Docile by K. M. Szpara for $2.99
Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix for $2.99
The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen for $2.99
Killing November by Adriana Mather for $1.99
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Iredell-Statesville Schools in central North Carolina have dealt with near nonstop book challenges and read-alouds over the last six months during school board meetings. Moms For Liberty has a large and vocal presence in the community, and that group led the efforts to challenge 75 books in the district.
One of the leaders of the book challenges has made a name for herself by harassing the school administration and by attempting to break into one of the local middle schools to take photos of two particular books she said she “knew” were in the collection. Paula Mimnaugh has been a staple at Iredell School Board meetings since last summer. She proudly wears a Moms For Liberty shirt, and she’s shown up at other school board meetings in her area. At one, she tied wearing masks to Marxism. She was aghast she was not allowed to just enter the school library and look for books.
The Iredell-Statesville school district came to a decision in mid-April about the list of challenged books. Fewer than 12 books will be reviewed, including Lawn Boy, All Boys Aren’t Blue, Ask Me How I Got Here, Another Day, Out of Darkness, Blankets, Flamer, George, and Girl Mans Up. A full list has yet to be released.
At the latest school district meeting, Iredell’s board took a new approach to responding to public comments about books. As people queued up to speak — several of whom planned to continue reading passages from books they disagreed with aloud, with the requisite caveat that young people in the audience should leave because the content was not appropriate for minors — the board chair asked the speaker once they began whether or not they had filed a formal reconsideration for the book.
As the first speaker approached the mic wearing her Kelli Moore for North Carolina shirt (Kelli Moore is a tea party affiliated candidate and involved with the “Mama Bears,” another group akin to Moms For Liberty), the board chair Todd Carver asked if she’d filed a formal complaint over the book.
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I’ve been learning lessons from literature for as long as I’ve been able to read. Actually, come to think of it, I’ve been learning lessons from literature for longer than that – my parents used to read me bedtime stories, and I always fell asleep to fairytale audiobooks. You know, the ones that came on cassette tape? The dark ages, if you will. Those lessons have stuck: for one thing, if your prospective mother-in-law tries to make you climb a gazillion mattresses to prove that you’re good enough for her son, just assume she’ll be insufferable all her life and move on.
Anyway.
Once I did learn how to read, the world of sources to learn from expanded. This wasn’t always a good thing, mind you. I read a lot of classic children’s books that were rife with problematic content. I was a child who thought that books were all but sacred, so it meant a lot of unlearning as I grew older and learned to think for myself. It also meant that I tried to do a lot of weird things – weird, at least, for a person whose age was in the single digits. I wrote a will (in a notebook, with a number 2 pencil) at the age of 8 because Amy March did so in Little Women. Needless to say, my mother started monitoring my reading more closely after that. Who knew what else I’d try to emulate.
Some of my most memorable life lessons, however, I’ve found in the Brontë sisters’ books, Anne Brontë’s in particular. I’ve written previously about why I love her so, and I still stand by it. Sadly, Anne, like her siblings, died young, with only a couple of completed works. What these novels lack in quantity, though, they make up for in quality. Both Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are incredible books that I reread regularly, and I’ve learned a lot from them. Shall we go over some of these life lessons from Anne Brontë?
In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Helen, the protagonist, falls in love with a man whose values don’t match hers. However, Helen is convinced that she can change him. It’s a common misconception, of course, especially considering that Helen is a sheltered 18-year-old girl, and Arthur Huntingdon, the man in question, is almost a decade older. Helen learns this lesson at horrifying speed when she finds herself trapped in an abusive marriage with no legal recourse.
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A few weeks ago I stumbled upon the Koreadathon, a readathon put together by two BookTubers: monica kim and books with chloe. Long story short, I loved it (it was my first readathon ever). But that’s not quite why I’m here. The readathon challenged participants to read a manhwa, graphic novel or webtoon from a Korean author. I’m already familiar with manhwa and webtoons. So I beelined towards the graphic novels and found a tiny but amazing corner of stories that I just have to share. During that week I just read one graphic novel. But choosing only one was such a hard decision because there are several amazing Korean graphic novels out there. Most of which I’ve compiled in this handy list for you!
I just want to add a few more things before I start with the list of Korean graphic novels. Most of these are stories are translated from Korean (by the same translator). But I threw in a couple that aren’t, that I still consider good fits for this list. For example, one of them was originally written in Swedish by an author who was adopted from Korea, which is actually what the graphic novel is about. Additionally, there are other Korean graphic novels out there as well, including from several of the same authors I’m mentioning below. So this list is by no means all there is of Korean graphic novels at all.
