TOBI'S DESK

In her monthly column  The Moon in Full , Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Good Shepherd , 1902–03, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 36 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Tootsie Roll Tom showed up at all the Little League games in the town where I grew up. Soccer games, too. He kept Tootsie Rolls in his pockets and in a small canvas satchel he wore on his shoulder. He arrived on his bicycle and kids surrounded him as he pulled the Tootsie Rolls from his pockets and his pouch and placed the candy in their eager palms. He was well loved in the town. In the town there was also a psychiatric hospital, formerly known as an insane asylum. My mom called it the loony bin, and she was not the only one. The rumor was that Tootsie Roll Tom lived there. He lived there but was not secured to a bed in a room with bars on the windows; he was allowed to ride his bicycle ...

Lizzy Stewart’s debut graphic novel, It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be , reimagines visual storytelling through a series of interconnected vignettes that each employ a unique illustrative style. From black-and-white sketches to full-color drawings, Stewart’s stories are linked by feelings of uncertainty and acceptance as friends and strangers alike confront the many ways in which expectations rarely match up with reality. In the below excerpt, two longtime friends meet up and recall the simple pleasures of their adolescence.   Lizzy Stewart is an illustrator and author based in London. She has written and illustrated books for children as well as countless comics and zines. She teaches illustration at Goldsmiths University and has also taught courses at the Tate and on behalf of the National Portrait Gallery. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art and Central St Martins. From It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be , by Lizzy Stewart, published July 27, 2021, by...

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 . Robert Pinsky. This week at  The Paris Review , we’re thinking about mouths and the breath. Read on for Robert Pinsky’s Art of Poetry interview , Shruti Swamy’s short story “ A House Is a Body ,” and Helena Kaminski’s poem “ Face .” 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,  choose our new summer bundle  and purchase a year’s worth of  The Paris Review  and  The New York Review of Books  for $99 (that’s $50 in savings!).   Robert Pinsky, The Art of Poetry No. 76 Issue no. 144 (Fall 1997) In...

Edward Hopper, Hotel Window , 1955, oil on canvas, 40 x 55″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I am puzzled by the mournfulness of cities. I suppose I mean American cities mostly—dense and vertical and relatively sudden. All piled up in fullest possible distinction from surroundings, from our flat and grassy origins, the migratory blur from which the self, itself, would seem to have emerged into the emptiness, the kindergarten-landscape gap between the earth and sky. I’m puzzled, especially, by what seems to me the ease of it, the automatic, fundamental, even corny quality of mournfulness in cities, so built into us, so preadapted for somehow, that even camped out there on the savannah, long before we dreamed of cities, I imagine we should probably have had a premonition, dreamed the sound of lonely saxophones on fire escapes. What’s mourned is hard to say. Not that the mourner needs to know. It seems so basic. One refers to certain Edward Hopper paintings—people gazing out of w...

Becka Mara McKay. Photo courtesy of McKay. Becka Mara McKay once asked me to make a list of things one would never find in a poem, the lesson being that an exploration of lawn mower parts or the muscles used while bowling or natural marble patterns might yield some wonderful language, and if we’re not putting wonderful language in poetry, then where will all this wonderful language end up? A lot of wonderful language has found its way into McKay’s latest collection, The Little Book of No Consolation , which is structured around seldom-used terms such as scorse , inhabitiveness , wood-want , and donkey’s breakfast . In “ from the Dictionary of Misremembered English ” she writes, “ I can only bless you once , says the Angel / of Syntax, who believes we are born among / words the way birds are born among wings.” These poems investigate the layered intricacies of language itself as much as they plumb the depths of their subject matters, which tend toward the intersection of the animal, ...

Photo: Erica MacLean. Today, the Eat Your Words kitchen plunges into controversy with Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–1984), the Russian known as Joseph Stalin’s favorite writer, whose greatest work is And Quiet Flows the Don . This book—if it can be called a book, and not an item of propaganda, or possibly a plagiarism, or at least a contested territory—was published in serial format from 1925 to 1932, and then was completed with a final volume in 1940. In the end it comprised four “books” concerning a cast of characters based in the Don Cossack region of Russia (now in Ukraine), set in a time period starting around 1912, before the outbreak of World War I, and continuing through the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. Sholokhov was known as “the Red Tolstoy,” and people often love the book for its qualities as a historical epic. When I first read it, while living in Moscow in my twenties, I found it useful in bringing the complex politics and military phases of the era to life. ...

Photo: Ruvin De Silva. Courtesy of Hogarth Books. It is no exaggeration to call Anuk Arudpragasam’s first novel absolutely devastating. The Story of a Brief Marriage depicts Dinesh, a sixteen-year-old Tamil man—and yes, at sixteen Dinesh is in many ways a man, forced into a premature adulthood—in a refugee camp toward the end of the Sri Lankan civil war. Though Arudpragasam’s second book is more removed from the bodily experience of violence as portrayed in his first, the war still hangs heavy over the scope of the new novel. A Passage North , an excerpt from which appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of this magazine , follows Krishan, a Tamil man who grew up outside of the war zone, as he makes his way north from Colombo to attend the funeral of his grandmother’s caretaker. It is an incredibly introspective work. Through the particularities of Krishan’s experience and inner life, Arudpragasam seamlessly unfurls ruminations on intimacy, trauma, and the passage of time. The contemplat...