When I was a kid, I thought my grandma was old. She wore clothes I associated with older ladies and she made cinnamon sugar toast for us when we went over there. She used mothballs! When my grandfather died, it turned out she didn’t know how to pump gas or write a check. And she was in her early 70s! That’s not even old! Why did I think she was old?

Is it just that the times were different and nobody was out there writing think pieces about how moms and grandmothers needed to flaunt their sexuality? Is it because I’m getting closer to my grandmother in age, and when I was a wee, tween, and teen I just lumped “older” into one category? Or is this due to advances in healthcare and quality of living? I mean, my father-in-law is 72 and he’s perfectly capable of climbing a mountain if he wanted to (he doesn’t want to). But then again he’s about 40% robot at this point, having had so many joint replacements.

I might not find the answers I want to those questions, but one thing I do know is that reading keeps the brain young in many ways. Research is still being conducted, but early signs show that reading could even help prevent or reduce the severity of various forms of dementia, which is of particular interest to me because I have the APOE e4 gene, which increases my chance of developing Alzheimer’s.

So allow me to present to you some of the best books for seniors. Experts agree that the earlier a person gets started preparing their brain for senior-ness, the better off they’ll be, so I’ve got my work cut out for me, too.

Self-Help Books

The thing about aging is that you don’t really need a book to tell you how to do it. All you really have to do is continue to not die and you will age, magically! But there are some great books for seniors on how to age healthfully and happily.

The news of “challenging” books has been sweeping the country lately. It has also been covered across most, if not all, media outlets. The main reasoning behind this has been the idea of “thinking about the children and what’s best for them.”

To that I say, with my loudest voice and every inch of my chest, the following:

If you’re a person who’s actively trying to ban books, you’re probably a not-great parent. At the very least, you’re inattentive as hell.

And I can back that statement up. 

But first, a little background as to how I first became aware of the act of trying to ban books. 

During the pandemic, I took up many, many hobbies. Besides going through the usual baking, gardening, and crafts, I also got back into reading in a big way. Not only that, but because I was post-grad and had free time, I decided to volunteer at my local anarchistic bookstore. I have been very lucky to have this opportunity, as I have very much enjoyed getting to know other members of the collective. I have learned a lot, radicalized my thinking, and gotten to know my community in a new way.

Of course, another bonus is getting lots of cheap and free books. Not to mention all the friends I made along the way!

Introducing Spartacus Books

Spartacus Books is a local collective in my city with a complex history. It is a nonprofit, volunteer-run bookstore that specializes in anarchism and building an activist space in our community. We carry LGBTQ+ studies and lit, Indigenous studies and lit, socialist theory, ecology, poetry, graphic novels, kids books, radical fiction, and more.

Additionally, we have a mini library, sitting areas, a free-to-use computer, and free wifi. We provide a space for local writers to sell their books and zines on consignment and provide our space for local organizing (during non-pandemic times, of course). We also carry naloxone kits, an important service in our neighbourhood.

The History of the Bookstore

Spartacus began in 1973 and is one of the oldest collective-run bookstores in North America. It was started by Roger Perkins, a member of a local university bookstore. The original name was the Spartacus Socialist Education Society. The main mandate of the collective was sharing reading materials that were otherwise hard to get. The store used to share a pool hall with the American Exiles Association.

The first novel I read by Jamaica Kincaid was Annie John, the first novel she wrote. She drafted it—as I recently learned from a long-awaited Art of Fiction interview conducted by Darryl Pinckney, which appears in the Review’s Spring issue—out loud in the bath, while pregnant with her daughter, Annie Shawn. Reading Kincaid, I felt emboldened by her wild, inimitable sentences—an invitation to abandon some of the conventions I had learned in school (which no doubt made my own early attempts at creative writing hard to tolerate). Her work provided me and many other readers with something vital, as it did for Kincaid herself. “When I was young, younger than I am now,” she writes in My Brother, her devastating memoir of her youngest brother’s slow and too-soon death, “I started to write about my own life and I came to see that this act saved my life.”

