Skip to main content

Announcing Our Spring Issue

Early in the new year, returning home from the office one evening, I picked up a story by the Argentinean writer Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. The opening pages of “An Eye in the Throat” place us in the thrall of an escalating family emergency, one that might belong to a work of autofiction. But in time, the nature of the story’s reality transforms. On finishing—I had to unclench my jaw and pour myself a drink—I realized that the narrative, like a tormenting Magic Eye, could be read in at least two distinct, and equally haunting, ways.

Like Schweblin’s story, several of the works in this issue seem to disclose, as if by optical illusion, a previously hidden plane of reality. Joy Williams gives us Azrael, the angel of death, who mourns the limited possibilities for the transmigration of souls as a result of biodiversity loss. In “Derrida in Lahore” by the French-born writer Julien Columeau, translated from the Urdu by Sana R. Chaudhry, an aspiring scholar studying in Lahore, Pakistan, is introduced to Derrida’s Glas (“You must read this,” his professor tells him, “it has fire inside it. Fire!”) and becomes a deconstructionist zealot. And in Eliot Weinberger’s “The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees,” bees become variously the symbols of socialism and constitutional monarchy, good luck and witchcraft, war and peace, and much else besides.

The subjects of our Writers at Work interviews, too, slip between worlds. Jhumpa Lahiri, in her Art of Fiction interview, describes “the woeful treadmill of needing approval” that drove her, at the height of critical and commercial success, to leave her American life behind. “It’s only when I’m writing in Italian that I manage to turn off all those other, judgmental voices, except perhaps my own,” she tells Francesco Pacifico, with whom, in Rome, she spoke in her new language. And in her Art of Poetry interview, Alice Notley describes the need, in her work, to go beyond conscious thought and the “scrounging” of everyday life—beyond, even, the grief of losing loved ones. “You might just freeze, but if you don’t, other worlds open to you,” she tells Hannah Zeavin, before adding, casually, “I started hearing the dead, for example.”

Perhaps a kind of doubleness is fitting for the spring we’re in: the season of hope, which is, this year as ever, filled with dread. When we asked the Swiss artist Nicolas Party to make an artwork for the cover of our new issue, he sent us not one image but two. Like in de Chirico’s The Double Dream of Spring, painted early in the First World War, each image exerts a kind of formal terror, at once seductive and monstrous. We decided that, for the first time in the magazine’s seventy-one-year history, the issue would have twin covers. Subscribers will receive the cover featuring a still life, an array of uncannily sagging apples and pears against rich blue. Buyers at newsstands and bookstores can pick up the version featuring a coastal landscape, albeit one in which the ocean is green and the sky a candy pink. If you’d prefer to alternate between realities, you can always have both.

Emily Stokes is the editor of  The Paris Review.



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/tzf62QP
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Beautiful Faraway: Why I’m Grateful for My Soviet Childhood

At 10 I wanted to be an artist, practiced a hysterical form of Christianity, talked to trees, and turned a sunset at a local park into a visionary experience. My great-aunt lured me to Evangelical Christianity with the strangeness of Gospel stories where Jesus always ended up angry at his disciples’ failure to understand. I sympathized with being misunderstood, and latched on. Besides, Christianity was a forbidden fruit in Soviet Russia so I had to worship in secret. This was unnerving but also alluring. I was a breathless romantic who wanted to be surprised by a knight on a white horse. From the early ‘80s to the early ‘90s, my childhood was formed by the images, atmosphere, and allusiveness of Soviet songs. I grew up in an artistic family where emotions flew high. I was the kind of imaginative child who could spin an entire tale from an oblong stain on the kitchen table. But there’s more to it than that. My family was not always idealistic or romantic, especially not in New York in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dressing for Others: Lawrence of Arabia’s Sartorial Statements

Left: T. E. Lawrence; Right: Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) In the southwest Jordanian desert, among the sandstone mountains of Wadi Rum, there is a face carved into a rock. The broad cheeks and wide chin are framed by a Bedouin kuffiyeh headdress and ‘iqal, and beneath the carving, in Arabic, are the words: “Lawrence The Arab 1917.” If you are visiting Wadi Rum with a tour guide, you can expect to be brought to this carving. You may also be shown a spring where Lawrence allegedly bathed, as well as a mountain named after his autobiography, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, whose rock face has been weathered into a shape that does, from some angles, look a little like a series of pillars. I am familiar with the legend of T.E. Lawrence—fluent Arabist, British hero of the Arab Revolt of 1916, troubled lover of the Arab peoples—as well as with the ways the Jordanian tourism industry has capitalized on this legend. Nevertheless, I am still surprised when I hear someone mentio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Philistines

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...
Post a Comment
Read more