TOBI'S DESK

The award-winning Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo ties the knot with her beau Christopher Nunez. She shared photos of the big day on Instagram. She looked stunning in a gorgeous red outfit accessorized with gold jewelry. A few months before the wedding, Elhillo celebrated a different kind of milestone. A collection of poetry co-edited with […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2Uepds9

Although the general misconception is that writers and book lovers are boring people, the CORA-The Nigeria Prize for Literature Book Party 2019 is proof of how untrue that is. On the 28th of July, 2019, Shell Hall at The MUSON Centre in Lagos was packed with guests who had come to spend an afternoon with […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2ZBzrrC

You might have seen the new Little Women trailer by now. In a series of quick cuts, the eminently familiar faces of Emma Watson and Saoirse Ronan , as well as the faces of Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanlen , flash on the screen: 2019’s wholesome and soft-feminist embodiment of those four famous girls some of us know so well from childhood. Unobjectionable, right? A new book called March Sisters also comes out this year, containing the musings of four well-known writers on their relationships to the book’s protagonists. But what about the latest adaptation of Emily Dickinson ‘s life, in which Hailee Steinfeld plays a punk-rock, badass Dickinson who writes about “wild nights” —and isn’t talking about religious ecstasy? For The Guardian , Adrian Horton asks how modernized should literary adaptations be ? What liberties is it okay to take? The post The Art of the Adaptation appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions https://ift.tt/2NzYTaC

Image courtesy Jennifer Tseng, photographer unknown. February 1982 It’s night. The curtains are closed, which gives the room a claustrophobic look. The men are all wearing brown or black, with white. Our mother is wearing blue, which both complements the oranges on the table and is the color that, as a child, I thought of as a white person’s color. When asked what their favorite color was, white kids almost always said “blue.” It’s our mother’s favorite color, too. Mine is red, the Chinese color of happiness. The men match the room, its fixtures and decor. Our mother and the oranges stand out as things that have come in from the outside; things that, like imports or immigrants, have come from elsewhere. Though the oranges agree with the orange chairs, one of the men’s shirt collars, the painting on the wall, our mother is the only blue thing. This photograph, taken when I was thirteen, always provokes mixed feelings in me. I spent much of my childhood observing the ways in which o...

This September, the English translation of László Krasznahorkai ’s masterpiece Baron Wenckheim ’ s Homecoming will be published, completing the novel cycle he began with Satantango and continued with The Melancholy of Resistance and War & War . Baron Wenckheim ’ s Homecoming is the culmination of Krasznahorkai’s labors, a manic Greek chorus that infuses festive Technicolor into his multifaceted, bleak vision. It is Krasznahorkai’s funniest and most profound book and, quite possibly, also his most accessible. Krasznahorkai has hinted that this may be his final novel and, if that’s the case, then it is a tremendous sendoff to one of our most talented writers. Baron is set in a dead-end Hungarian village riddled with gossips and backstabbers and structured with chapters ominously named after drumbeats. Plastic bags swirl through the air, and a gang of frightening—yet surprisingly human—Neo-Nazi bikers patrol the town. Bitter pomp and fierce one-upmanship reign freely. Everything...

Émile Bernard, Mother and Child , 1898, oil on canvas, 15″ x 18″. Public domain. “What did you have?” “A boy.” “Congratulations.” If your first child is a girl I’m told people say: “How nice.” How nice. My child is of course wonderful but I am also—embarrassingly—slightly proud that he’s a boy. Childbirth is full of such pitfalls, where the wish to be congratulated overrules common sense. I don’t find the standard notion of the good wife very compelling. But the pressure to be “a good mother” according to the prevailing definitions is practically irresistible. I can keep my head when David Holbrook, in his most recent outburst against “art, thought and life in our time,” warns that it is a failure in mothering that produces intellectuals and other pornographers: it’s less easy to steer a clear course through all the varied strictures of the psychoanalysts themselves. Worse still, it’s by no means adequate to try to behave like a good mother, because that involves an act of will: ...

illustrations © Jenny Kroik You see her sometimes on the way to work. On the train, or on line at the coffee shop where, though you are late, you have stopped for coffee. She is wearing what you ought to have chosen that morning: something much more cool or much more practical or much more elegant than you. Her bag is from a shop you’ve heard about but haven’t gotten to yet or can’t afford. She is in Boston or San Francisco or Atlanta or L.A., but she is perhaps most indigenous to New York City. She is real and she is also a figment of your imagination.  As I carried a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca into a coffee shop recently, a woman stopped me to say it was one of her “favourites.” We spoke about it in a way that caught the attention of another woman in line, and the second woman explained the plot to the third. She told her that the book was about a lot of things, but that it was really about a house. As someone who has worked as a bookseller, I have gotten good at d...

