TOBI'S DESK

Photo: Jenna Moore. Jonathan Meiburg was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1976 and grew up in the southeastern United States. In 1997, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to travel to remote communities around the world, a year-long journey that sparked an enduring fascination with islands, birds, and the deep history of the living world. Meiburg explores these passions in his new book, A Most Remarkable Creature , which traces the evolution of the wildlife and landscapes of South America through the lives of the unusual falcons called caracaras. Like the omnivorous birds at the heart of his book, Meiburg is more generalist than specialist. He’s written reviews, features, and interviews for publications including The Believer ,  Talkhouse , and The Appendix , on subjects ranging from the music of Brian Eno to a hidden exhibition hall at the American Museum of Natural History. He also conducted one of the last interviews with Peter Matthiessen. But he’s best known as a mu...

The following serves as the foreword to Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints , a newly translated selection of the Russian writer Teffi’s stories, which was published earlier this week by New York Review Books. Teffi. Photo courtesy of New York Review Books. There are writers who muddy their own water, to make it seem deeper. Teffi could not be more different: the water is entirely transparent, yet the bottom is barely visible. —Georgy Adamovich It is not unusual for a writer to be pigeonholed, but few great writers have suffered from this more than Teffi. Several of her finest works are extremely bleak, but many Russians still know only the comic and satirical sketches she wrote during her first years as a professional writer, from 1901 until 1918. Few critics have recognized the full breadth of her human sympathy, her Chekhovian ability to write convincingly about people from every level of society: illiterate peasants, respectable bourgeois, monks and priests, ...

As a child, the Queens-born photographer Dawoud Bey marveled at the vibrancy of midcentury Harlem, where his parents had met and many of their friends and family members still lived. “Driving through the crowded streets, I was amazed by what appeared to be the many people on vacation,” he has written . “It seemed to me that no matter what the day, everyday was Saturday in Harlem.” In 1975, equipped with a camera, he began paying weekly visits to the neighborhood, walking the streets and capturing pictures. This approach—on the ground, studied, empathetic—led to his first series of photographs, “Harlem, USA,” and would inform his practice in the ensuing decades of his career; much of his work feels grounded in the unmediated intimacy of these early street portraits. Bey’s Harlem photographs and a bounty of other pieces from his near half century at work are on display in “ An American Project ” (up at the Whitney Museum of American Art through October 3), his first retrospective in twe...

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 . Milan Kundera, ca. 1980. Photo: Elisa Cabot. This week at The Paris Review , we’re spending too much time online. Read on for Milan Kundera’s Art of Fiction interview , Hiromi Kawakami’s short story “ Mogera Wogura ,” and Stephen Dunn’s poem “ Historically Speaking .” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not  subscribe  to  The Paris Review ? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or,  subscribe to our new bundle  and receive  Poets at Work  for 25% off.   Milan Kundera, The Art of Fiction No. 81 Issue no. 92 (Summer 1984) Today one can compose music with a computer, but the computer always ...

In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photo: Lucy Scholes. The Flagellants , the American writer Carlene Hatcher Polite’s debut novel, is one of those out-of-print books that’s been lurking in the corner of my eye for the past few years. First published by Christian Bourgois éditeur as Les Flagellants in Pierre Alien’s 1966 French translation, and then in its original English the following year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the book details the stormy relationship between Ideal and Jimson, a Black couple in New York City. The narrative is largely made up of a series of stream of consciousness orations. Polite’s prose is frenetic and loquacious, and her characters fling both physical and verbal violence back and forth across the page. The French edition received much praise. Polite was deemed “a poet of the weird, an angel of the bizarre,” and the novel was described as “so haunting, so rich in thoughts, sensations, so well loca...

Alice Neel, Hartley , 1966, oil on canvas, 50 × 36″. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Gift of Arthur M. Bullowa, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the National Gallery of Art. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Alice Neel’s paintings are a tonic for the modern world—but not for the reason one might expect them to be. At first glance the tender, vivid portraits in “ People Come First ,” her sprawling retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, seem refreshing in contrast to the abstract expressionist movement they developed alongside. But pausing with each painting, I realized more and more that my feeling of rejuvenation was freedom from fatigue at the dull literality of photography; though she is a twentieth-century painter, our image-saturated twenty-first needs Neel. We like to see reality represented (you already know about social media), but for some reason, portraits and still lifes are associated with the sensibility of a distant past. Neel’s deep interest in the...

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual, Melville-themed wine tasting on Friday, May 7, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review ’s Instagram account . For more details, visit our events page , or scroll down to the bottom of the article. Photo: Erica MacLean. Whenever I would tell someone I was cooking from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for my next column, they would gleefully shriek, “Whale steaks!” And I would dither a bit and explain that no, those are illegal in America, and that I was instead planning to make two forms of chowder, clam and cod, that weren’t going to be very different from each other. In our Chowhound-fueled, extreme-eating kind of world, I felt a little silly. Chowder is an easy dish, and while there’s raging conflict over the primacy of New York style (tomato-based) versus New England style (white), and the finer variations of each, the topic seems to inspire passion in inverse proportion to its importance. (Potatoes or no potatoes? Avast.) In fa...