November 1, 2024 Document Suzanne and Louise By Hervé Guibert Originally published in 1980, Suzanne and Louise tells the story of two sisters—one widowed, the other never married, recluses in a hôtel particulier in Paris’s fifteenth arrondissement. The author, who is also their great-nephew, is one of the few who visits them. Suzanne takes a certain pride in having risen from the poor, uncultured working class to her position as the wife of a well-to-do shopkeeper, in having completed her studies and become a musician, after having traveled far and wide, reading Proust and listening to the “great works” of music. Louise respects this accession (her exclusion). “I quit after elementary school,” she says. Before entering Carmel, and then working at the pharmacy for her brother-in-law, Louise worked in Rheims for an insurance company. Louise loves frothy things: sparkling wines, sentimental magazines (on her bedside table, Nous Deux is next to Catholic Life), operetta music. Read More
October 31, 2024 First Person Bite By Morgan Thomas Photograph by Emet North. We travel to Lake Clark, Alaska, in a four-seater prop plane—my partner and I, the pilot, and the housekeeper for the residency where we’ll be staying. When asked which seat he wants, the housekeeper says, “I’ll take the leg room, I’m a big bitch.” I think, Queer? I ask about his work and over the racket of the plane he shouts that he performed for a decade as a drag queen at a famous Los Angeles bar. He quit during COVID. “People are gross,” he says. Though later he will tell me it was performance itself he tired of, finding it antithetical to intimacy. My partner, R., and I have come to the residency with the intention of inhabiting new metaphors for intimacy. In our application, we wrote, “In 1991, Lynn Margulis coined the term holobiont to describe miniature ecologies consisting of a host organism and their microbiome. The human is a holobiont—more than half of the cells in our body have nonhuman DNA.” We wrote, “In this project, we will ask how this theory of the holobiont can create possibilities for queer joy.” We’ve considered, for example, replacing the phrase “I’m full” with “My gut bacteria have multiplied by a billion and are satiated.” We know we will sound ridiculous. As we fly, I try to inhabit this new mode of thinking. I put a hand on the back of the seat in front of me and think, Look at those microbial skin communities. But the thought glances off; it won’t stick. Read More
October 30, 2024 Diaries Sleep Diary By Rosa Shipley June 29, 2024 Bed at midnight. Awake at 3:12 A.M. Back to sleep around six, awake again at 8:39 A.M. Very hot out. June 30 Bed at one thirty. Up at six thirty. Realized these are my final hours in my apartment before I move tomorrow. Not much sleep, but for good reason. When I already know that my sleep is going to be abbreviated, it’s easier to make peace with the specter of fatigue. This apartment has a skylight, and my bed lies directly beneath. All the time, it gives the sensation of soaking in a sun shower. It is as if I am sometimes being cursed by God’s blessing. No air conditioning, so I freeze tomatoes in the icebox, as I call it to myself—I live alone—and then put them on my belly and heart to cool. The past few weeks, when I’ve been up in the night and sensed morning coming, I’ve tried to locate the darkest corner of my studio apartment. This just means I’ve moved my top mattress layer, a cotton Japanese futon, to the floor. Restless, with one pillow and one sheet, I escaped the skylight. With my body this close to the floor, I can feel the rumblings of the building below me, the deep hum of the subway underneath, and the trucks outside, all the sound so bass-tone that I forget I’m even listening. Makes me think of the way that they say mushrooms speak to one another from underground, or of the sound of a whale. July 1 Bed at midnight. Up at eight. Miraculous! Read More
October 29, 2024 Diaries The City Is Covered in Snow: From the Notebooks of Orhan Pamuk By Orhan Pamuk At the heart of this book there is a dream I’d had before I ever started writing and drawing in these notebooks. I have managed to make sense of some parts of the dream, but others I still don’t understand. I was watching the dream unfold as if it were the view outside my window when I suddenly woke up, afraid … To help me understand that dreamscape, I have arranged the illustrated pages of this book not in CHRONOLOGICAL but in EMOTIONAL order. Read More
