TOBI'S DESK

Photograph by Colin Ainsworth. Everybody in the the New Wave–nostalgia hotel has their phones out, which makes me pretty much like everybody else. After breezing past the lobby desk, I peek around: slate colors, fresh leather. There are scented candles burning somewhere. There’s a coffee bar selling things at New York prices, and while I wait for what will be a bitter, strong, iced $5.50 Americano, I see them: maybe 1,500 antique books, lined up in a custom black bookcase that’s about twenty feet tall. In their latest show, Fixer Upper: The Hotel , the home-and-lifestyle reality stars Joanna and Chip Gaines renovate and redesign the Karem Hotel in downtown Waco, Texas, into what they name the Hotel 1928. (The original hotel was built in 1928.) The Gaines family struck gold in the 2010s with their house-flipping show Fixer Upper , and they eventually outgrew HGTV to form their own network, Magnolia. What’s not to like about the duo? Joanna Gaines looks like a movie star, and she’s u...

Hebe Uhart. Photograph by Nora Lezano. Hebe Uhart had a unique way of looking—a power of observation that was streaked with humor, but which above all spoke to her tremendous curiosity. Uhart, a prolific  Argentine writer of novels, short stories, and travel logs, died in 2018. “In the last years of her life, Hebe Uhart read as much fiction as nonfiction, but she preferred writing crónicas, she used to say, because she felt that what the world had to offer was more interesting than her own experience or imagination,” writes Mariana  Enríquez in an introduction to a newly translated volume of these crónicas , which will be published in May by Archipelago Books. At the Review , where we published one of Uhart’s short stories posthumously in 2019, we will be publishing a series of these crónicas in the coming months. Read others in the series here . Yesterday I was riding the 92. The bus was half-empty and a woman of about sixty or seventy caught my eye. It was difficul...

Photograph by Ben Ross Davis. Twice in his life, Ellis made a contract with himself. He’d promised he would give himself five years and by the end of them, if he still wanted to kill himself, he would. Both times he’d made this contract, he still wanted to die at year five. But since, for a few months during each five-year span, he had a break from his compulsive ideations, he told himself it meant that the clock had reset and the contract was void. That, and he didn’t want to kill himself, not really. I met Ellis in New York when I was twenty-six. He was the soft-spoken cybergoth—black mesh top, bleached-blond hair shaved to a perennial buzz—who always danced by the speaker stacks at warehouse parties. The angles of his jaw and his heavy brow lent him a harsh beauty. He told me about his suicidal thoughts the first time we had dinner. We didn’t know each other well, really at all, so his pain alarmed me. “I’ve had them ever since I was young,” he added. “Me too,” I said. I had...

Jacques Hérold. From a portfolio in issue no. 26 of the  Review (Summer–Fall 1961). Parable of the Movie “I like your movie. I can tell that horror is a big influence.” “Thank you, yes, I love horror movies.” “Oh, I didn’t mean horror movies. I meant horror.” “Thank you again. The feeling of horror itself also happens to be one of my biggest influences.” “You’re welcome. But I didn’t say anything about a feeling.” “I beg your pardon, but what kind of horror is neither a movie nor a feeling?” “Me.” “But we just met. You didn’t influence my movie at all.” “Well then. I take it back.” * The sound of the wind rustling the leaves in the part of the country from which he hailed eerily resembled the opening chords of the song “Do It Again” by Steely Dan. * A call about the job I applied for. I am invited to come in for an interview. * Parable of the Worm Inoculated against the fact that their king was a worm, they watched his tense face as he devoured their kin, p...

Welcome to Disney World! Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 1. Once I had to go to Disney World with my small children. On the way to the airport our taxi driver exhibited signs of Obsessive Disney Disorder—when he found out where we were going he started obsessively describing and listing and explaining everything that had to do with Disney World, even though he was a grown man. We stayed at the Portofino Bay Hotel, a Disney-owned property that is a replica of the storied village on the Italian Riviera. There were imitation Renaissance churches and Mediterranean piazzas clustered around a fake harbor with old Fiats parked on the cobblestones and fishing boats moored in the fake bay. Outside cafés ranged on the harbor, serving espresso under green-and-white striped awnings. Italian cypresses were planted along the pools. If you didn’t know it was a Disney replica of a real place, it would have to be characterized as being extremely tasteful and lovely. So you did tend to ge...

Photograph by Erica Maclean. In Franz Kafka’s first published story, “Description of a Struggle,” the narrator is sitting in a drawing room at a rickety little table, eating a piece of fruitcake that “did not taste very good,” when a man walks up to him. The man is described as an “acquaintance,” but we soon realize he is a double, or another part of the narrator’s self. The acquaintance has fallen in love and wants to boast about it. “If you weren’t in such a state,” he scolds, “[you] would know how improper it is to talk about an amorous girl to a man sitting alone drinking schnapps.” The comment seems to threaten an unchecked appetite. What would the lonely, schnapps-drinking man do if tempted by the girl? The struggle that follows, metaphorically speaking, is between the sides of the protagonist’s character—on one side, the man who desires to stand apart from society and guard his creative self, and on the other, he who wishes to fit in and reap the pleasures of fruitcake and am...

Gustav Klimt, Tannenwald , 1901. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons , public domain. Today we are publishing a previously unpublished poem by the poet, critic, and editor Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz was hailed as a promising short story writer and poet in the generation that included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman; a longtime editor at the Partisan Review , he was the youngest person ever to win the Bollingen Prize in 1959. (Some of Schwartz’s poems and letters were published in the Review in the eighties and nineties. ) The poem below was discovered without a date, but is immediately recognizable for its recasting of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from an alcoholic’s perspective. This riff is made poignant by the fact that Schwartz’s later years were characterized by mental illness and alcoholism. He died, largely isolated, at the Chelsea Hotel in 1966. Whose booze this is, I ought to think I know. I bought it several weeks ago. It...

Illustration by Na Kim. We are thrilled to announce that  The Paris Review  has won the  2024 ASME Award for Fiction , marking the second year in a row that the magazine has received the honor. The three prizewinning stories are Rivers Solomon’s “ This Is Everything There Will Ever Be ,” a disarmingly warm portrait of “just another late-forties dyke entirely too obsessed with basketball, dogs, and memes”; “ My Good Friend ,” Juliana Leite’s English-language debut, translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry, a story written in the form of an elderly widow’s Sunday-evening diary entry (“About the roof repair, I have nothing new to report”) that turns into a story of mostly unspoken, mutual decades-long love; and James Lasdun’s “ Helen ,” in which a man writing about his parents’ upper-class milieu in seventies London—the time of the IRA’s mainland campaign in Britain—stumbles upon the journals of a family friend, a woman who lives in what the narrator calls a “state of ...