None of Kincaid’s books—five novels, a collection of stories, a children’s book, and five works of nonfiction—has been published under her given name, Elaine Potter Richardson. “Elaine couldn’t write about Elaine,” she explains to Pinckney, “but Jamaica can write about Elaine.” Jamaica writes about Elaine, who in the process becomes Annie, or Lucy, figures who run through Kincaid’s oeuvre like a stubborn rope of live wires. For me, the distinction between memoir and fiction in her work is not determined by proximity to documentary fact—it’s more a question, in each book, of just how much Elaine and her surroundings had to be remade in order to feel real. There is an obsessive quality to Kincaid’s storytelling, and also to her prose. The same anecdote about a mother who burns her daughter’s books might appear in a memoir as an account of the mother’s desire for control, or in an interview as a sign of the world’s unjust disposition toward writers. And in fiction, the daughter is permitted to fantasize about revenge: Lucy, the narrator of Kincaid’s second novel, contemplates burning her mother’s letters at the corners and sending them back unread. It’s a gesture she has “read somewhere, of one lover rejecting another.”

“I’m constantly folding my own memories into the things I’ve learned,” Kincaid tells Pinckney, “like when you’re adding an egg to batter.” Of course, if what she read as a child has since been altered in her memory, she has a better excuse than most of us: her stolen library books were literally destroyed. Kincaid has found ingenious ways to revive and reinvent some of these lost works, even the ones she hated. In school, she was forced to read Wordsworth, whose poems, as she puts it, were used as a “weapon of empire.” Lucy likewise has to read “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” and as a consequence despises daffodils. And yet, as soon as Kincaid had a garden of her own, she planted twenty thousand of them.

For the eighth consecutive year, The Paris Review is pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 Whiting Awards. As in previous years, we’re also delighted to share excerpts of work by each of the winners. Here’s the list of the 2021 honorees:

Since 1985, the Whiting Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The awards, of $50,000 each, are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come. Previous recipients include Lydia Davis, Deborah Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eugenides, Tony Kushner, Sigrid Nunez, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mona Simpson, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Colson Whitehead.

Congratulations to this year’s honorees. And for more great writing from Whiting Award recipients, check out our collections of work from the 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 winners.

When we take pictures of our children, do we really know what we are doing, or why? The contemporary parent records their child’s image with great frequency, often to the maximum degree afforded by technology. Inasmuch as the baby or child is an extension or externalization of the parent’s own self, these images might be seen as attempts to equate the production of a child with an artistic act. The task of the artist is to externalize his or her own self, to re-create that self in object form. A parent, presented with the object of the baby, might mistake the baby for an authored work. Equally, he or she might find their existence in an object outside themselves intolerable. In both cases the taking of a photograph is an attempt to transform the irreducibly personal value of the baby into something universal by proposing or offering up its reality. Yet what the image records is not so much the reality of the baby as that of the person looking at it. If the baby or child is a created work, it is one whose agenda remains a mystery to its creator.

The actual representational value of the parent’s photographs might be minimal compared to their narcissistic and artistic functions. Yet in the act of photographing, the parent does aspire to represent. How can the child be expressed in such a way that others will recognize in it what the parent recognizes? The parent, having created the child, belatedly encounters the moral and technical difficulties of creativity. Her instinct is that the photographic act ought to be a selective one, recording only what the parent-photographer wishes to be seen and remembered. The result is something no one else would especially want to look at. The photograph is a half-truth, because it has omitted large portions of reality. Generally speaking, the parent’s attempt to express what they see and feel in looking at their child, to universalize those feelings, does not succeed. The parent may have thousands of such photos, just as a failed artist may have a roomful of unwanted canvases, which can find no place in the world.

