TOBI'S DESK

A London exhibition looks at the art that came out of the twentieth century’s most tumultuous relationships. But is it only within the context of romantic unrest that the best art can be made? Frida Kahlo, Le Venadita (little deer) , 1946. (Photo Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago) It was a Friday evening in 1914 and the American novelist and playwright Natalie Clifford Barney was throwing a garden party in Paris. Throughout the decades, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, and Marcel Proust would all drop by, but Barney’s salons were particularly known as gathering places for lesbian and bisexual women. That night, the painter Romaine Brooks had, true to character, shown up alone. An American born in Rome, Brooks was already becoming known for her uniquely dark and somber portraits of women. That Friday—and over the course of many Friday salons—in the cool of Barney’s garden, she and Brooks fell in love and would remain so for the rest of their lives. However, their disagreements...

In early July, I was able to sit down and interview Sergio De La Pava , the explosive, encyclopedic author who heralds a new era of the novel. A public defender in New York City, Sergio wrote his first novel on the commute to and from court cases, self-publishing the nearly 700-page A Naked Singularity in 2008. When it was republished by the University of Chicago Press, it received the PEN/Robert Bingham prize for Debut Novel. Since then, his second and third novel, Personae and Lost Empress , received similar acclaim from readers and critics alike. A writer on the periphery of the American literary scene, Sergio De La Pava’s response to art is electric, charged and ready to jolt complacency with the art form. The Millions: What did literature mean to you before you began writing? In a public conversation with other authors , you explained that your interest in writing began at around seven or eight. In your latest novel, a young boy loses his father and, during that morbid transit...

I meet Margo Jefferson for breakfast at her hotel in Boulder, Colorado, where she’s speaking at a literary conference. She’s energetic in both her speech and movement, gesturing, reaching, illustrating with her hands—artifacts, I think, of her years immersed in theatre, where her criticism earned her a Pulitzer. After our interview, I watched her at various panels during the conference and even in the face of confusing questions, she was smiling, gracious, witty as she discussed her upbringing and Negroland , her 2015 memoir of life in 1950s and 1960s America within upper-class black society. We spoke about that book, its implications within today’s political context, her advice for young women of color, and what she’s working on now. The Millions: Negroland is a cultural memoir. I had the feeling in reading it that you’re quite strategic in the places and times that you show us your emotions and motivations versus the times that you present yourself quite objectively, even clini...

From the poster for Gattaca  (1997)   In the summer of 1997, when I had just turned eleven, my mother decided my sister and I knew nothing and that it was up to her to fix it. We took a train to Washington, D.C., left our bags at an uncle’s house, and began a five-day odyssey through what felt like all of the museums that could possibly exist in the world. I was given a composition notebook, with instructions to take notes. I’ve retained little from our frenzied speed walking through places like the U.S. Mint, the Washington Monument, the Air and Space Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the Arlington National Cemetery, except for what I wrote in the capitalized block letters I’d adopted as my handwriting of the season. The single incident I’ve committed to memory took place in the Museum of American History, at an exhibition on Jim Crow. I was gazing up at large artistic renderings of black people sitting in the backs of buses, not being permitted entrance to swimmin...

Guy Davenport / Poem by  Mao Zedong In 1979, Guy Davenport’s second book of “stories” appeared: Da Vinci’s Bicycle . He was fifty-one. I put quotation marks around the word stories because almost nothing happens in any of them. When they’re good, they’re good for other reasons.   Davenport was a disciple of Ezra Pound and James Joyce, and like everyone answering that description, he was a supreme crank. The main problem with all of these guys is that they vastly overestimate the value of literary allusion. And I know all about it, ’cuz I was ruined in my youth by these lizard-eating weirdos. Davenport certainly did his part. They were all brilliant. They could write sentences that stick with you forever. Most people never write even one; these guys could practically cut them off by the yard. Yet, none of ’em knew when to stop. They always, always got carried away. My hypothesis is that too much of their motivation for writing was to enshrine their crankitudes. They were...

“It’s peculiar to me… that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying,” Gloria Beatty says in the third chapter of Horace McCoy ’s 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?  “Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant ways to end it?” Though the first chapter already reveals that Gloria was shot dead by the novel’s narrator at her request, the line still shocks the reader, like the alarm of a ship that has just hit an iceberg. Even in the Great Depression, this was simply too much. “The ending of McCoy’s novel is what the average mortal would call bleak. Naturally the bleak-minded readers… swoon with relief when the gunshot has done its work.” So writes Thomas Ligotti of the novel in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race , his 2011 survey of pessimism, republished this year by Penguin Books. “Yet even the consolations of bleakness have their limits,” he continues, “for those who treasure p...

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 .     Embracing fall equinox, we bring you George Seferis’s 1970  Writers at Work interview , where he speaks to the roles of conscious and subconscious memory in poetic imagery; Edmund White’s short story “ The Secret Order of Joy ”; and Jane Hirshfield’s poem “ Autumn .” George Seferis, The Art of Poetry No. 13 Issue no. 50 (Fall 1970) When autumn approached, when there would be a rather strong wind, and the fishing barges would have to sail through rough weather, we would always be glad when they were at last anchored, and my mother would say to someone among the fishermen who’d gone out: “Ah, bravo, you’ve come through rough weather”; and he would answe...