The Paris Review's Blog, page 845

DFW: the Trading Card, and Other News

David Foster Wallace: the trading card.
While you’re at it: pro-book desktop wallpaper.
On bribing librarians, and other ways to discover new books.
Speaking of libraries: here is what Auden checked out of the New York Society Library. (How many titles can you decipher?)
James Patterson and, oddly enough, the Duchess of Cornwall are teaming up to encourage fathers to read to their children.

 

Anaïs Nin on Heroes

February 21 is the anniversary of Anaïs Nin’s birth. In the following film, Nin discusses Lou Andreas-Salomé and Friedrich Nietzsche.

 

Happy Birthday, Telephone Book

On this day in 1878, the world saw the first telephone directory. The twenty-page book, which listed the numbers of phones in New Haven, Connecticut, instructed users not to “use the wire more than three minutes at a time, or more than twice an hour.”

 

Essex Girl

 

We traveled from East London in a Zipcar, beating the traffic bound for Lakeside, the out-of-town shopping center. The pier car park was sparsely filled with cars. Abandoned in a corner was a statue of the Virgin Mary the size of an umbrella stand. Out of season, the Essex archipelago lures only the most hardened. By October, the weather is spitting and icy, and its landscape is too bleak and monotonous to qualify as ruggedly beautiful. A Wikipedia entry had told us there are nineteen islands off the coast of Essex, most of them owned by the British Ministry of Defence and contracted to private companies testing ammunitions. The individual entries were nearly all stubs, waiting to be filled in. An archipelago struck a curious exotic note in a place associated mostly with commuting, military test sites, and, most recently, “constructed reality” television.

American import Jersey Shore inspired The Only Way is Essex, a show similarly centered on the intricate love lives of pneumatic people living in an area derided for being culturally bankrupt, despite its proximity to one of the most exciting cities in the world. Jersey’s Essex County was even named after the UK’s own historical Essex, in 1683. Maybe there’s no need to make analogies between the UK’s Essex and anywhere else because its reputation is internationally bad, and we don’t defend it. The county town Chelmsford, where I was born, was voted eighth best place to live in the UK on the prerecession property-porn show Location Location Location. Residents promptly rang in to call it soulless; flashy on one hand and tedious on the other, like a nouveau riche neighbor with dull preoccupations. Read More »

Emoji Classics, and Other News

Brace yourselves: great books as emojis. (Yes, that’s The Grapes of Wrath.)
The Royal Mail is producing a series of (quite lovely) Jane Austen stamps.
Tolkien’s cover designs.
A heartening series of people shopping for books around the world.
“‘Bookseller,’ say the books. ‘Can we do the Harlem Shake?’ ‘No!’ I shout. ‘There’ll be no novelty dances here. You’re better than that.’”

 

Golden Books

While we can’t pretend to have actually asked the question, “What if best-selling albums had been books instead?”, we can all agree that the answer, from British designer Christophe Gowans, is brilliant. (We’d suggest The White Album, but, well.)

 

See a Paris Review Interview: Live!

Called “one of the finest prose stylists at work in the language, an Emerson of our time,” the psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips joins Paul Holdengräber for a live Writers-at-Work interview on Monday, February 25, at the New York Public Library. In the tradition of Paris Review interviews, Phillips will discuss writing, life, and his most recent work, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life.

See program details here.

To receive a $10 discount off general admission, click here and enter code FRUSTRATION at checkout.

 

Gchatting with George Saunders

On Valentine’s Day, George Saunders agreed to Gchat with The Paris Review Daily to discuss his use of the modern vernacular in fiction; his new book, Tenth of December; as well as Nicki Minaj and what is, according to Saunders, one of the great undernarrrated pleasures of living.

 

George: Hi Katherine - ready on this end when you are

me: Hi George!
I am prepared

George: Well, I’m not sure I am. But I am willing. :)

me: we could just do the whole thing as emoticons

:/ :l :?

George: Man, you are a virtuosiii of emoticons.

me: A symptom of my generation...

George: I only know that one.

me: You only know happiness, then.

George: No - I only know the SYMBOL for happiness. Like, I can’t do ENNUI. Read More »

Meet Your Literary Hero, and Other News

#IWishICouldMeet, the popular Twitter hash tag, gets a literary twist as readers tell the LA Times which characters and authors they would love to meet #IRL. (And for the record, #ReuvenMalter.)
Paul Muldoon—poet, professor, Poetry Society macher, New Yorker editor, librettist, and Rackett guitarist—lists his favorite rock books.
This list of best sellers from around the world is fascinating and shaming.
In fact, next, the blogger reading one hundred years of best sellers might want to tackle the Indonesian list.
“The second half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of amateur press associations (ASAs)—small groups of writers, often without professional training, who would produce individual articles, pamphlets, or magazines mailed to all other members of the association; in other words, a progenitor of subscription-based blogging, and yet another example of primitive versions of modern social media.”

 

Theodoros Stamos, Untitled, 1965

 Since 1964 The Paris Review has commissioned a series of prints and posters by major contemporary artists. Contributing artists have included Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Bourgeois, Ed Ruscha, and William Bailey. Each print is published in an edition of sixty to two hundred, most of them signed and numbered by the artist. All have been made especially and exclusively for The Paris Review. Many are still available for purchase. Proceeds go to The Paris Review Foundation, established in 2000 to support The Paris Review.