TOBI'S DESK

Photo: Marion Ettlinger. At 248 pages, Joshua Cohen’s latest novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family , is slim by his standards. His 2010 comic novel Witz comes to 824 pages. Book of Numbers is just shy of 600. Beyond page count, there is an instantly recognizable intensity to Cohen’s writing, and in this respect, too, The Netanyahus is a bit of an outlier, for it unfolds with the ease of an anecdote, a comic—if cautionary—tale.   Published in the U.S. this week by New York Review Books, the novel follows a series of events surrounding a job talk in 1960 by the conservative religious historian Benzion Netanyahu at a small college in upstate New York. The narrator is the liberal economic historian Ruben Blum, who is assigned to take charge of Netanyahu’s campus visit, despite not knowing his work, because he is the only Jewish member of the faculty. Netanyahu unexpectedly brings his family al...

“I’m interested in people’s specificity,” Hebe Uhart once remarked. The Argentine writer, who died in 2018, wrote with what Alejandra Costamagna terms “a philosophical position that arises from the ordinary.” Animals , a new collection of Uhart’s writing on creatures, critters, and companions, offers countless examples of her keen powers of observation. In the below excerpt, Uhart visits Plaza Almagro in Buenos Aires and interviews an eccentric collection of dog owners.  Frank Paton, A Found Toy , ca. 1878, oil on panel, 12 1/2 x 15 1/2″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Here we are in winter, but the winter has made a mistake: it’s a spring day. The plaza is full of dogs, alone   and accompanied; they’ve been set loose to enjoy the lovely day. Beside me sits a very circumspect lady with a dog on A+ behavior, not even sparing a look at the dogs in the pen as they bark wildly. She says to me: “I’ve always protected animals. Back when I worked at a logistics warehous...

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 . Hass teaching at St. Mary’s College, ca. 1977. Photo courtesy of the author. This week at The Paris Review , we’re thinking about fatherhood and Father’s Day. Read on for Robert Hass’s Art of Poetry interview , Jonathan Escoffery’s short story “ Under the Ackee Tree ,” and Louise Erdrich’s poem “ Birth .” 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.   Robert Hass, The Art of Poetry No. 108 Issue no. 233 (Summer 2020) When you’re taking care of small c...

In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photo: Lucy Scholes. In a literary landscape often obsessed with youth—whether it’s the buzz surrounding so-called hot new talent or those “30 under 30” and “best of young novelists” lists—stories of late-in-life success prove especially fascinating. I’m talking about writers like Penelope Fitzgerald, who didn’t publish her first book until she was in her late fifties, and won the Booker Prize at sixty-three. Or the British novelist Mary Wesley, who was seventy when the first of her ten best-selling novels for adults made it into print. Then we have the doyenne of them all, Diana Athill, who experienced unexpected literary celebrity in her nineties. As such, Cleo Overstreet’s debut novel, The Boar Hog Woman —which was published in 1972, when its author was fifty-seven years old—couldn’t help but catch my attention. David Henderson’s celebratory obituary for Overstreet, which ran in the Berke...

Janet Malcolm and Katie Roiphe in conversation at NYU, 2012. Photo courtesy of Roiphe. In one of my last email exchanges with Janet Malcolm , in one of the darkest parts of the pandemic, she wrote to me, “I can only try to imagine the hard time you and the children are having. How can you not be stalled on writing? I wish there was something I could do to help.” Her response warmed me, elevating my state of general stagnancy into something almost socially acceptable. The idea of her in my house, helping with my son’s online schooling—his teacher was reading out “rat facts” during his daily forty-five minutes of Zoom—was so incongruous that it made me laugh. Before I met Janet, she was the only living writer who terrified me, because I loved her work so much. I had devoured The Silent Woman in graduate school, and then read everything else. I was in awe of her brutal precision, her sharp inquiries into the production of stories, her moral wrangling with journalism and biography. H....

Jas. I. Campbell, Historic American Buildings Survey: Ashton Villa , Photograph, 1934. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The long-held myth goes that on June 19, 1865, Union gen­eral Gordon Granger stood on the balcony of Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and read the order that announced the end of slavery. Though no contemporaneous evidence exists to specifically support the claim, the story of General Granger reading from the balcony embedded itself into local folklore. On this day each year, as part of Galveston’s Juneteenth program, a reenactor from the Sons of Union Veterans reads the proclamation at Ashton Villa while an audience looks on. It is an annual moment that has taken a myth and turned it into tradition. Galveston is a small island that sits off the coast of Southeast Texas, and in years past this event has taken place outside. But given the summer heat, the island’s humidity, and the average age of the attendees, the organizers moved the event inside. A man nam...

In Akwaeke Emezi’s new book, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir , the writer traces their experience as an ọgbanje , an Igbo term that refers to a spirit born into a human body, through letters to friends, family, and lovers. In the below excerpt Emezi describes trying to find community within their M.F.A. program and their discovery that working fearlessly could be a form of worldbending.   Guy Rose, The Blue House , c. 1910. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Dear Kathleen, Sometimes, you remember me better than I remember myself. I think that’s important in a friendship—to hold reflections of people for them, be a mirror when they start fading in their own eyes. I hope I do the same thing for you, too. I can’t wait for you to get here for Christmas; I know Germany has been hard on you this fall. The last time we texted, you wrote, I need you and our time this break . I know what you mean. The world can be a grit that sands away at us, and love can be a shelter...

Photo: © isman rohimly ibrahim/EyeEm / Adobe Stock. I first read the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti in December 2007, when I spent three weeks in the hospital due to an appendectomy gone wrong. Between doses of antibiotics, I asked my father to bring me a book that had just been published, of Onetti’s complete short stories. Before long, I came to one entitled “Convalescence,” which seemed appropriate given my situation. A woman is recovering from an illness in a hotel by the sea. Onetti doesn’t tell us what the illness is. A man keeps calling her on the phone, making threats, insisting she return to the city. I knew it might not be the best idea to read Onetti while laid up in a hospital bed—he’s not exactly the most upbeat writer. But the feeling that came over me as I turned the pages was one of joy. Back then, I used to go on diving trips with a couple of friends. I was really into it—getting away from São Paulo and heading down to Ubatuba or some other town on the coast, ...