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Two photographers take a look around the iconic literary journal
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| Photograph: Sara Kerens |
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| Photograph: Sara Kerens |
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| Photograph: Paul Barbera |
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| Photograph: Paul Barbera |
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| Photograph: Paul Barbera |
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| Photograph: Paul Barbera |
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| Photograph: Paul Barbera |
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| Photograph: Paul Barbera |
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| Photograph: Paul Barbera |
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| Photograph: Sara Kerens |
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| Photograph: Sara Kerens |
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| Photograph: Sara Kerens |
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| Photograph: Sara Kerens |
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| Photograph: Sara Kerens |
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| Photograph: Sara Kerens |
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| Photograph: Sara Kerens |
From
Lena Dystant (Selectism):
Part of the “Where They Create” project, photographer Paul Barbera goes inside the offices of legendary literary journal, The Paris Review. 208 issues on from its first in 1953, the magazine was orginally produced by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton, Americans in Paris, the opening statement reading "The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines…" Featuring interviews and work from the likes of Hemingway, Faulkner, Ezra Pound, V. S. Naipaul, Joan Didion and Truman Capote, the magazine continues to introduce the work of new writers and reevaluate established names. More in our gallery, for the full set of images head here and read an interview with current editor Lorin Stein here. [Read More]
From
Claudine Ko (Refinery 29):
In New York City's esteemed literary world, there are parties, and then there are The Paris Review parties. Indeed, as long as the quarterly journal has garnered respect for discovering new writing talent — Jack Kerouac, Adrienne Rich, and David Foster Wallace, to name a few — it's also been known for its all-night, booze-flowing soirées where society and the counterculture drink from the same bottle of whiskey.
“It’s always been two things at once,” says editor Lorin Stein. “On the one hand, it’s a hyper-sophisticated, modernist, avant-garde magazine. On the other hand, it’s sort of a destination party.” And over the decades, the 60-year-old publication has continually attracted an eclectic crowd, from Jackie O, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer, to more recently, Zadie Smith, Malcolm Gladwell, and the editors of Vice. [Read More]
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
A short story published in The Paris Review
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| Zadie Smith |
From
Zadie Smith's 'Big Week', published in The Paris Review:
He sat in the dive bar on Sherman, looking out at his house, on the other side of the street. The panels were buckled along the porch, and deep, ugly breaches scored the white clapboard, but come spring he would fix it all up for her, repaint and reseal, whatever needed doing. That went for the oil tank, too. He would keep doing whatever was necessary around the place, because he loved her, and she still loved him—in the largest sense of that word—and people would just have to wrap their heads around that fact. [Read More]
Find Zadie Smith on Amazon: US |
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Also at A Piece of Monologue:
From a 2013 interview with the author
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| Zadie Smith |
From
Richard Godwin (London Evening Standard):
NW was her attempt to write an ‘existential novel’, to channel her reading of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre into a modern, black, female setting. ‘Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we’re also dark people with dark thoughts. I wanted to have that on the page, as horrible as it might seem,’ she says.
Her father Harvey died in 2006, prompting what she describes as a long bout of reflection. ‘My family’s very noisy but my father was the quiet part of it. I miss that quietness.’ Then, in 2009, she became a mother for the first time, which informed the book’s ‘subconscious’ theme of fertility as well as its more overt concern with mortality. ‘There’s suddenly no one between you and death. My father’s dead, so there’s a direct route now. A few days ago, my three-year-old was messing around, saying, “One day I’ll be six and one day I’ll be seven and one day I’ll be 28.” I realised I would be 65. Me and Nick were like, “Oh my God.” This child is eating your life.’
However, despite its darker shades, NW’s warmth makes it a pleasure, much like an afternoon in a London park. The four central characters, Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan, are all supposed to have grown up close to where we meet: Leah does similar social work to Smith’s mother Yvonne; Natalie goes to a good university, just like Smith. ‘We always felt very fortunate,’ she says of her own upbringing. ‘Rich, lucky. It was only when I grew up that I realised we weren’t rich, but it was fine. We were on a nice estate, not much trouble. My school was nice. My friends were nice. My parents separated, but they managed it well.’
Now, Smith says she has all she could want as a writer and as a mother. She lives on campus in SoHo, where her fellow parents tend to be astrophysicists and economists. ‘My playground conversations are mind-blowing. I walk in and see the neuroscientist mum and think, “Oh, how embarrassing, I don’t know anything.” ’ Above all, she has the ‘higher headspace’ she needs, and an academic routine reminiscent of her time at Cambridge. [Read More]
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Also at A Piece of Monologue:
A 2011 review of Cole's second novel
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| Teju Cole |
From
James Wood (New Yorker):
Publishers now pitch their books like Hollywood concepts, so Teju Cole’s first novel, “Open City” (Random House; $25), is being offered as especially appealing to “readers of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” and written in a prose that “will remind you” of W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. This is shorthand for “post-colonialism in New York” (O’Neill), “lively multiracial themes” (Smith), “free-flowing form with no plot, narrated by a scholarly solitary walker” (Sebald), “obviously serious” (Coetzee), and “finely written” (all of the above). There is the additional comedy that Cole’s publishers, determined to retain the baby with the bathwater, boldly conjoin Smith and O’Neill, despite Smith’s hostility, advertised in an essay entitled “Two Paths for the Novel,” to O’Neill’s expensive and upholstered “lyrical realism.”
This busy campaign for allies does a disfavor to Teju Cole’s beautiful, subtle, and, finally, original novel. “Open City” is indeed largely set in a multiracial New York (the open city of the title). Cole is a Nigerian American; he grew up in Lagos, came to America in 1992, at the age of seventeen, and is a graduate student in art history at Columbia University. The book’s half-Nigerian, half-German narrator walks around New York (and, briefly, Brussels), and meets a range of people, several of them immigrants or emigrants: a Liberian, imprisoned for more than two years in a detention facility in Queens; a Haitian shoeshiner, at work in Penn Station; an angry Moroccan student, manning an Internet café in Brussels. This narrator has a well-stocked mind: he thinks about social and critical theory, about art (Chardin, Velázquez, John Brewster), and about music (Mahler, Peter Maxwell Davies, Judith Weir), and he has interesting books within easy reach—Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida,” Peter Altenberg’s “Telegrams of the Soul,” Tahar Ben Jelloun’s “The Last Friend,” Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Cosmopolitanism.” [Read More]
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Also at A Piece of Monologue:
