TOBI'S DESK

William Hilton, John Keats (detail), ca. 1822, oil on canvas, 30 x 25″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Poets can be divided into two groups: those who dutifully tortured “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” in secondary school ( POET = WORRIED ABOUT DYING scrawled unhelpfully in the margins) without ever giving its author a second thought, and those for whom Keats serves as spiritual teacher. To his followers, Keats is a poet’s poet, is the poet’s poet, a writer whose brief span compressed all the love, pain, and existential uncertainty of a lifetime, which the finest of his fifty-four published poems animate. He believed pain and trouble were their own education, “school[ing] an intelligence to make it a soul.” His was a rare gift, and yet his best poems weren’t earned without effort; early examples are uneven and clumsy, and for that perseverance and learning by shrewd emulation, we admire him all the more. His death at twenty-five trapped that quiddity in amber. ...

The second series of Poets on Couches continues with Rita Dove reading Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem “ My Bird ,” translated from the German by Mark Anderson. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping them through—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 distances. “ My Bird ” by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Mark Anderson Issue no. 92 (Summer 1984) Whatever comes to pass: the devastated world sinks back into twilight, the forest offers it a sleeping potion, and from the tower the watchman’s forsaken, peaceful and constant the eyes of the owl stare down. Whatever comes to pass: you know your time, my bird, you put on your veil and fly through the mist to me. We peer into the haze where the rabble houses. Yon follow my nod and storm out in a whirl of feathers and fur— My ...

John Vincler’s column  Brush Strokes  examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world.  El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), The Vision of Saint John , ca. 1608–14, oil on canvas, 87 1/2 x 76″. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain. I will remember 2020 not as a year of looking but as a year of listening. For months as the pandemic overtook New York, ambulance sirens sounded at all hours in strange choruses. When the sound of the sirens would break occasionally or fade into the distance after dawn, it was replaced not by eerie silence but by birdsong: the shrieks of the blue jays, the playful cheeps of the sparrows in the bushes, the eeks, chirps, and oddly varied sounds of the grackles everywhere. I wondered then, Were these sounds always here, and it was we who were made quiet? I rarely left my neighborhood of Ditmas Park, in Brooklyn, except to take my partner, Kate, pregnant with our second child, to ...

In Pardis Mahdavi’s new book Hyphen , she explores the way hyphenation became not only a copyediting quirk but a complex issue of identity, assimilation, and xenophobia amid anti-immigration movements at the turn of the twentieth century. In the excerpt below, Mahdavi gives the little-known history of New York’s hyphenation debate.  Flyer for the New-York hyphen debate, 1774 copyright © New-York Historical Society In the midst of an unusually hot New York City spring in 1945, Chief Magistrate Henry H. Curran was riding the metro downtown to a meeting at City Hall. Curran, the former commissioner of immigration at the Port of New York, and former president of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, had forgotten to bring his copy of the paper that morning. As a result, he found himself reading the various ads surrounding him on the colorful New York City subway. Curran tried to focus on different advertisements to distract himself from the heat, and from his growing...

Podgrad pri Vranskem Castle, 1830. Kaiser, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Terry Pratchett’s 1988 summary of The House on the Border­land begins: “Man buys House. House attacked Nightly by Horrible Swine Things from Hole in Garden. Man Fights Back with Determination and Lack of Imagination of Political Proportions.” It ends: “The journey to the Central Suns sold me infinity.” Infinity is a rather lofty reward for persevering through a battle with pig-men. But Pratchett was right. Wil­liam Hope Hodgson’s novel, published in 1908 (but likely writ­ten in 1904) is one of the most startling accounts of infinity that I’ve ever read. The novel came to me serendipitously: my friend Mike stumbled across it while googling some Dungeons & Dragons thing called “Into the Borderlands.” He read the book, loved it, and passed it on to me. I read it with no knowledge of who Hodg­son was or what I was getting into. As an immigrant, I often experience the delight of belated discovery: Fred...

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 . Richard Powers. This week at The Paris Review , we’re counting the weekdays. Read on for Richard Powers’s Art of Fiction interview , Gish Jen’s short story “ Amaryllis ,” and Wayne Miller’s poem “ Reading Sonnevi on a Tuesday Night .” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not  subscribe  to  The Paris Review ? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or,  subscribe to our new bundle  and receive  Poets at Work  for 25% off.   Richard Powers, The Art of Fiction No. 175 Issue no. 164 (Winter 2002–2003) In the early eighties, I was living in the Fens in Boston right behind the Museum of Fine Arts. I...

In her monthly column The Moon in Full , Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Gustav Klimt, Bauerngarten , 1907, oil on canvas, 43 1/4 x 43 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. An afternoon at the end of May, I stood on a porch in another state, and the day went staticky and dark. The sky purpled and every blade of grass on the hill was pricked by the electricity in the air, a field of green antennae buzzing with the signal. The purple that took hold: not a soporific lavender but the threatening plum of storm, a night come sudden and gone wrong. Said someone on the porch whose third language was English, “It is an eclipse?” It was not, but it felt like one, or how I imagine one to feel, time getting bent by light, the boundary breaking between day and night, one bleeding into the other, destabilizing in the way that certain incomprehensibilities can be, when the messages the senses...

Photo: Octavio Nava / Secretaría de Cultura Ciudad de México from México. CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://ift.tt/UbRXBT), via Wikimedia Commons. For decades, José Emilio Pacheco’s Battles in the Desert has been one of the most widely read novels in Mexico. Since its original 1980 serialization in the weekend cultural supplement Sábado and its subsequent publication, a year later, by the iconic Ediciones Era, this story of impossible love between a boy and his best friend’s mother has established itself as one of the most important novellas in Mexican literature, which boasts such gems in this genre as Carlos Fuentes’s Aura , José Revueltas’s The Hole , and Salvador Elizondo’s Elsinore: un cuaderno ( Elsinore: a notebook ), to name just a few. The considerable reach of this novella is in large part thanks to its readers’ word-of-mouth recommendations over the years and the fact that, since its second edition, it became part of standard middle school and high school curricula throughout the...

Chris Reynolds. Photo: Chez Blundy. Courtesy of New York Review Books. Mauretania is a mood. Spend some time with Chris Reynolds’s The New World: Comics from Mauretania and you’ll feel it. Stark illustrations will envelop you in their contrasts—the blanket blacks of the foreground, the impossible star-bright skies—and you’ll find yourself thumbing anxiously for the uncertain medium of shadows. The characters will elude you—transient, distant, largely muted in their emotions—and their struggles will become your own as you search for meaning in an increasingly mysterious world. We tend to use the terms creepy or uncanny to describe such a mood. I’ve always liked the German word unheimlich . But that describes only a piece of the feeling that permeates these comics. For those moments when life is relatively fine and yet you can’t seem to shake the unease that manifests in everything from the building across the street to the sunlight that “roars across the fields” to the nearly prog...