TOBI'S DESK

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 . Margaret Drabble. This week at The Paris Review , we’re feeling a little bored. Read on for some literature that answers our need for stimulation: Margaret Drabble’s Art of Fiction interview , Georges Perec’s short story “ Between Sleep and Waking ,” and Mary Ruefle’s poem “ Milk Shake .” 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 for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the D...

Fans of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie may have heard that earlier this year, she gave a keynote speech at Chile’s Future Congress, an event that gathers notable thinkers to debate solutions like climate change and social inequality. Turns out that Adichie has fans all over Latin America — sometime in December 2019, we shared on our […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/39xRxM4

The following essay appears in  Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures , a catalogue produced to accompany the exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art. Dorothea Lange, Berryessa Valley, Napa County, California , 1956, gelatin silver print, printed 1965, 11 1/8″ × 11 1/2″. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. This woman seems to have been standing in the meadow forever, with it and of it, welcoming us all, an earthbound archangel of the topsoil. You could imagine that below her housedress her feet have taken root or her torso has become a tree trunk, and the way she smiles and reaches out that right hand seems like the most generous way to say that this place is hers. Everything in the picture affirms a sense of stability. The square photograph is bisected horizontally by the straight line where the flowering meadow joins the bare hill on the right and the tree-covered hill on the left that rise up from either side of her like wings. That line is eve...

Vita Sackville-West How preposterous is it that Vita Sackville-West, the bestselling bisexual baroness who wrote over thirty-five books that made an ingenious mockery of 1920s societal norms, should be remembered today merely as a smoocher of Virginia Woolf? The reductive canonization of her affair with Woolf has elbowed out a stranger and more luxurious story: Vita loved several women with exceptional ardor, simultaneously adored her also-bisexual husband Harold, ultimately came to prefer the company of flora over fauna of any gender, and committed to a life of prolific creation (written and planted) that redefined passion itself. Take as a representative starting point the comically deranged splendor of Vita’s ancestry. Her grandfather Lionel, the third Baron Sackville, fell in love with Pepita, the notorious Andalusian ballerina, and by her fathered five illegitimate children. When Lionel became the British Minister in Buenos Aires, he sent those children to live in French conve...

In our new series Quarantine Reads, writers present the books they’re finally making time for and consider what it’s like to read them in this strange moment.  I started reading Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren , a prismatic, nightmarish work of speculative fiction, in New York City a couple weeks ago, when the coronavirus had just begun to spread into the West. Italy had fallen and the threat in the United States was imminent, but the real panic and anxiety still hadn’t sunk in. Stubbornly, and against better judgment, I decided to go through with my plans to take a three-week trip to Japan. I continued reading Dhalgren on my way to Tokyo on March 14. As I was reading on the nearly empty plane, I kept looking down at my hands, getting up, washing them, until they were dry and cracked and my knuckles started bleeding, and by the time I disembarked it looked like I’d been in a fistfight. Dhalgren has been my only real traveling companion this week: gently purring in my hands with the la...

In our new series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “ Monet Refuses the Operation ” by Lisel Mueller Issue no. 84 (Summer 1982) Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being. Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral is built of parallel shafts of sun, and now you want to restore my youthful errors: fixed notions...

Last week, Italian fashion house Maison Valentino premiered its short film series entitled “In Conversation With” on YouTube featuring Nigerian-American author, Tomi Adeyemi, as the first guest. The film series is described by BellaNaija as “highlighting the works, insights, and inspirations of today’s top thinkers through a series of short films.” The short film is […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2w2srYg

For Professor Harry Garuba You are in a lime green, waterproof jacket hooded. Restlessly standing on the pavement— overhead: grey concrete around you: vapour— on a street that resembles the Sunday-vacant ones in Jozi (although, the dream calls the street Lagosian, we tell it we believe it by continuing).   It is misty. After you […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2QROvvO

