TOBI'S DESK

Alanna Reeves. Photo: Alanna Reeves. Alanna Reeves , a visual artist and writer from Washington, D.C., is an emerging voice in contemporary American art. When Reeves and I went to school together growing up, everyone wanted to model their handwriting after hers. But it was in art class with the printmaker Percy B. Martin that it became clear she was much more than her fastidious script, that she was the real deal. Five years after receiving her B.F.A. in illustration and art history from the Rhode Island School of Design, Reeves has indeed made her mark. Last week, she partook in a virtual conversation hosted by Strathmore, offering an overview of her recent work and the theory behind it. The first piece discussed, Límon , was perhaps the most striking: a black-and-white photograph of her paternal grandfather overlaid with yellow embroidery floss in a design inspired by cross-stitch patterns. In much of her work, Reeves reexamines her girlhood pastimes, such as cross-stitch and pap...

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual wine tasting on Friday, August 28,  at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review ’ s Instagram account . For more details, click here , or scroll to the bottom of the page. I crusted the gamekeeper’s “simple chop” with mushrooms—not what Lawrence intended but I’ve made the recipe (from his fellow Briton Mary Berry) a half dozen times since. Few people could have been more off-grid than the English writer D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) during his sojourn at a cabin eighteen miles northwest of Taos, New Mexico, where he and his wife, Frieda, lived without electricity, kept chickens, built an outdoor oven, made adobe bricks and “a meat safe to hang from a tree branch,” evicted nests of rats, and traveled two miles on horseback for their milk and mail, their butter and eggs. The time Lawrence spent at this place—called “punishingly remote” by the biographer John Worthen in D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider —was relatively short, a span...

Colleen Higgs, the founder and manager of Modjaji Books, has published a new memoir titled My Mother, My Madness (2020). Published on July 10 by South African publishing company, Deep South, My Mother, My Madness recounts Higgs’s experience caring for her mother in the last ten years of her life. The synopsis reads: A woman reluctantly […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2XeOKnV

In the final years of his life, Paul Klee’s productivity skyrocketed. Fearing suppression by the Nazi party, the beloved Bauhaus instructor had fled Germany and returned to his home city of Bern, Switzerland, where he struggled with an autoimmune disease and watched Europe backslide into another war. “ Late Klee ,” on view by appointment at David Zwirner’s London gallery through July 31, focuses on his output from this period. Abstract yet immediately striking, these late works display Klee’s continued experiments with line and his interrogations of mortality—both the world’s and his own. A selection of images from the show appears below. Paul Klee, pathetische Lösung (Pathetic solution) (detail), 1939. Photo: Kerry McFate. © Klee Family. Courtesy David Zwirner.   Paul Klee, Schema eines Kampfes (Diagram of a fight) (detail), 1939. Photo: Kerry McFate. © Klee Family. Courtesy David Zwirner.   Paul Klee, Besessen (Possessed) (detail), 1939. Photo: Kerry McFate. © ...

Brad Watson. Photo: © Nell Hanley. I met Brad Watson in 2004. He was starting a one-year stint as the Grisham Visiting Writer at Ole Miss, where I was an M.F.A. student, and I’d signed up for his workshop. The week before the semester began, I saw him at a bar in town, newly arrived and sitting on a stool by himself. I went up and introduced myself and he looked me over and grinned. His eyes had this way of shining when he found something funny. “You the one who wrote that weird story with the mannequin?” he asked me. “I am,” I confessed. “I enjoyed it,” he said, and picked up his drink. “I like sort of oddball stuff.” At that point in my life, my glorious and unpublished twenties, I knew only that I wanted to be a good writer, not that I could be. So, this exchange gave me a suspicious confidence. I liked Brad from the start. After we said goodbye, I walked directly to Square Books, smiling, and bought his debut collection, Last Days of the Dog-Men . I then went back to my ap...

My boyfriend, last of his mother’s six children, fourteenth of his father’s nineteen, bought his mother a house. So, we drove amped on psychedelics and youth, in a seven-car convoy to a club to celebrate. The song of our convoy’s sirens cut through the muggy night and mingled with the random bursts from the guns […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/309JWC0

Adéperó, Irekànmi envisages that i have been sozzled by the wine from Sobówalé’s keg and have chewed on nuts from Íyin, the ancestral witch who drives men to lunacy. she debates the fidelity of your existence. does she know; she swims in oblivion to your soothing presence swaddling my discomfort and the tranquilizing whispers that […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2Dg7Hzq

Ethiopian author Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King and Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangaremgba’s This Mournable Body are on the longlist of the 2020 Booker Prize. This is the first nomination for either authors. Joining them on the female-dominated longlist of thirteen are two-time winner Hillary Mantel for The Mirror and the Light, the final installment in […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2X6QW0Q

© Hamdan / Adobe Stock. The eighty-four days I spent in a relationship with my rapist were days filled with music. We met in a nightclub, Schoolboy Q pulsing around us as he held my waist and I yelled my name into his ear. After our first date, I let an awards show replay in the background as I squealed into the phone with a friend. Earlier that evening, he kissed me deeply as he dropped me off at my car. “I shouldn’t let you leave,” he whispered before parting my lips with his tongue. I recounted these details as Beyoncé belted “Drunk in Love” in a performance taped only a few weeks after her self-titled album’s release, when the world was abuzz with her fuller, post-baby body, her unapologetically sex-positive lyrics. My rapist made me feel the way Beyoncé looked on that stage, her heavy thighs peeking through glittery fishnets as she reclined backward on a chair with the microphone so close to her lips, she could have licked it. One night, my rapist asked if I’d heard of Gregory...

This is the final installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky. Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara , 1857. I walked to a high place and slept at the top. The air there was thin. Someone sleeping in the space adjacent was ill. Coughs punched through the wall in the night. But wall is not the accurate word for the thin sheets of particle board that divided the space. A quilt hung by clothespins would’ve caught the sound better, baseball into mitt as opposed to baseball through wax paper. “Altitude sickness” had been whispered in the courtyard in the evening as the sun did a better and better job hiding itself behind the mountains, sending megaphones of cold light toward whispers of clouds. In bed, I worried as the sounds of the sickness graveled and percussed their way to my ears. Tunnel of throat, dark cavity of lung. Breath yolky and frothed. Go down, I urged the person in my mind. Go down. Get lower where your lungs and blood can feed on the oxygen they need. I wanted...