The Paris Review

The lion bites the dirtwhen about to die,and weeps. But he’s...

Thu, 23 May 2013 17:00:37 -0400

   The lion bites the dirt
when about to die,
and weeps. But he’s kingly
   investigating rolling wheels on an empty chariot
      with vultures overhead; child, he fears
      but does not flee the flame
brightening in his pelt. As his gaze rules
grasses without deceit, and let no glance inward
      remain oblique,
      so did I, carrying a torch into that smoke,
   form a third eye
   and consent to die.

—Christopher Patton, from “The Death of Pliny the Elder”
Photography Credit Andrew Pope

“Sometimes there are things you didn’t know you wanted to...

Thu, 23 May 2013 16:04:00 -0400

“Sometimes there are things you didn’t know you wanted to see.”

Liz Brown on “Biopic-Mania.”

"Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written. "

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:45:21 -0400

““Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written. ””

- Anthony Burgess

Choose Your Own Adventure: Author Edition

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:00:00 -0400

Choose Your Own Adventure: Author Edition

“Poets, painters, musicians and so forth who loitered about...

Thu, 23 May 2013 13:10:40 -0400

“Poets, painters, musicians and so forth who loitered about St.-Germain in the early fifties were, to my knowledge, more or less impoverished. If any of them did have money, it was not mentioned. Christopher Logue, I had heard, was highly impoverished even by poetic standards. I wanted to invite Christopher to lunch, but there was a chance he might feel offended. I asked Max Steele, who knew him pretty well, what to do. Max suggested that he might criticize a manuscript in exchange for lunch. That sounded fine. Christopher was agreeable, so we met at some restaurant. I gave him a five-page story I had written. I thought he would skim through it, make a few comments, and we could get on with our lunch. Ah, no. He took the story apart paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word. I was appalled. It seemed to me that he talked for an hour, pointing out every mistake. Since that day I have, for better or worse, inspected each paragraph, sentence, phrase and word, perhaps fearful that Christopher might be looking over my shoulder. That was almost fifty years ago and I still am not sure if I feel indebted to him. He made things more difficult.” —Evan S. Connell, from the portfolio Postwar Paris: Chronicles of Literary Life.

“Who is Herbert Huncke? When I first knew him I saw him in what...

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:14:18 -0400

“Who is Herbert Huncke? When I first knew him I saw him in what I considered the ‘glamorous’ light of a petty criminal and Times Square hustler who was experienced in the ways, thoughts, and activities of an underground culture which is enormously extensive. The attempt to dismiss him because of his social irresponsibility is something that I was never able to conceive as truthful or productive. I saw him as a self-damned soul—but a soul nonetheless, aware of itself and others in a strangely perceptive and essentially human way. He has great charm. I see that he suffers, more than myself, more than anyone I know of perhaps; suffers like a saint of old in the making; and also has cosmic or supersensory perceptions of an extraordinary depth and openness.” —Allen Ginsberg

The Burning Ghat, a strange short film featuring Herbert Huncke, who introduced Williams S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, and became a muse of sorts in their writing. (via)

“I might warn that civilization as we know it is on the verge of...

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:49:34 -0400

“I might warn that civilization as we know it is on the verge of collapse. Poetry—being able to say it concisely, without excess anywhere—somehow lives up to these things that I’m writing about. It does them justice.”

Talking Civilization with Dana Crum

Among the birchesears scooped the rustle. Ruby, his...

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:32:26 -0400

Among the birches
ears scooped the rustle.

Ruby, his eyes
increased the rounded world.

No pigment save the sepia stain
the gland between his antlers left.

On sugar legs, he’d melt in winter,
leaving prints, aboriginal,

all animal.
Two lights appeared.

Machinery fit itself
to his blue-toned form.

This paper sheet
mimics him,

snow troubling the picture
as any whiteness will.

—Mark Wunderlich, “White”
Art Credit Jane Lee

A lost Pearl S. Buck manuscript, found in a Texas storage unit,...

Thu, 23 May 2013 09:45:17 -0400

A lost Pearl S. Buck manuscript, found in a Texas storage unit, will be published this fall.

For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.

Hats off to our beloved contributor Lydia Davis, who was just...

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:48:49 -0400

Hats off to our beloved contributor Lydia Davis, who was just awarded the Man Booker International Prize, Great Britain’s most prestigious prize for fiction. In the judges’ citation, Sir Christopher Ricks asked how best to describe Davis’s works: “Just how to categorise them? They have been called stories but could equally be miniatures, anecdotes, essays, jokes, parables, fables, texts, aphorisms or even apophthegms, prayers or simply observations.”

