at a time in Britain where ethnic diversity wasn’t common place. For over 50 years New Beacon Books has stood proud in the heart of Finsbury Park...

Growing up as a vegetarian in rural England in the ’90s, I was sometimes under the impression that my lifestyle was unusual—if not radical. In recent years, vegetarianism (and reduced-meat diets) have become more mainstream even in rural areas. With time I’ve come to realize that there have always been vegetarians and vegetarian communities. Perhaps the more interesting ones for me are the artists and thinkers who go against the grain, choosing to think and live differently from the people around them. There is sometimes difficulty in ascertaining the validity of claims that certain historical figures actually followed a vegetarian lifestyle. For Da Vinci we have both Giorgio Vasari ’s accounts and the letters between Andrea Corsali and Da Vinci’s patron Giuliano de’ Medici as convincing sources; for Pythagoras we have a number of ancient sources, as well as his enduring legacy. My awareness of Albert Einstein ’s vegetarianism comes from primary sources—letters to Hans Muehsam an...

  Jason Novak is a cartoonist in Oakland, California. from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/2tDtNEh

One of the questions at the heart of Old in Art School , the new memoir by Nell Painter , is what it takes to be “An Artist” and who gets to decide you’ve earned those capital A’s. In her 60s, Painter left a career as an eminent Princeton historian and author of numerous books about African-American history and race—including, in 2010, The History of White People —to study painting and drawing at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts and in the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design. After a lifetime of hard work and intellectual rigor adding up to success, Painter found that art school was governed by a different equation, where who you were and how you looked seemed to be at least as important as what you produced. “To be An Artist was to be a certain kind of person that you could not become through education or practice,” she writes. “If I lacked the essential quality of being An Artist, I was condemned to failure.” In a recent interview at her vacation ho...

From the Women’s March on Washington.   “Class of ’36, I guess we did something wrong.” This was what my grandmother wrote to her Barnard College classmates, fifty years after they had all graduated. My grandmother was charismatic and uncompromising, equally critical of capitalism and sentimentality. In her life as a Westchester housewife/radical leftist, she’d planned protests, played tennis, and published mystery novels. When her children were grown, she moved to Manhattan, waking every morning at five to walk briskly around Central Park (she was only mugged a few times.) She spent the rest of the day writing and tending the ivy she’d planted to beautify the trees along her block. Every Saturday she organized against US atrocities in Central America. Days before she died in 1992, while attached to an IV, a blood transfusion, and oxygen, she dictated the final paragraph of her eighteenth book to my mother. The book was, she explained, the first in a new series she planned to...

Albert Robida A curious feature of most dystopian fiction is that it begins in medias res.  It’s a stylistic convention of the genre, and it applies to most dystopian lit that comes to mind, from Nineteen Eighty-Four to Brave New World to Never Let Me Go .  As pure narrative strategy, it makes sense.  After all, novels in general must hook a reader quickly, and there are few things hookier than unfolding disaster.  Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven , for example, begins with twenty utterly gripping pages of the first hours of a superplague wiping out Toronto (and the world).  There is something compelling about this type of introduction—it carves narrative down to a brutal logic in which the only two options are survival or death. The TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale , which will wrap up its second season in July, is the most recent popular example of this phenomenon. The viewer is dropped, from the first episode, into the fresh ...