Shakespeare was an insult master, as were Churchill, Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde and… Cézanne? Apparently so. In The Irish Times, Colm Tóibín reads through the painter’s letters, one of which includes a gripe that “Pissarro is an old fool [and] Monet is a wily bird.” (You could also read Claire Cameron’s Millions review of Tóibín’s latest novel.)
Van Gogh Was Cheap
Thoughts on Someone
New Edith Wharton Discovered
A new short story by Edith Wharton has been discovered in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Yale. The nine-page story, “The Field of Honour,” takes place in 1915. We reflect on Wharton’s work.
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The Modern Bretteurs
A Russian man was shot last week over an argument about 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Perhaps this means I need to update my article about the history of the Russian duel.
“Life, friends, is boring”
“These were not like other poems: within their consistent 16-line armature they were turbulent, mad, feverish, cryptic, an unruly union of boppy jive-talk, and thorny quasi-Elizabethan diction. It was impossible to tell who was speaking, or to whom; poems ended in mid-syllable, bristled with random phrases in foreign languages, sported menacing-looking accent marks and Shakespearean contractions, were riddled with ampersands and ellipses.” At The Rumpus, a memory of falling in love with The Dream Songs (which happens to nicely complement a piece we published back in April).
Spying with Mountain Chicken Mother of the Buddha
Recommended Reading: Anya Groner’s short story “Suspecting the Smiths” at The Oxford American. “From the ages of nine to eleven, I worked as a spy… I discussed my cases with my partner, who went by code name Mountain Chicken Mother of the Buddha.”
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The Paris Review’s Roundtable
Paris Review editor Lorin Stein sat down alongside James Salter, Mona Simpson, and John Jeremiah Sullivan to discuss the magazine’s sixtieth anniversary with Charlie Rose. At one point Stein admits that, “If you wrote about sex the way Jim [Salter] writes about sex … in nonfiction, you would be a sociopath.” (Bonus: Stein writes about John O’Hara for The New Yorker.)