October 25, 2024 The Review’s Review On Writing Advice and the People Who Give It By Sheila Heti Drawing by Stephanie Brody Lederman, from Heroic Couplet (The Hustle), a portfolio that appeared in The Paris Review issue no. 75 (Spring 1979). The Canadian writer Sam Shelstad’s third book, The Cobra and the Key, is a funny and charming satire of writing advice and the people who give it. The book is in the form of a writing manual, and its prologue begins: Imagine you are standing in a gymnasium with numerous wooden chests spread out across the floor. Each chest contains one of two things: either a cobra, or a story. As much as you do not want to interact with the dangerous snakes, your curiosity is too great. It’s human nature to crave stories. We need them. So you gamble and open up one chest. It’s a story. You sit down and read, relieved to have avoided an encounter with one of the cobras and grateful that you get to enjoy a story. Once finished, however, you find yourself feeling anxious. The story was fine, but nothing special. You need to open another chest in the hopes of finding another, better story. In fact, you will not be satisfied until all non-snake chests have been opened and you have recovered every possible story. And so, inevitably, you open a cobra chest. You are bitten and the poison slowly kills you. Straight-faced, grandiose, slightly lunatic—this man is our guide. A hundred and fifty-three short chapters follow, covering such topics as “Getting Started,” “Plot,” “Style,” “Point of View,” “Revision,” and so on. I think what confuses me so much about those who have prescriptions for how to write is that they assume all humans experience the world the same way. For instance, that we all think “conflict” is the most interesting and gripping part of life, and so we should all make conflict the heart of our fiction. Or that when we think of other people, we all think of what they look like. Or that we all believe things happen due to identifiable causes. Shouldn’t a writer be trained to pay attention to what they notice about life, what they think life is, and come up with ways of highlighting those things? The indifference to the unique relationship between the writer and their story (or between the writer and the reason they are writing), which is necessarily a by-product of any generalized writing advice, is part of what makes the comedy in this book so great. As a teacher, “Sam Shelstad” is so literal, and takes the conventions of how to write successful fiction on such faith, that when he tries to relay these tips to his reader, the advice ends up sounding as absurd as it actually is. Read More
October 24, 2024 In Memoriam Remembering Gary Indiana (1950–2024) By The Paris Review Gary Indiana in front of his Los Angeles apartment building, 2021. Copyright Laura Owens. We at the Review are mourning the loss of Gary Indiana. We are grateful for his work, and to have published an Art of Fiction interview with Tobi Haslett in issue no. 238. At a recent launch party, he gave a reading of several James Schuyler poems he loved, including this one. We hope to be adding remembrances in the coming days. One thing I should put out there before giving my first last thoughts about Gary Indiana is that it doesn’t matter what I think. I learned this from him. My estimation of Gary comes so late in the game as to be worthless: he’d downed the same drinks and smoked the same cigarettes and had the same conversations about the same famous names with so many younger writers before me that it was a testament to the vastness of his appetite and perhaps also to the vastness of his loneliness that he still insisted through his eighth decade of life on doing what he did, which was—between making books and essays—hanging out deep into the night and pretending we had a culture. I’d often wake up the mornings after to find an email continuing our discussion—a multiparagraph missive sent from irmavep1@gmail.com—and I always meant to ask him if he’d ever been in touch with the person who’d created the original email address named after Irma Vep, that femme fatale and anagrammatical “vampire” played by Musidora. He loved Les vampires, and crime films and fiction of all kinds. This was our major subject—noirs, antinoirs, procedurals, detection—and now it’s his dead body locked alone in the top-floor room. Gary Indiana, the alias, the self-invention, was smart, mean, honest, and usually correct; the man behind the mask, I never met; again, I was too young and also, maybe, too straight, so instead of his bared heart, I got the writerly complaint. I think with all the art people and music people and fashion people and so on in his life, he just liked to sit down with another person who was baffled by the language. His true crime or true-enough crime trilogy is a masterpiece and deserves the Library of America today, agents and editors and rights issues be damned; publishers were always fucking Gary over. But despite a battered career, he knew who he was. One night at the Scratcher, we were joined by Ben Wizner, the ACLU lawyer representing a fresh-faced whistleblower named Edward Snowden. An inveterate hater of the U.S. intelligence community for, among other things, its invention of AIDS (Gary had a lot of theories), our own homegrown Elf King stood up at the table and declared, “I want you to tell Edward Snowden that the greatest living American novelist would like to suck his dick.” The message was delivered. A pity the mission was never accomplished. —Joshua Cohen Read More