Click here to read some of Davis’s most recent fiction in The Paris Review—or click here to receive our next issue, with five new stories (or miniatures, or anecdotes, or essays, or whatever you’d like to call them).

“In an album of disparities and disjointedness, ‘Diamonds on the...

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:30:00 -0400

“In an album of disparities and disjointedness, ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’ is a model of coherence and qualified, tempered hope—slow, sad, suspect and nebulous, off-balance but redemptive nonetheless. You know why you feel the miracle and wonder of it all. The song may not have the dancing of the rest of the album, but what it has is something else.”

Adam Plunkett on Paul Simon’s Graceland.

“‘Failure is the family business,’ the Duck Man said on our...

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:45:20 -0400

“‘Failure is the family business,’ the Duck Man said on our first day out, flashing a broad salesman’s smile. But he didn’t need to tell us. Milt had already heard of him from men he knows in Omaha. The Duck Man has a reputation: like the smell of a slaughterhouse, it carries distances. He is known for buying scrap metal that was once the basis of a productive business. He has made a fortune in scrap, in destroying what others built.”

—E. J. Levy, from “Theory of the Leisure Class”
Film Still from Tom Kalin’s finally destroy us

Last Chance for Our Special Tote Bag Offer!

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:10:50 -0400

Last Chance for Our Special Tote Bag Offer!

Today marks the anniversary of Arthur Conan Doyle’s birth. While...

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:56:55 -0400

Today marks the anniversary of Arthur Conan Doyle’s birth. While his creation, Sherlock Holmes, has inspired hundreds of adaptations in many media (in several of which, no one finds it weird that a modern man is named Sherlock Holmes) I think we can all agree that these tributes found their apex in the following theme song.

Warning: this is strangely catchy, oddly stirring, and will stay in your head for the rest of your life.

A manuscript page from Heinrich Böll’s Vermintes Gelände,...

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:08:57 -0400

A manuscript page from Heinrich Böll’s Vermintes Gelände, published in 1982.

“The impulse may ‘fall’ into the same family as the one that...

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:13:39 -0400

“The impulse may ‘fall’ into the same family as the one that drives us, as toddlers, to touch a hot stove. Driven by a basic instinct for discovery and, ironically, survival—a need to methodically taste-test the environment in which we are to go on living.”

Evan James on the impulse to fall.

Photography Credit Benjamin Schmuck.

The two of us are young enough to dream we’ll make it out...

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:36:08 -0400

The two of us are young enough to dream
  we’ll make it out alive, somehow escape
the burden of our genes and history
  to start again, unstained. From the rotting corpose
of a lion he’d killed, Samson took honey, ate,
  and found it sweet, but then slew thirty men
because of it. Like him, we crave the taste
     of something drawn from death, but can’t be sure
     if fingers drip with syrup or with gore.
  Or both. Nothing we touch is innocent.

—Bob Watts, from “A Poly-Grecian Urn: Wal-Mart, Easter Weekend, 1998”
Illustration from Understanding Human Behavior Vo1. 14: An Illustrated Guide to Successful Human Relationships

Dawn Clements doesn’t necessarily intend her drawings to become...

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:36:00 -0400

Dawn Clements doesn’t necessarily intend her drawings to become panoramic in scale. She begins with small pieces of paper and draws in ballpoint pen, or paints in black ink, a slice of what she sees; in particular, her own domestic environment, or interiors and characters from film and melodrama. But sometimes these small works don’t seem complete, so she glues another section of paper to the drawing and continues. This can go on for weeks, months, or years, resulting in drawings ranging in size from eleven feet in diameter to seventy-two feet in length.

…

Clements drew, over the course of one year, those two rooms of her Brooklyn railroad apartment, from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. As the drawing grew in scale she continued folding it into a manageable size, the process of folding and unfolding adding wear and tear. To get every angle she found herself in awkward positions, such as sitting in the tub or crouched in a corner. The finished twenty-six-foot drawing is a flattened-out version of her kitchen and bathroom as seen from multiple viewpoints that result in odd distortions of perspective. —Susan J. Swenson

Featured drawing from Dawn Clements’s portfolio “Kitchen and Bathroom.”

This is Allen Ginsberg’s reading list for his class, “Literary...

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:00:36 -0400

This is Allen Ginsberg’s reading list for his class, “Literary History of the Beats.” (Yes, he is on it.)

For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.

"I feel that the characters in the story already exist in a limbo outside my control, and what I’m..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:15:56 -0400

““I feel that the characters in the story already exist in a limbo outside my control, and what I’m doing over the months of gestation is getting in touch with them and learning about them.””

- P. D. James