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Still from Kentucky Route Zero . Kentucky Route Zero is haunted in the same way America is haunted. In this five-act play of a video game, the characters Conway and Shannon and their bizarre companions amble back and forth, around and through the real and unreal roads and rivers of rural Kentucky. Everyone has a goal of some sort—delivering one last antique, finding a new workshop, reaching another gig—but all of it folds into the layers of this dreamscape underworld. Just as so many Latin American writers took inspiration from Faulkner, the Southern Gothic of Kentucky Route Zero takes inspiration right back from the magic realism of García Márquez and the pointed political artistry of Neruda. The hopeful folk songs of miners punctuate Kentucky’s caves and forests as their ghosts come out to perform again, long past their deaths at the hands of corporate greed and negligence. Artists and blue-collar workers alike become trapped by exploitative debts that never stop following them.

Stephanie Burt on how to remember Jan Morris’s trans memoir Conundrum. Jan Morris died in November of 2020, and you can read a remembrance of her by her colleagues here.  JAN MORRIS Before the actor Elliot Page and the model Janet Mock and the legislator Danica Roem and the TV star Nicole Maines were born, before Against Me! and Anohni and Cavetown had sung a note, before Jenny Boylan’s She’s Not There and Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw and Eddie Izzard’s Definite Article , twenty years before the first recorded appearance of the word cisgender , and three years after I was born, in 1974, the Anglo-Welsh travel writer and veteran Jan Morris published a short and beautiful book called Conundrum . Morris was already famous as the first journalist up Mount Everest, part of Edmund Hillary’s expedition: she would go on to publish dozens more books and a flurry of essays (some in The   Paris Review ) before her death in 2020, but Conundrum remains her best known. Not the first moder

In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Here’s a question: Can you name the debut novel, originally published in Britain in September 1965, that became a more or less immediate best seller, and the fans of which included Noël Coward, Daphne du Maurier, John Gielgud, Fay Weldon, David Storey, Margaret Drabble, and Doris Lessing? “A rare pleasure!” said Lessing. “I can’t remember another novel like it, it is so good and so original.” Coward, meanwhile, described it as “fascinating and remarkable,” admiring the author’s “strongly developed streak of genius.” Du Maurier—a writer whose own work is famously mesmerizing—declared it “compulsive reading … Endearing, exasperating, wildly funny, touching and superbly amoral.” Gielgud thought it “full of fascinating characterisation and atmosphere.” Never not in tune with the times, Weldon deemed it “a magical mystery tour of the mind,” Storey “a superb piece of confectionery,” whil

Little known in the U.S., the writer Tove Ditlevsen (1917–1976) is widely beloved in her native Denmark. She wrote dozens of books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, but her crowning literary achievement is The Copenhagen Trilogy , a trio of frank, riveting memoirs published stateside by Farrar, Straus and Giroux earlier this week . An excerpt from the third volume, Dependency , newly translated from the Danish by Michael Favala Goldman, appears below. Tove Ditlevsen. Photo courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Everything in the living room is green—the carpet, the walls, the curtains—and I am always inside it, like in a picture. I wake up every morning around five o’clock and sit down on the edge of the bed to write, curling my toes because of the cold. It’s the middle of May, and the heating is off. I sleep by myself in the living room, because Viggo F. has lived alone for so many years that he can’t get used to suddenly sleeping with another person. I understand, and it’s f

In Susanna Forrest’s  Écuyères  series, she unearths the lost stories of the transgressive horsewomen of turn-of-the-century Paris.  Céleste Mogador as a countess (wikimedia commons) My horse carried me like the wind. I couldn’t breathe; I hugged his neck, like jockeys do; I called out to him; he leapt forward again … I was going to overhaul my companions, maybe win the race! This idea transported me. I threw my horse against the ropes at the turn … I blocked the woman who was pressing closest to me and I passed her! I was so happy that, for fear of seeing the other woman beat me, I closed my eyes, left everything to my horse and spurred his left flank. I heard them say: She has won! That’s Élisabeth-Céleste Venard looking back on her first race as a stunt rider at the Hippodrome at the Barrière de l’Étoile outside Paris in 1845. At the time she was twenty, already notorious, hired to titillate the new arena’s eight thousand spectators in sidesaddle hurdle races, costumed parade

“If I write as though I were addressing readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that form. It is a form, an empty form – I shall never have readers.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground,  The muses don’t sing to cover letter writers — they’re busy with the poets. But me? I transact exclusively in unloved prose. No one loves cover letters, but everyone needs a job. So my business, editing them, always booms. My process may prove unorthodox, so let me offer a disclaimer before we begin. In the butchery of cover letter editing, one removes metaphors with chainsaws, cauterizes complexity with hot iron, and amputates anything more ambiguous than a grunt. I have no mercy for the saccharine cant of wild-eyed naïfs who write, “I would be thrilled to work as an entry-level Associate.” Because you wouldn’t. A newborn’s barbaric yawp can thrill. Doing what spring does with the cherry trees can thrill. “Providing general administrative support in a fast-pac

While wandering around a snowy New York City this past December, the artist Jan Baracz began to notice patterns forming in the grates of storm drains. “They reminded me of the I Ching hexagrams and ideographic language systems,” he writes. “They also reminded me of when I lived in Japan and researched how water patterns (from vapor to ice) are represented in kanji. It was a time when I had given my apophenia free rein. I was transfixed by logograms and language characters built upon symbolic origins. I thought these snow glyphs may be a perfect set of images to reflect this intense time in which we seek signs and project meaning onto the physical world that surrounds us.” A selection of Baracz’s photographs appears below. Photo: Jan Baracz.   Photo: Jan Baracz.   Photo: Jan Baracz.   Photo: Jan Baracz.   Photo: Jan Baracz.   Photo: Jan Baracz.   Photo: Jan Baracz. from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/3a8MsfE