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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 . This week at The Paris Review , we’re resolving to read even more of our archive in the New Year. Read on for Octavio Paz’s Art of Poetry interview , Rachel Cusk’s “ Freedom ,” and Catherine Davis’s poem “ The New Year’s Burden .” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not  subscribe  to  The Paris Review  and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door—and if you subscribe via our  special bundle , you’ll get a tote bag, too! And don’t forget to listen to  Season 2  of  The Paris Review Podcast !   Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry No. 42 Issue no. 119 (Summer 1991) I am very...

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Source: Thinkstock. I find myself most aware of silence when I am thinking about the many ways it can be punctured. Under the wrong circumstances, a hospital room can become a symphony of noises, each of them courting the worst of a person’s anxieties. There might be an incessant but inconsistent beeping, or the sounds of several machines doing the work of keeping a person alive. It is a privilege to be told that someone you love is going to survive. The message comes from some exhausted doctor, eager to give the good news after the tests, or the surgery, or whatever else. I have also been on the other side: knowing that I would be watching a person I love slowly fade until they vanished altogether, and understanding there’s nothing that can be done. There’s something uniquely challenging about the moments in between, when the good news of a person’s continued living is deliv...

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Irving Nurick, illustration from the 1920s In her 2008 review of Cecily von Zeigesar’s Gossip Girl novels, Janet Malcolm quotes the eponymous narrator’s “opening volley”: “We all live in huge apartments with our own bedrooms and bathrooms and phone lines. We have unlimited access to money and booze and whatever else we want, and our parents are rarely home, so we have tons of privacy. We’re smart, we’ve inherited classic good looks, we wear fantastic clothes, and we know how to party.” I’ve never read the books myself, but on the CW show, which I was briefly obsessed with, we hear Kristen Bell’s voice-over during the title sequence: “Gossip Girl here! Your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite.” The actors playing these trust-fund teens aren’t just good-looking; they seem like genetic impossibilities. Blake Lively is perfectly cast as the, in Mal...

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! The Impossible Burger. Science lifted us out of nature. It tamed the wilderness; it gave us tools to transcend our lousy, fallen bodies; and it shot us to the moon. Now it has produced a hamburger made entirely of vegetables that bleeds like real beef. The packaging of the aptly named Impossible Burger instructs you, as if daring you, to cook the patties medium rare. Three minutes on each side, and the center will remain the fleshly pink color of raw sirloin. This effect is the result of heme, the protein that carries oxygen through our blood and gives it its crimson color, and which food scientists have discovered how to ferment in a lab using genetically engineered yeast. (Pedantic foodies will point out that the red in beef is not blood but myoglobin, but this is beside the point. We call burgers “bloody” to acknowledge a truth that modernity has long tried to obscure: that...

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! I can tell who’s calling me from across the room by the pitch of their bitch . Fati goes up on the i  so that it’s almost a shriek. Hieu gets a little gravelly, dark and full, bitch as precursor to some good gossip. Blaire says it flat, matter-of-fact, like a name. Franny says it like a bell, a sweet call to fellowship. I love my bitches. I love being bitched by them. It’s an insult we’ve spun into coin. The femmes and queers I have known have saved my life. The deep wells of care from femmes; the ingenuity of queer love. Bitch is the passport to that nation. Or maybe it’s the national anthem, how we sing our love to each other. Maybe it’s our language. When I am bitched by the homies, there is no threat on my life. There is no car following me as I hightail it home, bitch flung out the window, faggot close behind. There is no accusation like back in high school when b...

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Hebe Uhart. Photo: Agustina Fernández. In section 16, grave 34 of the Chacarita Cemetery in Buenos Aires, pumpkins and tomatoes now grow. Pumpkins and tomatoes, just like that. A scene that could have been written by Hebe Uhart, who, since October 12, 2018, has lain in a grave there. An image worthy of her stories: reality interrupted by strangeness. “A story is a little plant that’s born,” Uhart used to say that Felisberto Hernández used to say. Hernández was one of her go-to authors, along with Natalia Ginzburg, Fray Mocho, and Simone Weil. Uhart starts her magnificent story “Guiding the Ivy” by announcing, “Here I am arranging the plants so they don’t overcrowd one another, pulling off dead leaves, and getting rid of ants.” * Some time ago, at the launch party for one of her books, Hebe Uhart—born in 1936 in Moreno, Argentina, author of some fifteen volumes of stories, no...

