TOBI'S DESK

Shigeko Kubota’s Berlin Diary: Thanks to My Ancestors . 1981. Cathode-ray tube monitor, crystal, ink, and twine. 9 × 8 × 11″ (22.9 × 20.3 × 27.9 cm). “Everything is video,” the Japanese-born, New York–based artist Shigeko Kubota remarked in a 1975 interview. “[We] eat video, shit video, so I make video poems… Part of my day, everyday, the memory—I like to put in video.” Overlooked compared to some of her other Fluxus-associated peers (including her husband, the pioneering video artist Nam June Paik), Kubota’s work is now the subject of a small but brilliant exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Liquid Reality , which spans her artistically fertile period from 1976 to 1985. In Kubota’s hands, video abandons its cold, sleek pretense, instead taking on a wild quality, with inverted color schemes and pulsating time warps akin to an overgrown garden. “Film was chemical, but video was more organic,” she told The Brooklyn Rail in 2007, eight years before her death at the age of sevent...

Photo: Erica Maclean This year, I suggest a sad and lovelorn Halloween, tender and tolerant of monsters. The book for the mood is the 1816 novel Frankenstein , by Mary Shelley (1797–1851), a classic of gothic literature whose pages inspired foraged-fare acorn scones, a cocktail, and a bread pudding—not weird science, but foods of love. Readers, critics, and biographers have long sought the key to Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s life, which had all the tragedy and plot twists of a good gothic novel. Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the early feminist text A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , and William Godwin, a radical political writer as famous as Wollstonecraft in his time. When Mary was sixteen, she fell for a young poet on the make, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and ran off to France with him, along with her fifteen-year-old stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who also later had a sexual relationship with Shelley. The ménage ran out of money and returned to Engla...

Yesterday, we launched Season 3 of our podcast, with an episode that includes Yohanca Delgado reading her story “ The Little Widow from the Capital .” To mark the occasion, we asked Delgado what allows her to begin writing again when nothing else has worked: When I struggle to write, I shrink my expectations: two words a day. No more, no less. The part of my brain that seeks narrative shyly re-emerges. Maybe day one is easy: a first and last name. But even as I close my laptop, I don’t want to stop there. Beatriz Ortiz wants something. And word by word, the exposed brick wall in Beatriz’s office emerges, the smell of the tangerine she’s peeling… It becomes an Oulipian exercise, a game of Pass the Story. In A Swim in the Pond in the Rain , George Saunders describes the construction of a story as a gradual process, in which different versions of the writer slowly build the best possible draft through small revisions. The version of me who has just watched Viy has access to a diffe...

With our acclaimed podcast, The Paris Review gives voice to the sixty-eight years of our archives. Season 3 launches today, with the release of episode 19, “ A Memory of the Species .” We open with a recording of the literary critic Richard Poirier in conversation with Robert Frost for the poet’s 1960 Art of Poetry interview, from issue no. 24. Next, the Italian poet Antonella Anedda and her translator Susan Stewart discuss Anedda’s poem “ Historiae 2 ,” published in issue no. 231. The American vocal ensemble Tenores de Aterúe then reimagines the poem as a song in the folk tradition of Anedda’s native Sardinia. And Yohanca Delgado reads her story “ The Little Widow from the Capital ,” from issue no. 236, in which a chorus of Dominican women living in a New York apartment building gossip about their new neighbor’s talents for embroidery and witchcraft. Listen now at theparisreview.org/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will arrive eve...

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 . Samuel R. Delany in his New York City apartment in 1983. This week at  The Paris Review , we’re dreaming of other worlds, and highlighting writers of speculative and science fiction. Read on for Samuel R. Delany’s  Art of Fiction interview , an  epilogue chapter  to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, and Margaret Atwood’s poem “ Frogless ,” paired with photos from Richard Kalvar’s series “ Earthlings .” 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. Interview Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210 Issue no. 197 (Summer 2...

