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. The Large Figure Paintings, No. 5, Group 3 , Hilma af Klint, 1907. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons . I In a driveway in San Jose, California, faded winter sun shone off the waxy tongues of the biggest jade plant I’d ever seen. The person I was with, whose mother’s heart had stopped four days before, unloaded things from a rental car. His stepfather, who I’d been warned was “a strange man,” pulled in behind us, back from collecting his wife’s ashes. He walked over with a cardboard box, anonymous and regular as any box you’d see on a doorstep, and stood by his stepson, holding this box. The man hefted the box in his hands and said, in a tone I cannot describe as anything other than merry, “You wouldn’t believe how much your mom weighs stripped of water and bodily liquid.” Something exited the person I was w...

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 . Working at his place in the afternoon, and other notes from the archive on writing and romance. If you enjoy these free interviews, and the portfolio, why not subscribe  to  The Paris Review ? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Interview Jane and Michael Stern, The Art of Nonfiction No. 8 Issue no. 215 (Winter 2015) INTERVIEWER When you started writing about road food, did you think it was of a piece with the folkways movement that was going on then? MICHAEL STERN If we didn’t at the start, we very quickly did. The year after  Roadfood  was published, we published  Amazing America . And in  Amazing America  there are...

Illustration by Matthew Fox (@matteo_zorro). New Recruits The vast office in which the group of Black men find themselves is open-plan. No walls interrupt the space separating them from the glass cage emblazoned with the three letters—CEO—that mark the territory of the alpha male. A huge picture window generously affords a view over the rooftops of Paris. Forms are handed out, left, right, and center. Here, they are recruiting: recruiting security guards. Project-75 has just been granted several major security contracts for a variety of commercial properties in the Paris area. They have an urgent need for massive manpower. Word spread quickly through the African “community”: Congolese, Ivorian, Malians, Guineans, Beninese, Senegalese. Everyone takes out the various papers required for the interview: the identity card, the traditional résumé, and the CQP, a kind of official permit to work in security. Here, it is portentously dubbed a diploma . Then there is the cover letter: “To W...

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons . “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery,” goes Mao’s famous dictum. “A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence in which one class overthrows another.” The aftereffects of this kind of violence on a nation’s citizens is the subject of the South African writer C. A. Davids’s new novel How to Be a Revolutionary , out from Verso this month. In chapters that crisscross between present-day Shanghai, apartheid-era Cape Town, Beijing during the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests, and a series of McCarthy-era letters from Langston Hughes to a South African friend, Davids follows the friendship of Beth, a South African diplomat, and Zhao, a Chinese writer, as they come to terms with the moments of betrayal, naivete, and political cowardice in both of their pasts. But history, like revolutions, is complicated, and Davids is sensitive in her portrayal of the impossible choices...

Gary Indiana, Cookie as my ex-boyfriend , New York, 1980. I was at a sedate little cocktail party in SoHo, one of those uneventful parties I wound up at once a week. It was a typical SoHo art shindig: there was a full bar, sliced raw veggies and clam dip, bread sticks, mini-wieners and pea-size meatballs floating around in red sauce in a hot stainless-steel pan. The usual bunch of scrubbed, aspiring, New York art climbers were there mingling and tittering and chit-chatting discreetly, the women in sensible low heels and expensive stockings with no runs, and the men in silk ties, designer sports jackets, and clean jeans. A few of the men with goofy-looking bloodshot eyes were passing around marijuana; the ladies were giggling and tossing their sleek pageboy hairdos around, acting like they’d never seen marijuana before. These women were young, fresh out of college, but they were always trying to make themselves look old for some reason. I never understood that. They wore gray baggy ...

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons . It’s the name. Sula. That’s what always strikes a space between my breasts whenever I think of Toni Morrison’s second novel, published in 1973, and my favorite of her oeuvre. There are other proper names in Morrison’s titles—Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved—but they do not wear their allegory so lightly. Sula always seems to me to name a person , not an idea. She is, of course, a type , but she is the type of person who exceeds typology. She’s the kind of woman about whom you start to say “she’s the kind of woman…” even though you know any words that follow will twist like winter leaves before they hit the air, will fall to the ground, dry and dead wrong. Sula is a real character , as we say. Sula is incomparable, matchless, singular. There is nobody like Sula. And yet. I’ve seen Sula in my days, in my sisters, my aunts, my friends, a stranger crossing the road. Morrison saw Sula in someone, too, before she wrote her: I began to write my second boo...

Louis I. Khan, 1956 study for center city Philadelphia, ink on tracing paper. A selection from the architect’s notebooks and drawings, including sketches from his European travels as well as early drafts and finished renderings of his buildings. One day, as a small boy, I was copying the portrait of Napoleon. His left eye was giving me trouble. Already I had erased the drawing of it several times. My father leaned over and lovingly corrected my work. I threw the paper and pencil across the room, saying “now it is your drawing, not mine.” Two cannot make a single drawing. I am sure the most skillful imitation can be detected by the originator. The sheer delight in the act of drawing has its way in the drawing and that also is a quality that the imitator can’t imitate. The personal abstraction, the rapport between subject and the thought also are unimitatable. In the presence of Albi [Cathedral], I felt the belief in the choice of its architectural elements, and what exhilaration an...