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! The author as a child, dressed as Oscar the Grouch. Every year it floods on three sides of our town. I do not know how any town could have floods on three sides, but there it is. My mom says it is because the very rich people who live on the lake to the south of us keep the water levels too high so they can run their speedboats year-round, and then every spring, the rains come and we flood, and no one cares because we are all poor. It floods to the south along the river with the park with all the pavilions and the baseball diamonds and the tennis courts and the Frisbee golf course, and the small municipal (in-ground!) pool. And it floods on the southeast, behind the high school, and the motels near the highway. The Townsman Inn and Restaurant and Lounge has been renovated twenty times in half as many years, due to floods, most recently to feature taxidermy animals, on a shelf ...

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! On September 24, 1980, a man wearing cowboy boots and carrying two brown suitcases entered Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. One suitcase held $777,000 in cash; the other was empty. After converting the money into chips, the man approached a craps table on the casino floor and put everything on the backline. This meant he was betting against the woman rolling the dice. If she lost, he’d double his money. If she won, he’d lose everything. Scarcely aware of the amount riding on her dice, the woman rolled three times: 6, 9, 7. “Pay the backline,” said the dealer. And just like that, the man won over $1.5 million. He calmly filled the empty suitcase with his winnings, exited Binion’s into the desert afternoon, and drove off. It was the largest amount ever bet on a dice roll in America. “Mystery Man Wins Fortune,” the Los Angeles Times reported. No one knew the identity of t...

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! One kid raises their hand. They ask, “Miss Gurba, why’d you become a high school teacher?” This is a classic time-killing move. My tone turns serious. I respond, “It was an accident.” Hearing a public school employee be so blunt widens kids’ eyes. They’ve baited me into a tacit game of truth or dare and I’ve knowingly broken the rules. I’m pretty sure they expect me to belt out the opening lyrics of “Greatest Love of All.” They want a saint. What garbage. Catholics raised me, but I’m not a martyr. Still, even teenagers know you’re not supposed to admit that you stumbled into their classroom, but who cares? I did and I stayed and I continue to stumble in every morning. Something my students ask me less often is whether or not I like teaching. Something they ask me even less often than that is what I like about my profession. Read more >> from The Paris Review ht...

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! So. We cuss. Some of us cuss by saying mercy me or suffering succotash . I like to say shooty-pooty , which I learned from a nice Baltimore boy back in 1963. It’s a Cub Scout version of shitty-pity , which is a cutesy diminutive for just plain shit . This kind of substitution for a cuss word is what linguists call an amelioration . It softens the blow while still addressing the topic. This is not the same as a euphemism, by the way, which tries to evade or screen the subject. Americans are big on substitute amelioration. We invent thousands of them daily, it seems. Darn for damn , gosh for God . They often sound as though we started to say the taboo word but caught ourselves. Almost all of us have darker vocabularies if we’re pushed. We all have strong vocal reactions to pain and surprise, to anger or fear. We often use the same language in response to the strong positive s...

As 2019 draws to an end, we at Brittle Paper would like to thank all our readers for your continued support. It’s been another fantastic year of achievements by African authors and authors of the African diaspora, and we’ve been honored to be able to document them. Like previous years, our Notable African Books of […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2QifkZ9

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Franz Juttner, Illustration from Snow White, c.1905 The stepmother swings like a light bulb back and forth, causing the mother who is not there to glow. That is her job. I am a mother, a stepmother, and a step-stepmother because I am my husband’s third wife and he has daughters from his first marriage and a daughter from his second. And I am a mother-mother to our two sons. “This isn’t one of your fairy tales,” my husband once said to me during an argument. He didn’t mean Disney, he meant Grimm. He meant I was stowing myself in the body of a fairy-tale stepmother and setting sail. When all my husband’s daughters are in our house at once, I grow very small. The weight of those girls who are not mine tilts the house and slides me toward the door. The weight of my sons slides me back in. Up and down goes this seesaw. My husband takes no turns. He grows weightless and blurry. O...