This Is My Body , Cameron Dezen Hammon ‘s debut memoir, opens with the author on stage at The Refuge, an evangelical megachurch in a suburb of Houston where she works as worship leader, a role for which she must “look young, but not too young…pretty, but not too pretty.” In front of the stage, a white casket holding an 18-year-old girl sits open, obscured by the colored lights and the fog pouring from a machine backstage. “We’re both objects in this space,” Hammon writes, “the eighteen-year-old girl and me, two different kinds of painted dolls.” Just before she begins to sing, Hammon’s phone vibrates in her dress pocket as she receives texts from a man she met an arts conference, “a man I might love, who is not the father of my eight-year-old daughter. Not my husband of twelve years.” Meanwhile, beside her on stage, Hammon’s husband, a member of the worship band, strums his guitar and waits for her to begin. “Much of the time these days, I don’t believe what I’m singing,” she writes,...

In today’s edition of featured fiction—curated by our own Carolyn Quimby —we present an excerpt from E.R. Ramzipoor ’s debut novel, The Ventriloquists , out today from Park Row. In its starred review, Booklist called The Ventriloquists “A compelling historical thriller,” while Publishers Weekly called the book “Sprawling and ambitious, with crisp pacing and fully realized characters.” 2 Years Before Faux Soir The Pyromaniac Let me tell you something about my friend Marc Aubrion. Though I have known many writers who were given to stage fright, Aubrion would have found it difficult to define, let alone to experience, that feeling. It did not matter whether the audi­ence laughed at his jokes, or at him: if they were laughing, they belonged to Marc Aubrion. That is not to say that he wasn’t afraid, in the days of Faux Soir . To be alive was to be afraid. Although not every day of the occupation brought us pain—it is easy to forget that now—unpredictability bred our fear. We were tra...

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 . Don DeLillo, ca. 2011. Photo: Thousandrobots. This week at The Paris Review , we’re celebrating that most late-August phenomenon: humidity, and the ensuing sweat. Read on for Don DeLillo’s Art of Fiction interview , Sheila Kohler’s short story “ Cracks ,” and Andrew Klavan’s poem “ The Pond .” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.   Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction No. 135 Issue no. 128 (Fall 1993) On humid summer nights I tracked horseflies through the apartment and killed them—not for the meat but because they were driving me ...

During his yearlong trek spent researching paranormal claims throughout the Midwest, B.J. Hollars admits “whether discussing the mundane or a monster sighting, it’s hard to know who to trust.” Everyone, it seems, has a story. “The irony,” Hollars writes in Midwestern Strange , “is that much of the research conducted by cryptozoologists, ufologists, anomalists, paranormal investigators, and the like undergo the same processes employed within academia’s hallowed halls—namely, hypothesizing and theorizing toward a greater understanding of truth.” He often returns to this sentiment: Strange tales demand our attention, but such research is met with skepticism. Midwestern Strange is a fun and fascinating romp through those tales—delivered with Hollars’s talent for connecting dots while remaining comfortable with unanswered questions. The author of Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America , The Road South: Personal Stories of the Freedom Riders , and other books, he...

Francesco Hayez, Portrait of Alessandro Manzoni , 1841, oil on canvas, 46″ x 36″. Public domain. The Manzoni Family is a meeting between two authors who at first glance could hardly seem more different. Alessandro Manzoni is simply the most celebrated figure in modern Italian literature. His great novel The Betrothed , published in quite different editions in 1827 and 1840, is the first modern novel in Italian, the later edition marking a milestone in the con­solidation of Tuscan Italian as the language for a potentially united Italy. Profoundly Catholic in inspiration, the book was placed at the core of the Italian school syllabus after the country achieved unification in 1861 and still offers a linguistic and moral example to generation after generation of Italian children. Natalia Ginzburg, on the other hand, was a Jewish novelist and a Communist, whose husband Leone Ginzburg died in a Fascist prison during World War II. While Manzoni’s prose now seems elaborate, sometimes ...