Still from Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. The coronavirus has thrown a wrench into Aries season, but plans for my March birthday remained unchanged. I watched Autumn de Wilde’s new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma entirely alone. I am a harsh critic when it comes to film versions of Austen and consider myself a purist—a champion of the Pride and Prejudice BBC miniseries, which culminates in Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy diving into a pond at Pemberley, scantily clad by Regency standards. As far as Emma is concerned, I am a tried-and-true disciple of Clueless and find Cher Horowitz hard to match, even by a silky-skinned, pre-Goop Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1996 version. Anya Taylor-Joy, however, is the perfect Emma, exuding a quiet, even intimidating confidence; her tight blonde curls and perky ruffs are a flawless manifestation of her character. Emma’s world, too, is an appetizing spectacle in de Wilde’s film, the walls of the Woodhouse estate painted in decadent pinks and greens. To match, eve...

Jill Talbot’s column,  The Last Year ,  traces in real time the moments before her daughter leaves for college. The column ran every Friday in November, January, and March. It will return again in June. I’m pulling onto I-35 North. It’s morning, and my daughter, Indie, is in the passenger seat. The sky’s a soft blue, as if every cloud has somewhere else to be. When I put on my blinker and move into the right lane, Indie tells me that I-35 runs from Laredo, Texas, to Duluth, Minnesota, something she learned last year in school. I ask her how far that is, and she taps her phone. 1,568 miles. Today we’re only traveling forty. Indie and I watch the news at night. We see the empty streets of New York City. We listen to the stories about San Francisco. Texas moves at a slower speed, and the only sign our world is changing is in the empty grocery store shelves. But we feel it coming, especially when Indie worries that all the ceremonies of her senior year will be canceled. I had ...

In our new series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “BODY. HISTORY. EVIL. GOD. HUMAN” by Lawrence Jospeph Issue no. 229 (Summer 2019) i. So it is, the chaos contracted in an unfolding scene in five sentences: Body. History. Evil. God. Human. ii. But what ideas, in what facts? Inside the sun the heat is sucking the soil’s moisture, a blue-and-red Diet Pepsi logo is imprinted on a lobster’s claw, flashes of lightning, steady rains complicating the identification of bodies charred to bones, Town of Paradise a fire zone, anywhere is everywhere. And in another intensity the Great Migrations of Peoples, ecocidal petro- capitalist qualitative destruction, every cubic meter of ...

Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami has a new book forthcoming on April 28, 2020 from Pantheon Books. Titled Conditional Citizens, the memoir details Lalami’s journey from her home country Morocco to the United States, and her experiences as an immigrant in America. At 208 pages, the book is Laila Lalami’s debut work as a memoirist, and […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3dxSR5a

In 1955, after hitting it off at a party in Helsinki, Tove Jansson and the artist Tuulikki Pietilä developed a romance that would last a lifetime. They spent some of the early days of summer 1956 together on the island of Bredskär, where the Jansson family had a summerhouse. The letter below, sent shortly after Pietilä left to teach at an artists’ colony, sees the Moomin creator exploring the dimensions of this new love, recounting the festivities of her uncle Harald’s birthday (“which has traditionally always been a big bash, celebrated at sea”), and drawing “a new little creature that isn’t quite sure if it’s allowed to come in.” Tove Jansson, 1956. Photo: Reino Loppinen. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 7.10.56 [Bredskär] Beloved, Now my adored relations have finally gone to sleep, strewn about in the most unlikely sleeping places, the chatter has died down, the storm too, and I can talk to you. Thank you for your letter, which felt like a happy hug. Oh yes, my Tuulikki,...