An artist, in the consideration of her material, also confronts the difficulty of separating it from the conditions of her own existence, yet her instincts are the reverse of a parent’s. Rather than trying to control or interfere with what the viewer “sees,” her aim is to give total power to the image, so that it is capable of living independently in the world. A baby is already an independent being: despite its many needs, it doesn’t exist solely as a condition of the mother. The baby is already important, but not necessarily in a way that the mother can see or find acceptable. It is important in spite of its mother, not because of her. The mother uses the baby’s image as a way of changing the basis of this importance, and of proving that she created—and is still in the act of creating—the baby. When she sets out to express her baby or child in photographs or stories, the mother-as-artist is trying to re-attribute the material to herself. Thus, “her” child is more important than other children: the mother-as-artist enters into an unending battle, in which the ground of truth will be repeatedly desecrated as she attempts to prove this is the case.

Anthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha, winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Contest and the 2021 American Book Award. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, the L.A. Times Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN America / Jean Stein Book Award, and was longlisted for the Believer Magazine Editor’s Award. A CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, California, he has lineage in the Bracero Program and the Dust Bowl. He collaborates with Juan Felipe Herrera and the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio, and serves as an associate poetry editor for Noemi Press and as a poetry editor for Omnidawn.

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From Borderland Apocrypha:

El Arpa, a Mexican Lynching, No. 53

Ina Cariño holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Their poetry appears in Guernica, Diode, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. Cariño is a Kundiman fellow and a recipient of a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. They are the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, forthcoming from Alice James Books in March 2023. In 2021, Cariño was selected as one of four winners of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. In 2019, they founded a reading series, Indigena Collective, centering marginalized creatives in the community.

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From Feast:

balsam pear. wrinkled gourd.
leafy thing raised from seed.

Jesse McCarthy is an assistant professor in the Department of English and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of the essay collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?—a Time and Kirkus Reviews Book of the Year—and The Fugitivities, a novel. His writing on culture, politics, and literature has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, and n+1. He also serves as a contributing editor at The Point. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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From “Notes on Trap”:

Trap is what Giorgio Agamben calls, in The Use of Bodies, “a form-of-life.” As it’s lived, the form-of-life is first and foremost a psychology, a worldview (viz. Fanon) framed by the inscription of the body in space. Where you come from. It never ceases to amaze how relentlessly black artists—completely unlike white artists, who never seem to come from anywhere in their music—assert with extraordinary specificity where they’re from, where they rep, often down to city, zip code, usually neighborhood, sometimes to the block. Boundedness produces genealogy, the authority of a defined experience. But this experience turns out to be ontology. All these blocks, all these hoods, from Oakland to Brooklyn, from Compton to Broward County, are effectively the same: they are the hood, the gutter, the mud, the trap, the slaughterhouse, the underbucket. Trappers, like rappers before them, give coordinates that tell you where they’re coming from in both senses. I’m from this hood, but all hoods are the hood, and so I speak for all, I speak of ontology—a form-of-life.

Nana Nkweti is the author of the story collection Walking on Cowrie Shells. An AKO Caine Prize finalist and alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her work has garnered fellowships from MacDowell, Kimbilio, Ucross, and Clarion West, among others. She has studied international law and trained and practiced as a nurse, and is now a professor of English at the University of Alabama.

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From “Night Becomes Us”:

Night veils and reveals—her dark face tarted up with stars. Neon-lit. Flossing.

Megha Majumdar is the author of the New York Times Notable Book A Burning, which was nominated for the National Book Award, the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association’s Carnegie Medal. She is also the editor in chief at Catapult Books. She grew up in Kolkata, India, and now lives in New York. A Burning is her first book.

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From A Burning:

Even a future movie star is having to make money. One morning my sisters and I are spraying rose water in our armpits, braiding our hair, putting bangles on our arms, and together we are going to bless a newborn. The general public is believing that we hijras are having a special telephone line to god. So if we bless, it is like a blessing straight from god. At the door of the happy family, I am rattling the lock thuck thuck thuck.