TOBI'S DESK

Frank Southgate, Autumn. Waders on the Breydon muds–little stint, curlew, dunlin and curlew-sandpiper , 1904, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Galloway is unheard of. This southwestern corner of Scotland has been overlooked for so long that we have fallen off the map. People don’t know what to make of us anymore and shrug when we try and explain. When my school rugby team traveled to Perthshire for a match, our opponents thumped us for being English. When we went for a game in England, we were thumped again for being Scottish. That was child’s play, but now I realize that even grown-ups struggle to place us. There was a time when Galloway was a powerful and independent kingdom. We had our own Gaelic language, and strangers trod carefully around this place. The Romans got a battering when they came here, and the Viking lord Magnus Barefoot had nightmares about us. In the days when longboats stirred the shallow broth of the Irish Sea, we were the center of a busy world. We took ...

In Re-Covered , Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. The Fortnight in September was republished this month by Scribner. “The man on his holidays becomes the man he might have been, the man he could have been, had things worked out a little differently,” writes R. C. Sherriff in The Fortnight in September , his unassuming but utterly beguiling tale of an ordinary lower-middle-class London family during the interwar years, on their annual holiday to the English seaside town of Bognor Regis. “All men are equal on their holidays: all are free to dream their castles without thought of expense, or skill of architect.” First published in 1931, The Fortnight in September was the British writer’s first novel, though Sherriff was already known as the author of Journey’s End , based on his experiences in the trenches, and is still today one of the most celebrated plays ever written about the First World War. This had been an unprecedented sell-out s...

Tyshawn Sorey. Photo: Sharif Hamza. Tyshawn Sorey is a remarkable figure in contemporary music. For the past twenty years, he has been among the most highly regarded and in-demand drummers in avant-garde jazz, playing with major contemporary figures such as Steve Coleman, Kris Davis, Vijay Iyer, and Steve Lehman, as well as veterans like Marilyn Crispell, Myra Melford, Roscoe Mitchell, and John Zorn. On albums like Alloy , The Inner Spectrum of Variables , and Verisimilitude —the trilogy of trio records he released between 2014 and 2017—he blurs the boundaries between jazz and classical music, exploring sound textures and patches of silence as well as driving rhythms. Over the same period, Sorey, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017 and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, has been developing his oeuvre as a classical composer. Until recently, you would have had to visit a concert hall to hear most of Sorey’s major classical works. His new double album For George Lewis ...

Caio Fernando Abreu. Photo courtesy of Adriana Franciosi. First Letter for beyond the Walls Something happened to me. Something so strange that I still haven’t figured out a way to talk about it clearly. When I finally know what it was, this strange thing, I will also know the way. Then I’ll be clear, I promise. For you, for myself. As I’ve always meant to be. But for now, please try to understand what I’m trying to say. It is with significant effort that I write you. And that’s not just a literary way of saying that writing means stirring the depths—like Clarice, like Pessoa. In Carson McCullers it hurt physically, in a body made of flesh and veins and muscle. For it is in my body that writing hurts me now. In these two hands you cannot see on the keyboard, with their swollen veins, wounded, bursting, with wires and plastic tubes attached to needles inserted into veins inside which flow liquids they say will save me. It really hurts, but I will not stop. Not giving up is the bes...

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 . In His Analysands’ Chair, 2000. This week at The Paris Review , we’re thinking about psychoanalysis and the interpretation of dreams. Read on for Adam Phillips’s Art of Nonfiction interview , an excerpt from Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend , Joanna Scott’s short story “ A Borderline Case ,” and Mark Scott’s poem “ Freudian Tenderness ,” as well as selections from a 1984 portfolio of Louise Bourgeois drawings . Interview Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7 Issue no. 208 (Spring 2014) Psychoanalytic sessions are not like novels, they’re not like epic poems, they’re not like lyric poems, they’re not like plays—though they’re rather like bits of dialogue from plays. But they do seem to me to be l...

As the only Jew in my class, it fell to me to introduce the single Hanukkah song included in the annual winter concert at Randolph Elementary. All I had to do was approach the microphone and name the preceding song (That was “Silent Night”) and say what we were singing next (Now we will present “Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah”) and then return to my place on the metal bleachers which had been set up in the cafeteria for the performance. I wasn’t a shy kid, but this task absolutely terrified me, and I worried about it for weeks in advance of the concert. As soon as I knew the names of the songs in question, I would lie awake at night practicing, repeating the words so often their sense dissolved. Sometimes I would wake my parents up and tell them, tears in my eyes, that I just couldn’t do it, that this time I was too frightened, and they would gently remind me that I’d said the same thing the previous year. Benner, my dad would say, you always do great. Benner, it’s important to participate...

  Linus Borgo, Bed of Stars: Self-Portrait with Elsina and Zip , 2021, oil on canvas, 46 x 68″ (detail) . Linus Borgo makes consistently uncanny and gorgeous work, some of which will be featured at Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles this January. M y favorite of their self-portraits—deadlocked with Fuzzy FTM Transsexual Amputee Plays with Magic Wand and Poppers (Self Portrait) — is Bed of Stars: Self Portrait with Elsina and Zip , in which Linus lies in a pool of deep blue, star-stamped sheets, an oblique banner of sunlight across his torso and thighs, his body filling the frame, toes nearly poking through the border. It’s a work that questions what it is to reproduce an image, a pet, a body part. Of course, this is the terrain of figurative art. But duplicates also appear within the piece: Linus’s left bionic forearm and its phantom mirror not only each other, but his right forearm; the cat dozing by his ankle complements the stuffed one cradling his elbow; the bedspread un...

Samuel David Colkett, Landscape with Cottage , 1842, oil on canvas, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The path to the Oracle was best before dawn, past the pond sleepily switching from frogsong to birdsong, through the dark woods fringed with ferns, up the hill so steep that no matter how slowly I went, I was always out of breath when I reached the top. Three years ago, my parents contracted with a logging company to do what they thought was routine cutting of their two hundred and fifty thickly forested acres in New Hampshire. Perhaps they were thinking of men in picturesque plaid shirts with axes and the careful removal of a few choice maples; instead, a machine of murder arrived. It was the size of a two-story house, leaked diesel on the road, relentlessly tore up everything in its path. For hours, my parents sat frozen in their farmhouse, listening to what my father would later describe as the sound of the trees screaming. At last, the sound broke my parents, and they ran ou...