Without further ado, let’s get into it!
We’re kicking things off with a funny graphic novel. It’s a slice-of-life type of story that shows three middle-aged mothers who want more than what the mediocre men in their life can give them. There’s Lee Soyeon, who divorced years ago but is now in another unfulfilling relationship. Myeong-ok, on the other hand, is having an affair with a younger man. And finally, Yeonjeong has her eye on someone from her gym (don’t tell her husband). They’re all bored with their conventional romances, so they go wild in a way more often attributed to twentysomethings. Through motels, nightclubs, and outrageous sexual encounters we follow these three women in their new honest and vulnerable adventures.
This is a very soft and bittersweet graphic novel about family and food. Umma’s Table follows a comic book writer named Madang, who moves to the countryside with his new family. His newborn baby changes his life, and what seems like a fresh start soon turns difficult. Madang’s parents are sick, and he constantly goes back to the city to care for them. It’s clear that Madang struggles to be a good husband, father and son simultaneously. So he throws himself into his cooking, reminiscing about his own upbringing and how his mother always had food on the table for him and his brother no matter what. It all feels like a thoughtful meditation on food and how it brings us together — bridging the gap between generations.
© Book Riot
Death is not always physical. Sometimes it comes in the form of self-destructive female desire that caves to abuse, accepting it as a prized possession. Female desire sometimes refuses to live in the orderly house of kindness and logic. Instead, harm feels familiar and there is therefore safety in abuse, self-inflicted or otherwise. Women have centuries of trauma to thank for that. Being exploited is the price Vanessa and Nolan’s unnamed narrator have to pay to be able to afford a brief trip away from being alone. Twisting a man’s abusive behavior into a romantic act is the only way forward, or so these women have convinced themselves to believe.
In Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa, 15-year-old Vanessa’s first love is her teacher, a 42-year-old Jacob. Jacob cleverly exploits her hormonal teenage mind and her deepest desire for admiration. He breaches all boundaries and starts touching her inappropriately in class, much to Vanessa’s pleasure. He quotes Nabokov and starts calling her “My Dark Vanessa.” He gifts her Lolita, which Vanessa becomes obsessed with to a point when she confuses her own memories with those of Lo and Humbert.
The novel opens as an adult Vanessa tries to recount her ‘affair’ — if we can call it that — with Jacob. Vanessa still hasn’t admitted to herself that she has been sexually abused by Jacob. Instead, she remains fixated on him. Since her teenage years, she has been full of longing and desire for this monstrous man who repeatedly raped her in the past and is now seeking her support to defend him against allegations of sexual harassment. Vanessa says, “I wasn’t abused, not like that.” She strongly believes that she wasn’t “raped raped.” She adds, “All I can think of is the lovely warm feeling I’d get when he stroked my hair.”
Vanessa is a classic victim who protects her abuser as the truth will break her. She is mad at the world that vilifies Jacob and still delusionally thinks that he was in love with her. One loves as one knows how, and for Vanessa, loving her abuser is a way of loving herself. She has a dull job and so much of her potential has been wasted because of her obsession with Jacob. Yet she has her sights set on Jacob as if he is the prize that will finally stabilize her life. Losing her desire for Jacob will mean losing a pivotal part of herself, something she has built her personality around. Vanessa’s constant denials of her own victimhood and her stark refusal to stop loving it signify the ambivalences inherent in abuser-abused relationships.
Megan Nolan’s Acts Of Desperation is a tour de force chronicling the many paradoxes of female desire. The narrator is in her early 20s and in love with a man named Ciaran who is cold, casually cruel, and still in love with his ex-girlfriend. The narrator’s love for this man, the toxicity they share, and the way she feels the happiest in a sacrificial role leave the readers feeling claustrophobic and gasping for air. She willfully removes herself from her friends, narrowing her life down to revolve around Ciaran: cooking him effortful meals, the increasingly joyless sex they have, and the bottles of wine she downs when Ciaran isn’t there to monitor her. Though she revels in her victimhood, pushing herself to anorexia, and having periods where she cuts herself, she also longs to be free. Her desire to be debased by Ciaran stands in sharp contrast to her desire to evolve into an independent woman.