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Original illustration © Daniel Gray-Barnett Ten days after I called off my engagement I was supposed to go on a scientific expedition to study the whooping crane on the gulf coast of Texas. Surely, I will cancel this trip, I thought, as I shopped for nylon hiking pants that zipped off at the knee. Surely, a person who calls off a wedding is meant to be sitting sadly at home, reflecting on the enormity of what has transpired and not doing whatever it is I am about to be doing that requires a pair of plastic clogs with drainage holes. Surely, I thought, as I tried on a very large and floppy hat featuring a pull cord that fastened beneath my chin, it would be wrong to even be wearing a hat that looks like this when something in my life has gone so terribly wrong. Ten days earlier I had cried and I had yelled and I had packed up my dog and driven away from the upstate New York ho...

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 . J. G. Ballard. Photo: Fay Godwin. This week at The Paris Review , we’re in a holiday kind of mood. Read on for J. G. Ballard’s Art of Fiction interview , Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “ Dancing in the Moonlight ,” and Diane di Prima’s poem “ Rondeau for the Yule .” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not  subscribe  to  The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door—and if you subscribe via our special bundle , you’ll get a tote bag, too! And don’t forget to listen to Season 2  of  The Paris Review Podcast !   J. G. Ballard, The Art of Fiction No. 85 Issue no. 94 (W...

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! © Original illustrations by Jenny Kroik Before I was a tomboy or a clotheshorse or a loser or a teenager, I was a bookworm. In that happy valley before puberty, my greatest bliss was to be given both a book and the permission to play dress-up all at once. I had a plain white trunk for my robes and silks, my wings (several kinds), my swords and my purses. Dressing up as my favorite characters was a bit of magic, and, even today, I still read novels like a costume designer. I can tell you that the best part of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is Edna Pontellier ’s peignoir. I think a lot about Moriah’s underwear in Play It As It Lays (blue silk from a hotel shop) and Hana’s sneakers in The English Patient (slightly too big). How could I not? They are the only shoes she wears. C lothing means something about our destination, our origins, our field, our desires. Everyone i...

Harriet Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell on the steps of 239 Marlborough Street in Boston, Massachusetts, Christmas 1959 (Courtesy of Harriet Lowell) In 1959, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick were feeling restless with their Boston life. It was the year of the publication of Lowell’s Life Studies : Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house on Boston’s “hardly passionate Marlborough Street,” where even the man scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, and is a “young Republican.” (“Memories of West Street and Lepke”) Lowell won the National Book Award for the collection, but the publication also coincided with a manic episode. “I feel rather creepy and paltry writing now to announce that I am all healed and stable again. So it is. Five attacks in ten years make you feel rather a basket-case” he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop in July. By the fall ...

Brittle Paper‘s African Literary Person of the Year, now in its fifth year, recognizes individuals who work behind the scenes to hold up the African literary establishment in the given year. The 2019 Honour goes to Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, OBE, for being, in the course of more than two decades, a unique actualizing force in […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2tGVUVY

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! Johan Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Laesende lille pige, 1900 “I read books to read myself,” Sven Birkerts wrote in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age . Birkerts’s book, which turns twenty-five this year, is composed of fifteen essays on reading, the self, the convergence of the two, and the ways both are threatened by the encroachment of modern technology. As the culture around him underwent the sea change of the internet’s arrival, Birkerts feared that qualities long safeguarded and elevated by print were in danger of erosion: among them privacy, the valuation of individual consciousness, and an awareness of history—not merely the facts of it, but a sense of its continuity, of our place among the centuries and cosmos. “Literature holds meaning not as a content that can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience,” he wrote. “It is a participatory are...

