The Paris Review, long recognizable for its fat, little, bookish profile, has been redesigned under the watch of new editor Philip Gourevitch. Also gone is the practice of emblazoning the cover with an abstruse piece of art (as opposed to, say, the New Yorker) and nothing else. “Maybe no one thought it before Mr. Plimpton died, but the venerable old magazine did need an update.” says Bud, who’s got a full accounting of the venerable literary magazine’s new look (and contents).
The new Paris Review
From the Newsstand: Michael Lewis Goes to Iceland
Michael Lewis turns in yet another tremendous piece in the current issue of Vanity Fair. This one is about the catastrophic financial collapse in Iceland:Walking into the P.M.'s minute headquarters, I expect to be stopped and searched, or at least asked for photo identification. Instead I find a single policeman sitting behind a reception desk, feet up on the table, reading a newspaper. He glances up, bored. "I'm here to see the prime minister," I say for the first time in my life. He's unimpressed. Anyone here can see the prime minister. Half a dozen people will tell me that one of the reasons Icelanders thought they would be taken seriously as global financiers is that all Icelanders feel important. One reason they all feel important is that they all can go see the prime minister anytime they like. For those following along at home, we've also noted Lewis' two takes on the Wall Street collapse and his more recent piece on the NBA.
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A Guy, His Brother, and the Broken Mental Health System
My neighbor and friend Jacob Lambert wrote a powerful piece for Philadelphia Weekly recently about his brother David, who has been diagnosed with acute bipolar disorder:I was at home in Bella Vista when he called. Last I'd heard he'd "eloped" from the hospital and was wandering his old East Village haunts. This was nothing new; many times over the years, his ward status had been upgraded, giving him a bit of freedom - and he'd simply walk off, winding up in Manhattan, then Bellevue, then back at the hospital he'd started from.Today, though, he wasn't calling from a pay phone on Bleecker Street. He was on a cell phone at Seventh and Pine, saying he was browsing apartments, was owed $100,000 and would be buying me a new Mercedes. He sounded as bad as ever, and the call ended when he set down the phone to talk to a stranger.Incidentally, Jacob also runs the hilarious Philly Turkey, a must read for Philly natives.
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Jonathan Safran Foer is a Dog Person
As an urban dog owner I greatly enjoyed Jonathan Safran Foer's article in the New York Times about the trials and tribulations of having a dog in a city. This op-ed piece is an argument against a plan to eliminate "off leash" hours in city parks. As someone who has many times appreciated the ability to let his dog "off leash" in parks in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia, I agree with Foer. I also enjoyed his musings on what it means for us (as in humanity) to have this desire to bring animals into unfriendly environs like cities. Kudos, as well, to Foer for letting his guard down in this piece in a way that many other writers might not have. (via Gwenda)
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At the London Review of Books: Clancy Martin on Alcoholism
In the LRB this month, professor and novelist Clancy Martin offers a brutally candid account of his own attempts to get sober. The piece is affecting, horrifying, and enlightening:As a child I visited my older sister in a psychiatric hospital, but I hadn't been inside one for 30 years. Then, on 1 January this year, at about 11 o'clock in the evening, my wife found me, feet kicking, dangling from an improvised rope - a twisted yellow sheet - about a metre off the ground in our bedroom closet. Our two-year-old daughter was in the bed, sleeping, just a few feet away. Somehow the proximity of a child to the parent's suicide, as with Sylvia Plath's little children in that lonely London flat, increases the suicide's shame. I was at the end of a binge. I was also at the end of three years of secret drinking, of hiding bottles and sneaking away to bars while my wife thought I was living as I had promised her, as a sober man.Martin's narrative of his own battle also considers the dominant theories of alcoholism (the possession theory; the tragic theory) and treatments for it, including a new treatment - some hail it as a magic bullet - the drug baclofen. Martin's description of his conflicted feelings about Alcoholics Anonymous are particularly interesting, but it is the unsparing account of his own drinking that haunts me.See also: Garth's recent review of Martin's novel, How To Sell.
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News from Middle Earth
Though posthumously published work is often disappointing, it's hard not to be curious about the just announced publication of The Children of Hurin by JRR Tolkien, which has been compiled from excerpts and notes by Tolkien's son, Christopher. According to the Guardian, Tolkien enthusiasts will be familiar with the work since fragments of it have been previously published elsewhere:Extracts from the original tale, said to be a detailed but staccato account of the family of Hurin, the man who dared defy Melkor in the first age, have already been published - illuminating, Tolkien enthusiasts say, some of the oldest tales of the legendary land of Middle Earth.The new book is slated to arrive in Spring 2007.
A New Quarterly Conversation
A new issue of the excellent online literary review, The Quarterly Conversation has been posted. There are plenty of goodies on offer, but perhaps the most intriguing is a piece by François Monti about Zone, a French novel by Mathias Énard that has certain literary corners of Europe buzzing. It's got quite a hook:Zone, as has been much noted, is a 517-page sentence, and its rhythm is one that draws readers inevitably toward the end, much faster than you would have thought. It's difficult to stop for a breather, to try and reflect on what's being read. Somehow, form and content stymie a consideration of the meaning of the narration and the way it works. I thought I liked it perhaps more than I really did.The book will be published in English by Open Letter in summer 2010.