Skip to main content

The Art of Distance No. 12

The Paris Review began sending out The Art of Distance twelve weeks ago, with the intention of offering hope, solidarity, and good company to readers facing a global pandemic. The pandemic continues, but the killing of George Floyd by police brought to the fore two other deep-rooted crises in our communities: police brutality and systemic racism in America. The Paris Review opposes racism and injustice. We are determined to work with contributors and readers and as an organization to make our industry a more equitable, dynamic, and creative place. This is a long process, but the Review believes it is vital and imperative work.

This week, we’re sharing six more Writers at Work interviews with Black American writers and listing resources for those who wish to contribute to the movement. May these conversations and organizations offer a measure of inspiration and consolation, and may spending time with these texts remind us that this necessary work is ongoing.

Stay safe, whether you are at home or in the streets.

—The Paris Review

This week, we’re highlighting more of the Black American voices in our archive by lifting the paywall on the following interviews (the interviews opened last week remain available as well):

Maya Angelou, The Art of Fiction No. 119

“I thought early on if I could write a book for black girls it would be good because there were so few books for a black girl to read that said this is how it is to grow up. Then, I thought, I’d better, you know, enlarge that group, the market group that I’m trying to reach. I decided to write for black boys and then white girls and then white boys.”

Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210

“The city gets you used to crowds, used to people relating to one another in a certain way, like strong and weak interactions between elementary particles. The strong interactions only come into play when the particles are extremely close, less than the distance of a single atomic nucleus. Those are the interactions readers want to see in novels. At the same time, paradoxically, cities can be dreadfully isolating places. The Italian poet Leopardi wrote in a letter to his sister, Paulina, about Rome, that its spaces didn’t enclose people, they fell between people and kept them apart.”

Ralph Ellison, The Art of Fiction No. 8

“Now, mind, I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial—all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself.”

Charles Johnson, The Art of Fiction No. 239

“We’ve lost something. And so my question is, What does it mean to be civil? What kind of person do you have to be? That’s an idea we can trace back through two thousand years of Western history, and the East as well, going back four or five thousand years. It’s not a question that is going to go away.”

Edward P. Jones, The Art of Fiction No. 222

“Ten or so years ago, someone asked me to come to her class and answer questions about Lost in the City. This one white woman said she had trouble feeling or caring about any people who weren’t like her. You hear that and it’s like somebody slapped you in the face.”

Ishmael Reed, The Art of Poetry No. 100

“With literature you can condemn the powerful, and you can critique the powerful. Of course, Dante paid for it. He was never able to return to Florence. He died in exile. He endured a lot to speak his mind. They tell us, Don’t write about politics. You know, because the politics is aimed at them. But Dante had a political office! And some of those characters in Dante’s Inferno are political opponents of his. The same with Shakespeare. His work was political. I was reading The Merchant of Venice the other day and it includes one of the most devastating antislavery arguments ever written. So I don’t know where they get the bourgeois idea that art shouldn’t be political.”

*

We also urge you to engage with the following resources shared by organizations that are dedicated to working against police brutality or to uplifting Black voices and communities.

The Schomburg Center’s Black Liberation Reading List

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is curating this list of new and classic books in all genres for adults and kids.

Order from These Black-Owned Bookstores

Lit Hub has compiled a user-friendly list of Black-owned bookstores across the country.

Entropy Magazine: Where to Submit: Bail Fund Edition

Entropy has devoted a big slot in this monthly column to a list of bail funds and community organizations working to assist protesters and others.

The Brown Bookshelf: KidLit Rally 4 Black Lives

Kwame Alexander, Jacqueline Woodson, and Jason Reynolds presented this panel on June 4, the first half for kids, the second for parents, to offer resources, solidarity, inspiration, and active ways of fighting racism through literature for kids.



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/30gZvZg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more