TOBI'S DESK

In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. If the Australian writer and critic Thelma Forshaw is remembered for anything today, it’s most likely the hatchet job that she gave Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch in 1972. Of the many reviews the book received, Forshaw’s—published in the Age , a newspaper based in Greer’s own hometown of Melbourne—was by far the most disdainful: “King Kong is back. The exploits of the outsized gorilla may have been banned as too scary for kids, but who’s to shield us cowering adults? To increase the terror, the creature now rampaging is a kind of female—a female eunuch. It’s Germ Greer, with a tiny male in her hairy paw (no depilatories) who has been storming round the world knocking over the Empire State Building, scrunching up Big Ben and is now bent on ripping the Sydney Harbour Bridge from its pylons and drinking up the Yarra.” Understandably, Forshaw’s slam piece caused quite a stir, and ...

In March,  The Paris Review  launched  The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of   the magazine , quarantine-appropriate writing on the  Daily , resources from our peer organizations,  and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter  here , and find the latest unlocked archive selections below. “Thanksgiving will feel different this year. With so many of us unable to gather around tables with friends and family, I thought it might be nice to spend some time with literature that brings us together for memorable meals: sumptuous dinners, rollicking celebrations, and even some awkward dining room discussions. May we vicariously sit at these crowded tables, even as there may be empty seats at our own. Sam White’s poem ‘ Memo ’ captures what I hope these stories, poems, and interviews can offer during this strange week. The poem, which starts with a demolition, ends with a holiday meal. The clo...

João Gilberto Noll. Photo courtesy of Nectar Literary. This past week, when my roommate asked me about the plot of the João Gilberto Noll novel I was reading, Harmada , I struggled to even begin. “A man wakes up in the muck and encounters a child. He spits on the child’s wound to cure it, then walks away, eventually happening upon a play featuring two actresses. Then he has a threesome with the actresses, which eventually turns into a foursome with the company’s director, and by the way, one of the actresses is a single mother and has a baby, don’t forget. Then the man is in some kind of asylum or halfway home, remembering his life before, when he was a director and his wife abandoned him after he proved to be infertile. Then this baby, who’s now a teenage girl, is also there, and he helps her become the most famous actress in the city of Harmada. Eventually there’s a celebration, and I think this all might be a metaphor for the creative process and also Brazil, but maybe not … ” I’...

Read Aysegul Savas’s story “ Layover ” in our Fall issue The club has six members. Maks and I bring the cake. Beth brings drinks. Talia sets out chairs in front of the bookshop. Penelope carries the metal grill and turns the shop sign to Closed. Follie, the black dog, goes wild. She jumps and licks and runs in circles. Then she goes in search of an empty bookshelf, to curl into. We have a joke about Follie reading all the books inside, while the club congregates on the shop terrace, across the gates of the Luxembourg Gardens. It’s really not that funny. But somehow at a gathering, it can become hysterical. The club is called Cakes and Ale . That might be my favorite of Maugham’s books, though it’s Penelope who came up with the name. She’s been a bookseller for thirty-five years, which means that she’s a master punner. She is also a master judge of character. It seems too obvious that a bookshop owner named Penelope, with her long hair and wool cardigans, should also be an eccentric...

Our column  Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Read Forough Farrokhzad’s poems “ After You ” and “ Window ” in our Summer 2020 issue. Forough Farrokhzad in 1965 (wikimedia commons) In 1954, a nineteen-year-old poet walked unannounced into the office of the literary editor of Roshanfekr ( The Intellectual ), one of Iran’s most prestigious magazines. Her fingers were stained with green ink, and she trembled with nerves as she handed over three poems. One of them, the twelve-line “Sin,” described in explicit detail her affair with the magazine’s editor in chief. Different translations give different nuances to the opening of the poem: “I have sinned a rapturous sin / in a warm enflamed embrace,” (Sholeh Wolpé) or “I have sinned, a delectable sin, / In an embrace which was ardent, like fire” (Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée) or “I sinned / it was a most lustful sin / I sinned in arms sturdy as iron, / hot like fire and vengeful.” (Far...

Photo: Dragiša Modrinjak. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Factories demand Workers must command — Primer , 1957 A Bulgarian grocery store opened for business in my Amsterdam neighborhood. On the inside of the plate-glass window they hung a Bulgarian flag, making the store highly visible from the outside, but dark inside. They sell overpriced Bulgarian groceries. And the same can be said of almost all the ethnic markets. First come the migrants, and after them—the markets. After a time the ethnic food markets disappear, but the migrants? Do they stick around? The number of Bulgarians in the Netherlands is clearly on the rise; two Bulgarian markets have opened recently in my neighborhood alone. And as to those with a “Balkan tooth,” they have famously deep pockets as far as food is concerned; they’ll happily shell out a euro or two extra to satisfy gourmandish nostalgia. The markets sell Bulgarian wine, frozen kebapcheta and meat patties, cheese pastries ( banitsas ), pick...

“I’ve always had a thing with birds,” said the artist Ida Applebroog in a 2016 interview . A few years ago, inspired by John James Audubon’s ornithological paintings , she began a series of works that foreground her longtime fascination with all things feathered. Unlike Audubon’s birds, which were brought beautifully to life on paper after being shot, eviscerated, and splinted into position by the naturalist himself, Applebroog’s birds don’t hide their mortality. A bluebird lies belly up, its ruddy breast exposed. An owl sprawls out with its eyes closed. A pair of gray woodpeckers dip their heads back, beaks pointed toward the sky to which they’ll never return. “ Applebroog Birds ,” a new show devoted to the artist’s avian works, will be on view at Hauser & Wirth’s Twenty-Second Street location through December 19, 2020. A selection of images appears below. Ida Applebroog, Cardinal , 2018, ultrachrome ink on mylar, 52 1/2 x 40″. © Ida Applebroog. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Phot...

Original illustration by Jenny Kroik “This puzzling quest is almost at its end.” James Rorimer, 1942   Nobody knows who made the Unicorn Tapestries, a set of seven weavings that depict a unicorn hunt and described as “the greatest inheritance of the Middle Ages.” Without evidence, the La Rochefoucauld family in France asserted that they originate with the marriage of their ancestor in the fifteenth century. The Tapestries did belong to the La Rochefoucauld in 1793, before they were stolen by rioters who set fire to their chateau at Verteuil. The family resumed possession of them sixty years later, when the Tapestries were recovered in a barn. The precious weavings of wool, silk, gold and silver were in tatters at their edges and punched full of holes. They had been used to wrap barren fruit trees during the winter. In late 1922, the Unicorn Tapestries disappeared again. They were sent to New York for an exhibition, which never opened. A rich American had bought the tapestri...