Why Do We Keep Reading The Great Gatsby? - The Paris Review
WEBJan 11, 2021 · It’s creepier and profoundly, inexorably true to the spirit of the nation. This is not a book about people, per se. Secretly, it’s a novel of ideas. Gatsby meets Daisy when he’s a broke soldier and senses that she requires more prosperity, so five years later he returns as almost a parody of it.
The Art of Fiction No. 137 - The Paris Review
WEBThe Paris Review Podcast returns with a new season, featuring the best interviews, fiction, essays, and poetry from America’s most legendary literary quarterly, brought to life in sound. Join us for intimate conversations with Sharon Olds and Olga Tokarczuk; fiction by Rivers Solomon, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and Zach Williams; poems by Terrance Hayes and Maggie Millner; nonfiction by Robert ...
The Paris Review - The Gruesome Case That Made Voltaire a …
WEBMar 13, 2015 · A gruesome legal case turned Voltaire into a crusader for the innocent. This article was reported and written by Ken Armstrong for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal-justice system. On the night of October 13, 1761, cries rang from the shop of Jean Calas, a cloth merchant who lived and […]
T. S. Eliot’s “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”
WEBDec 18, 2013 · By 1954, when Eliot wrote “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” the pains of conversion had waned and the poem conveys the hopeful joy of his faith. It was also perfectly illustrated by the Catholic painter and poet David Jones. The poem begins declaratively: “There are several attitudes towards Christmas,” then …
Writing the Lives of Forgotten Women - The Paris Review
WEBApr 26, 2018 · Writing the Lives of Forgotten Women. Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610. When you need to tell the truth, sometimes nothing will do but lies. Thanks to the labor of women of all backgrounds who have raised their voices in the face of indifference or opposition, some of the silences in our culture’s narratives are now getting ...
The Paris Review - Inscrutable, But Beautiful—Walter Russell’s New …
WEBBy Dan Piepenbring. May 19, 2015. Look. Walter Russell (May 19, 1871–May 19, 1963) was the progenitor of a “new world-thought” centered on light; in books such as The Electrifying Power of Man-Woman Balance, The Book of Early Whisperings, and The Dawn of a New Day in Human Relations, he foresaw “a marriage between religion and science ...
Philippe Petit, Artist of Life - The Paris Review
WEBJun 3, 2019 · And certainly a book would be the last place to turn if you were truly serious about doing it. The book, then, is a kind of parable, a spiritual journey in the form of a treatise. Through it all, one feels the presence of Philippe himself: it is his wire, his art, his personality that inform the entire discourse.
Quarantine Reads: The Book of Disquiet - The Paris Review
WEBApr 15, 2020 · Quarantine Reads. In this series, writers present the books they’re finally making time for. Maybe it is true that books find you when you need them: The Book of Disquiet sat on my shelf for at least a year before I took it down, sometime in February. The hardcover is fat and dense, and the text is, like a drug, rather mood-altering, so I was ...
Richard Howard and George Plimpton on Translating Proust - The …
WEBOct 13, 2015 · Richard Howard first appeared in The Paris Review in our thirteenth issue—from the summer of 1956. Since then, several of his poems and translations have found their way to these pages, and in 2004, J. D. McClatchy interviewed him for our Art of Poetry series. In our Summer 1989 issue, George Plimpton spoke with Howard about translating Proust.
Muriel Rukeyser, Mother of Everyone - The Paris Review
WEBMay 30, 2018 · In moments of desperation, a favorite poem has resurfaced lately, sometimes on Twitter and sometimes in memory. Muriel Rukeyser’s “Poem,” originally published in The Speed of Darkness fifty years ago this month, is in part about the entanglement of these two stimuli, internal and external: I lived in …