TOBI'S DESK

Saint Ignatius of Loyola Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Photograph by Nheyob, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons . In my hometown of New Orleans, which is overwhelmingly Catholic, certain men I know go periodically to a Catholic retreat up the river. They go there to repent. Probably they contemplate goodness. And goodness is a lot more interesting than it sounds.  The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola are used as the format for these pursuits. Saint Ignatius of Loyola was a womanizer, purportedly—like a lot of the saints. So probably he wanted to repent, too.  My friends growing up in New Orleans were all Catholic girls, and I’ve often wondered about their Catholic qualities. They seem to have less vinegar in their veins than Jewish girls (like me). It fascinates me to delineate the character traits informed by their religion. I’m drawn to its organized tenets. I’d read the Catholic catechism just for kicks.  But you don’t have to be Catholic to appre...

“My mother couldn’t believe the Queen’s hats. My mother disliked birds and hats.” Queen Elizabeth II in New Zealand, 1953. Licensed under CC0 2.0 . When the Queen of Tuvalu died, I remembered. My parents were pleased that at ten years old I liked Mark Twain. And then they discovered that, as with Cleo the Talking Dog five years earlier, I would not move on from The Prince and the Pauper . I wasn’t interested in any other non-school book. I’d seen the film of Twain’s novel and Errol Flynn had the right to sit in my presence every week when I reread my favorite parts. Tom Sawyer ? Any luckily orphaned boy princes? No? Then no thanks. My mother had purchased from a door-to-door salesman in 1958 our 1957 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia. We never owned another set. My knowledge of the world came from our ever more out-of-date encyclopedia. My science is still very Sputnik-era. I let the twenty-four taped, dogged volumes go with much regret in 2009 after my parents died. A...

Mur de la Peste, Lagnes. Photograph by Marianne Casamance, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons . The Plague was not an easy book to write. Camus was ill when he began it, then trapped by the borders keeping him in Nazi-occupied France. Aside from these difficulties, there was the pressure of authentically speaking up about the violence of World War II without falling into the nationalist heroics he deplored. Like with most problems in art, the solution was to address it directly: in one of the most revelatory sections of the novel, the character Tarrou blurs the line between fancy rhetoric and violence. “I’ve heard so much reasoning that almost turned my head,” he says, “and which had turned enough other heads to make them consent to killing, and I understood that all human sorrow came from not keeping language clear.” All human sorrow! The boldness of this claim hints at how much Camus believed in words. The Plague is full of people who struggle to clarify their language and ...

Danielle Orchard, Lint , 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Gallery. The women in Danielle Orchard’s paintings are usually undressed, or only partially clothed. They might be smoking a cigarette in the bath, or staring at themselves in a mirror, or eating from a bowl of popcorn in bed. Orchard’s settings are often mundane—a bedroom, a boudoir, a kitchen—but these environments are striking in their angularity and irregular perspectives, the paintings’ compositions at once calling to mind the art historical tradition of the female nude and unsettling it. Her painting Lint graces the cover of the Fall issue of the Review and depicts a woman in stockings and no knickers. We talked about Balthus, working with life models, outsize objects, how she made Lint , and the notable absence of pubic hair from the painting.   INTERVIEWER When did you start gravitating toward the female nude? ORCHARD The painting program I was in at Indiana University was fairly traditional and v...

Photo by Lisa Pines. This fall marks a transition on our editorial team, as Vijay Seshadri is bidding the Review farewell—at least as our poetry editor, a role he has occupied since 2019. He will be greatly missed. With our forthcoming Winter issue, we will welcome to the role Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy, a professor at the University of Chicago who has served as a guest editor of Poetry  magazine and is the author of three books of poetry, most recently  Underworld Lit . We are deeply grateful to Vijay for introducing us to the work of so many remarkable poets over the last few years, and for being a marvelous colleague and a true friend to the Review . The worst thing about choosing poems for The Paris Review is having to say no. The magazine receives many submissions, and many of those include strong poems that deserve to be in its pages but can’t be accommodated. Turning down poems is probably even worse for a poetry editor who is also a practicing poet and knows how...

A page from “ How to Name Your Baby ,” in issue no. 66. John Train, a cofounder of The Paris Review and its first managing editor—or “so-called managing editor,” as he often put it—died last month, at age ninety-four. It was Train who coined the Review ’s name and, in its early days in Paris, as a member of the Café Tournon crowd, he pushed the magazine away from criticism, writing later that “theories, both literary and political, are the enemy of art.” Train went on to become “an operator in high finance and world affairs,” as the Times obituary put it today, but many will remember him best for his love of small idiosyncrasies: in the early fifties, while studying for a master’s degree at Harvard in comparative literature, Train noticed in Collier’s magazine a Mr. Katz Meow, which led to an earnest obsession with collecting what he called “remarkable names of real people.” You can find some of these in our Summer 1976 issue, no. 66, which features a fourteen-page list ...

Gabriel Mälesskircher, Saint Guy Healing a Possessed Man , public domain, via Wikimedia Commons . This week, we remember Hilary Mantel (1952–2022), and bring you recommendations from two of our issue no. 241  contributors.  On holiday in France, I went to Colmar to see the Isenheim Altarpiece in the Musée Unterlinden. Afterward, wandering through the museum’s collection of medieval and Renaissance art, I came across a small oil painting: part of an altarpiece attributed to Gabriel Mälesskircher, a fifteenth-century German artist from Colmar. Saint Guy Healing a Possessed Man has clear, singing colors, predominantly reds and greens. While Saint Guy looks on, the possessed man in question is being restrained by three other men. His head is thrown back, and the expelled demon, a tiny black humanoid, has just flown out of his gaping mouth.  I thought at once of Mavis Gallant’s story “In the Tunnel,” which ends with the protagonist, Sarah, writing a jokey, flirtatious ...

Photograph by David Wipf. Spanish moss, City Park, New Orleans, June 1958, via  Wikimedia Commons . Licensed under   CC BY 2.0 .   Nancy Lemann’s work is deceptive in its meandering. She is thinking deeply even when it seems as if her thoughts are floating. Her laser powers slice into idiocy (and dice it) while they also beam sympathetically onto, as she would call it, the folly of the human condition. Her work evokes something old-fashioned in its manner and tone, and this proves to be a way she keeps herself from being subsumed in the clichés of modern culture even as she is examining it. But she is observing the human being of today. One of her passions is history, with particular attention to architectural preservation and travel. Though she is describing us, we feel she is looking at us from another time, through the lens of the ages. Nobody writes like Nancy Lemann. You might recognize slivers of other writers within her work, writers whom she first revered: E...

A collage by Dennis, reflecting her interest in how interior spaces relate to feminism. Made in 1971 in her loft on Grand Street. Courtesy of Donna Dennis. Ted Berrigan was the first in the circle of poets around the Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church to ask me to design an announcement mailer for one of his readings. He encouraged others to do the same. In the late sixties, I designed a number of flyers and covers for mimeographed poetry books. These gave me the first public exposure for my work. Ted and I saw one another off and on for about five years. In the spring of 1970, we lived together on Saint Mark’s Place in the East Village, until June, when Ted went to teach a course in Buffalo. I moved into the artists Rudy Burckhardt and Yvonne Jacquette’s loft on East Fourteenth Street while they summered in Maine. Ted stayed with me for a number of weekends that summer, and he proposed that we undertake a collaborative book. As I remember, I began the collaboration by making dr...