In our new series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “ Our Dust ” by C.D. Wright Issue no. 109 (Winter 1988) I am your ancestor. You know next-to-nothing about me. There is no reason for you to imagine the rooms I occupied or my heavy hair. Not the faint vinegar smell of me. Or the rubbered damp of Forrest and I coupling on the landing en route to our detached day. You didn’t know my weariness, error, incapacity. I was the poet of shadow work and towns with quarter-inch phone books, of failed roadside zoos. The poet of yard eggs and sharpening shops, jobs at the weapons plant and the Maybelline factory on the penitentiary road. A poet of spiderwort and jacks-in-the-pulpit, hollyh...

For the sixth consecutive year, in 2020 The Paris Review Daily is pleased to announce the winners of the Whiting Awards . As in previous years, we’re also delighted to share excerpts of work by each of the winners. Here’s the list of the 2020  honorees: Aria Aber , poetry Diannely Antigua , poetry Will Arbery , drama Jaquira Díaz , nonfiction Andrea Lawlor , fiction Ling Ma , fiction Jake Skeets , poetry Genevieve Sly Crane , fiction Jia Tolentino , nonfiction Genya Turovskaya , poetry Since 1985, the  Whiting Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The awards, of $50,000 each, are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come. Previous recipients include Lydia Davis, Deborah Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eugenides, Tony Kushner, Sigrid Nunez, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mona Simpson, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Colson Whitehead. Expl...

Young Eudora Welty (courtesy The Eudora Welty Foundation) In The Optimist’s Daughter , Eudora Welty introduces the idea of confluence—of two rivers merging, inexorably, magically, disturbingly. Fate gently takes the reins from Chance. We can rest, we can be held. And the life we thought was singular turns out, reassuringly, to be a strand in a larger pattern. I became a young woman in the house where Welty spent six months as a young woman. We touched the same walls with our same searching fingers. We grew up shopping at the same grocery store—the Jitney 14—where also, I should mention, a thousand other people shopped; there is nothing sacred about a Jitney. We learned gardens from our mothers, who were always more skilled in dirt than we were; we trailed behind them, gathering blooms, starting our own plots of earth. We left home for college at the age of sixteen, we tried on the North for size. It didn’t fit. I imagine she looked back at the South with that same disturbed wonder ...

My neighbor Vinny Capriani is a great neighbor. I’m happy to have him as one. I live in a state where a man shot another because his kids’ basketball fell into his neighbor’s yard. So I’m happy Vinny is my neighbor. My other neighbor, a tubby attorney, has only spoken to me once. He wanted […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3dx9XQo

Tope Folarin and Nnamdi Ehirim are both on the longlist of the 2020 VCU Cabell First Novel Award. The annual book prize is presented on behalf of Virginia Commonwealth University MFA in Creative Writing Program and sponsored by James Branch Cabell Library Associates, VCU Libraries, the VCU Department of English, Barnes & Noble @ VCU, and the […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3aj0o5C

Credo Mutwa, celebrated South African traditional healer and author of several books, died following a period of ill health on Wednesday, March 25, 2020. He was 98 years old. Mutwa, whose full name is Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, was a sangoma who dedicated his life and writings to the preservation of African cultural practices and mythology. […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/39qijX3

Genya Turovskaya. Photo: Willis Sparks. Genya Turovskaya was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and grew up in New York City. She is the author of The Breathing Body of This Thought (Black Square, 2019) and the chapbooks Calendar (Ugly Duckling, 2002), The Tides (Octopus, 2007), New Year’s Day (Octopus, 2011), and Dear Jenny (Supermachine, 2011). Her poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in Chicago Review , Conjunctions , A Public Space , and other publications. Her translation of Aleksandr Skidan’s Red Shifting was published by Ugly Duckling in 2008. She is a cotranslator of Elena Fanailova’s Russian Version (UDP, 2009, 2019), which won the University of Rochester’s Three Percent Award for Best Translated Book of Poetry in 2010. She is also a cotranslator of Endarkenment, The Selected Poems of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (Wesleyan, 2014). She lives in Brooklyn. * “Failure to Declare” I am beside myself I have no beast in this ring, no horse in this race N...