TOBI'S DESK

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 . “A crush goes nowhere,” Kathryn Davis  writes  on the  Daily  this week, in a piece adapted from her forthcoming memoir,  Aurelia, Aurélia . “It’s called a crush because it’s like something landed on top of you, making movement impossible.” Still, who doesn’t love to nurture a crush every now and again? Flirtations, racing hearts, and fixations of all kinds certainly abound in our archive. Read on for Italo Calvino’s awkward habit of “falling in love with foreign words” as recalled by his translator William Weaver in an introduction to  The Art of Fiction no. 130 ; dashed fantasies in “ Rainbow Rainbow ,” Lydia Conklin’s story of a teenage girl meeting her...

Photo by Sarah Lucas Agutoli. Claudia Durastanti has spent years interrogating the limits of language, first out of necessity and later by choice. Born in the U.S. in 1984 to Italian parents, both deaf, who never taught her sign language, she grew up between Brooklyn and Basilicata, a small town in southern Italy. The frustrations, silences, and miscommunications that marked her childhood—and the corresponding impulse to fill in those lacunae via the imagination—can be felt in her work as a writer, and as a translator determined to leave some room for “poetic imprecision.” Durastanti translated the latest Italian edition of The Great Gatsby and is also the translator for Donna Haraway, Joshua Cohen, and Ocean Vuong—which might give you a sense of her range. Her own fiction has been translated into twenty-one languages. La Straniera , her fourth novel, was a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2019, and its English translation by Elizabeth Harris, Strangers I Know , received a PEN...

Photo by Ken Heaton, via Wikimedia Commons . Early in the morning last week, in a funk of sleeplessness, I tuned in to the afternoon matches of Round Three at the Australian Open. The cool blue geometries of the courts in Melbourne—especially when the sound is off—are usually a balm to my mind. But there’s always a danger that the match will be exciting, and when the Spanish up-and-comer Carlos Alcaraz fought through to a fourth set against Matteo “The Hammer” Berrettini, I gave up and made coffee. Then I reread (for the fourth or fifth time) the opening pages of Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s The Circuit , his account of the year 2017 in tennis—a year that witnessed the comebacks of Nadal and Federer, just when they seemed ready to pack it in—and a rival to John McPhee’s Levels of the Game for the best book out there on the sport. Phillips watches games the way we all do—on television—but he sees more, and more clearly, than the rest of us. Before I knew it, I had read half the book, Be...

Still from The Seventh Seal courtesy of the Criterion Collection. The film is available to stream , and as a disc set . We’re in a room on the ground floor of a hotel, the bed facing a wall of curtained windows that in turn faces the street. It is nighttime. Rain is coming down, steadily, reflectively, a stream of passersby visible through the curtains, which are sheer. Everyone is moving in the same direction, bent slightly forward and holding an umbrella, from left to right, the good direction, from past to future, the opposite of where Death leads the knight and the squire and the monk and the smith and the mute in their final dance against the backdrop of time in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal . The umbrella is the canopy of the heavens; the rain is never going to let up. We can see the passersby but they can’t see us, though Eric has turned a light on above his side of the bed. I was obsessed with The Seventh Seal my senior year in high school; I was obsessed with the vis...

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 a new essay published on  The Paris Review Daily , the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra  explores  how a lifetime of cluster headaches led him to seek relief in the hallucinogenic mushroom  teonanácatl . He learns an important lesson: always wait before redosing. In the spirit of experimentation, this week’s  Redux  riffs on writing under the influence. Read on for Hunter S. Thompson’s hard-won advice about which drug a writer should avoid, in the  Art of Journalism No. 1 ; a hazy afternoon in J. M. Holmes’s “ What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me? ”; Anne Waldman on the body as “just a bundle of drugs” in “ How to Write ”; Allen Ginsberg’s 1966  lette...

Three-year-old girl riding an Arabian horse. Miragexv at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. “The Bridge 94 (Demo),” by Mobb Deep featuring Big Noyd, went unreleased for twenty years. The fact that you could make something that good and decide not to put it out says everything about Mobb Deep’s seat in the pantheon. The whole thing is a kniving, wintry blast of phonetic artistry, but the last lines are Shakespearean. The rapper is Prodigy, a twenty-year-old Albert Johnson the Fifth (Albert the Third was Albert J. “Budd”Johnson, a major early bebop saxophonist who came out of Dallas and got his break recording with Louis Armstrong in the early thirties). Prodigy will die in his early forties from problems related to sickle-cell anemia, but at the moment he’s talking about his home ground in the vast housing projects of Queens. The song is a warning to would-be intruders or, in Big Noyd’s words, “motherfucking violators.” In six seconds Prodigy draws an eerie pict...

Illustrations by George Wylesol . Teonanácatl . That’s what the Aztecs used to call the mushroom known today as pajarito , or “little bird.” My friend Emilio recommended it as a treatment for my cluster headaches, and he got me a generous dose in chocolate form. I stashed the squares in the fridge and awaited the first symptoms with resignation, though I sometimes fantasized that the mere presence of the drug would keep the headaches at bay. Sadly, soon enough I felt one coming on, and it was the very day we had planned a first-aid course. My wife Jazmina and I had just had a child, and after attending a clumsy, tedious introduction to first aid, we’d decided to call in a doctor, and ended up inviting other first-time parents to an exhaustive four-hour program that would take place at the house next door. But in the very early dawn of the designated day, I woke up with that intense pain in the trigeminal nerve that for me is the unequivocal sign of an imminent headache. My wife prop...

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. Strange Flower (Little Sister of the Poor) , by Odilon Redon, 1880 1. How did you hear about planet Earth?   2. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being abysmal, 5 being transcendent, please rate your experience with planet Earth: 1  2  3  4  5 3. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being frozen numb, 10 being the worst pain possible before exploding into a trillion meteoric fragments, how much pain are you in right now? 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 4. In general, do you wish you had more freedom?  Please circle one: Yes   No 5. In general, are you glad to be tethered by gravity to planet Earth? Please circle one: Yes   No 6. If you were to describe the smell on your surface, you would use the word(s) (please circle all that appl...