The first Sierra Leone National Book Fair took place between December 5 to December 7, 2019, in Freetown, at the 50/50 Hall on Tower Hill. Total attendance over the three days was close to a thousand. While the fair was attended by government ministers and scholars from most of Sierra Leone’s main universities, over half […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2PRHTO8

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! “No homo,” says the boy, barely visible in the room’s fading light, as he cradles my foot in his palms. He is kneeling before me—this 6’2” JV basketball second stringer—as I sit on his bed, my feet hovering above the shag. His head is bent so that the swirl in his crown shows, the sweat in the follicles catching the autumn dusk through the window. Anything is possible, we think, with the body. But not always with language. “No homo,” he says again before wrapping the ace bandage once, twice, three times around my busted ankle, the phrase’s purpose now clear to me: a password, an incantation, a get-out-of-jail-free card, for touch. For two boys to come this close to each other in a realm ruled by the nebulous yet narrow laws of American masculinity, we needed magic. No homo. The words free him to hold my foot with the care and gentleness of a nurse, for I had sprained my ankle h...

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! How do I convey the overflowing surplus of books in the nineties? They had their own aisle in every supermarket and spilled over into the checkout lane so you could impulse-buy them along with gum and nail clippers. Their pages were off-white and delicate as Pringles, their covers so shiny they were almost slimy, and they became polka-dotted by your fingerprints as soon as you touched them. They weighed, and cost, approximately nothing. What were they about? What weren’t they about? There was a tie-in novelization of every Hollywood movie, plus one tie-in novelization of a tie-in TV show of a Hollywood movie . There was an extremely pink series in which Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen solved low-stakes mysteries (fictional, presumably, though it wasn’t totally clear). There was a ubiquitous best seller that was just two hundred pages of a little boy being brutalized by his sadisti...

Since Lupita Nyong’o snapped the rights to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s signature novel Americanah, there has been increasing buzz on the status of the project, from David Oyelowo’s initial attachment to play Obinze to its switch from feature film to TV series to the announcement of Danai Gurira as showrunner to the Nollywood controversy that trailed its […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2Mh18OT

The 2019 Lagos International Poetry Festival took place from 30 October to 3 November. Founded in 2015 by the performance poet Efe Paul Azino, author of For Broken Men Who Cross Often, this year’s festival, themed “A Wild Beautiful Thing,” featured five days of panels, performances, film screenings, and workshops. Events were spread across three […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/35Ldoih

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday! As of spring 2020, I will be stepping down as Chairman of the MacDowell Colony’s Board of Directors. It’s time for somebody else to sit in the chair. When I took this position, nine years ago, Barack Obama was the President of the United States, Donald Trump was facing the imminent collapse of his financial empire, and Prince, David Bowie, Leonard Nimoy, Nora Ephron, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip Roth, Gene Wilder, Muhammad Ali, Amy Winehouse, Elmore Leonard, Alan Rickman, and my father were still with us, just to mention the people who meant a lot to me. Along with BookCourt bookstore in Brooklyn, Saab automobiles, RadioShack, and, apparently, common decency. So, you’re welcome. These feel like such dire times, times of violence and dislocation, schism, paranoia, and the earth-scorching politics of fear. Babies have iPads, the ice caps are melting, and your smart refrigerator is ...

Lydia Davis. Photo: © Theo Cote. Was it worth plowing through this year, after all? The jury has a few more days on that, but a compelling argument came in last month, when Lydia Davis’s Essays One hit the shelves. Even just as a physical object, it is delightful: a small, pleasantly chubby book, the jacket a grassy and somehow optimistic green, the design unadorned, as though there is nothing more you need to know than title and author. (It makes a nice companion to her collected stories —similar in size and shape, green against orange.) The delights continue inside. Davis is speaking of reading Lucia Berlin when she writes, “This is the way we like to be when we’re reading—using our brains, feeling our hearts beat,” but the phrase applies well to this book: it’s an experience in an active, alive sort of reading, sensitive and attuned. Sitting with the book felt as though someone had come in to gently adjust my antennae, helping clarify signals in what had seemed just noise. And i...