Still from Lil Peep’s “Gym Class” music video. Curtis Eggleston’s Hollow Nacelle , out last month from Expat Press , is, like reality, both weird and not at all so. His characters—bandmates—wanna blow up… Or at least have a girlfriend, or at least make art. This is a southern California dreamworld, only so, so gray. In prose that is wonderfully straight even when it muses and metaphorizes, Eggleston conjures up the terrifying banality of fantasy, the dumbness of miracles, and lays them flat on the page. Major miracles, as per usual: love, art, friendship. Plus—and without the corniness that sometimes comes with contemporaneity—there’s the (evil? stupid? neutral?) kinds of spells that, for better or for worse, enchant our late-modern world: an Uber-type driver who appears and disappears at will, the mystery of Instagram virality, a rock of black “goth” molly that turns “purple, lustrous” under the iPhone flashlight. In Hollow Nacelle , magic is in minor stuff: the hypnotic choreogr...

Jim Harrison named one of his hunting dogs Joy Williams or perhaps it was just Joy. She was named after me in any case. Jim was perhaps having a bit of fun, knowing my horror of the hunt. She might well have been a gay and avid associate, reveling in the tristesse of falling birds, but I prefer to think of her as reluctant, anguished about such an enterprise, failing to thrill to it. I prefer to think of her questioning the rightness of it, finding the whole bewildering activity loathsome. She adored Jim, of course, but saw the world differently, like Ahab’s whale who sees a different ocean from each side of its massive head. I prefer to think of Jim taking the hunting dog Joy’s feelings into account, for he thought highly of dogs as well as ravens, loons, horses, bears, dolphins (“certainly as dear as people to themselves”), and all manner of creatures, and would dismiss any philosophy that found them unworthy of grace or our concern. It wasn’t until the sixth century that the Chr...

Caroline and son. Courtesy of the Clifton family. What is our relationship to history? Do we belong to it, or is it ours? Are we in it? Does it run through us, spilling out like water, or blood? I think the answers to those questions, at least in America, depend upon who you are—or rather, on who you’ve been taught to believe that you are. If the history you descend from has been mapped, adapted, mythologized, reenacted, and broadcast as though it is the central defining story of a continent, perhaps you can be forgiven (up to a point) for having succumbed to a collective distortion. But what if yours is a history the wider world once recorded not as lives and feats but as articles of inventory? Men, women, children listed according to their age and value as property? What if the largeness of those lives—what they endured, yes, but also what they carried, remembered, witnessed, and made—has been hushed up, negated, overwritten, or outright erased? What if the recovery of your full...

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. The Wild Hunt of Odin , by Peter Nicolai Arbo, Nasjonalmuseet Summer is dead. The last flames of its cremation heat the leaves across New England where I live. The rest of the fire-stained leaves will fall, ashy on the forest floors, ashy on the sidewalks. This is how ghosts speak, the sound of ashy leaves blown by wind or shuffled by feet, and October is when they speak the loudest. Ghosts are white in the imagination, pale blurs, small fogs of body. The moon is also white, but no one thinks it a ghost. For this haunted moment of the year: the Hunter’s Moon. Bare trees, bare fields—all the better, by moonlight, to spot the prey, take aim, drain blood, skin, sever limb from joint, and slice flesh to store for the cold months ahead. Me, I go to the grocery store; my meat has its skin peeled off before I bri...

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 . Welty, ca. 1962, Wikimedia Commons This week at  The Paris Review , we’re waiting for the bus and descending into the subway. Read on for Eudora Welty’s  Art of Fiction interview , Gish Jen’s short story “ Amaryllis ,” and Frank O’Hara’s poem “ Corresponding Foreignly ,” paired with a  portfolio of photographs  by G. M. B. Akash. 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. Interview Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47 Issue no. 55 (Fall 1972) Once you have heard certain expressions, sentences, you almost never forget them. I...