© Book Riot
When I was a teenager, one of my favorite authors was Kate Morton, who I once remember saying in an interview, “Write the book you want to read.” She was later the subject of a school project that I did in which I included this quote of hers, but now I can’t seem to find any source to back up her saying that. But it doesn’t really matter, considering there are a wealth of authors and creatives who have been credited with some version of that quote — a fact which I had no idea of as a teen.
The best known and most accredited form of the “write the book you want to read” saying comes from Toni Morrison. In 1981, she spoke at the annual meeting of the Ohio Arts Council, where she was reported as stating, “Writing to me is an advanced and slow form of reading. If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” A simple Google search will tell you not only that the internet loves this quote, but that there’s no shortage of writers and authors who have said something along the same lines, making it virtually impossible to credit the sentiment of the quote to only one person.
In 1951, for example, crime novelist Mickey Spillane responded to a question of why he continued to write material that some readers, including his father, found distasteful: “I write the kind of stuff I’d like to read but can’t find. If I didn’t like it I wouldn’t write it.” C.S. Lewis, beloved author of The Chronicles of Narnia, was quoted in a biography as saying, “I wrote the books I should have liked to read if I could have got them. That’s always been my reason for writing. People won’t write the books I want, so I have to do it myself.” Additionally, in 1955, Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien shared that Lewis had passed on that very wisdom and quoted him as proclaiming, “If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves; but it is very laborious.”
And it doesn’t stop there. After White Oleander became a bestseller when it was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club, Janet Finch said in 1999, “As a writer, I’m always trying to create the book I want to read, but can’t find anywhere. Mine happens to be for anyone with a strong stomach.” In 2002, as part of “Writers on Writing” series in The New York Times, Ann Patchett stated, “Sometimes if there’s a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.”
The list goes on. Anne Lamott’s most famous saying is, “I write books I’d love to come upon.” Madeleine L’Engle shared a similar philosophy concerning children’s literature: “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” Beverly Cleary is most often quoted as having said, “If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.” And I’m sure any number of your own favorite authors have said something to the same effect, as writing the book you want to read appears to be one of the most valuable pieces of advice one writer can give to another.
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Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.
“Spring like a gun to the head,” Dorothea Lasky writes in a poem in our latest issue, “Green how I want you.” It’s been a strange, uncertain season, and now that the weather is turning and the cherry trees are beginning to blossom, we’re revisiting some works that evoke the cruelest month: an interview with the Italian poet Antonella Anedda; a story by Ira Sadoff that makes romancing a florist sound wistful yet thrilling; Elizabeth Brewster Thomas’s poem in which “beneath your feet a thousand spores of ice / blossom in darkness”; and a collaboration between Ben Lerner and the photographer Thomas Demand, featuring a profusion of paper flowers. (And if you pick up a copy of our Spring issue, you’ll also find collages by the late artist Birdie Lusch, who pasted newspaper clippings onto Hallmark catalogues to make her glorious bouquets.)
If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and art portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.
INTERVIEW
The Art of Poetry No. 109
Antonella Anedda
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From Kati Kelli’s “My tragic homeschooled past.”
You’re on that old kick again, rereading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage to refresh and resplendorize the senses, but why not go back to the source? It’s never wrong to read Dyer’s Thomas Bernhard (and, after all, your Bernhard). It’s never bad to sit at Good Karma Café, in Philadelphia, at a little metal table out front, with Bernhard’s novella Walking, reading
I ask myself, says Oehler, how can so much helplessness and so much misfortune and so much misery be possible? That nature can create so much misfortune and so much palpable horror. That nature can be so ruthless toward its most helpless and pitiable creatures. This limitless capacity for suffering, says Oehler. This limitless capricious will to procreate and then to survive misfortune.
while a person pulls up with a carriage and introduces to the air a baby, a little baby who was born three days ago, and stands there holding this: “Lily.” She explains as much—the three-day thing—and announces the name to inquirers (the nonreaders …). Three days old only! Why is this little baby taking the air so soon? Why promenade now? This merciless tenderness might permeate the whole atmosphere now, while you read “My whole life long, I have refused to make a child, said Karrer, Oehler says, to add a new human being over and above the person that I am, I who am sitting in the most horrible imaginable prison and whom science ruthlessly labels as human,” and laugh at combinations, at the café.
—Caren Beilin
You can read Sheila Heti’s interview with Caren Beilin on the Daily here.
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