This fall marks a transition on our editorial team, as Vijay Seshadri is bidding the Review farewell—at least as our poetry editor, a role he has occupied since 2019. He will be greatly missed. With our forthcoming Winter issue, we will welcome to the role Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy, a professor at the University of Chicago who has served as a guest editor of Poetry magazine and is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Underworld Lit. We are deeply grateful to Vijay for introducing us to the work of so many remarkable poets over the last few years, and for being a marvelous colleague and a true friend to the Review.

The worst thing about choosing poems for The Paris Review is having to say no. The magazine receives many submissions, and many of those include strong poems that deserve to be in its pages but can’t be accommodated. Turning down poems is probably even worse for a poetry editor who is also a practicing poet and knows how being turned down feels. Guilt, misgivings, second-guessing, paralysis about naysaying, and avoidant behavior are the by-products of the process. And they should be. As a writer, if you don’t identify with the writers who are sending you work, you’re probably hardening yourself against yourself. 

Other than that, being The Paris Review’s poetry editor for the past thirteen issues has been a terrific experience. Looking back over the more than sixty years since I washed up on American shores, I’ve come to recognize how much literature was the means by which I socialized myself into this country and its civilization. Choosing poems for the magazine and mulling over the choices I made gave me a chance to make that socialization concrete in my mind. I was a descriptive rather than a prescriptive editor, largely because that unusual process of socialization had left me with a vivid sense of the imagined republic of American letters. At least as an editor, I saw my obligations as being almost as much civic as they were aesthetic, requiring me to acknowledge the entire republic rather than stake out a claim in one of its territories. I honored, I think, the multiplicity of American poetry (including translations into American English)—which is easy to do, because there is excellent work across the range of American literary allegiances. 

There has been something deeply satisfying about engaging with this country as an editor. I was most gratified when I chose poems by poets whom I felt were unfairly neglected or underappreciated. I had the chance to publish long poems, which have a harder time finding homes. I had the chance to experience over and over that little click in the mind, with its attendant rush of endorphins—very much like the click in the mind that comes from finishing a piece of writing you like—on coming across a poem that is undeniable. Maybe my only regret is that I came to the job too late to do full justice to my experience of the poetry of my time, and to some of my deepest enthusiasms. Very early on in my tenure, for example, I wrote to Allen Grossman’s widow, Judith, begging for unpublished Grossman poems. She told me there were none. That was a bitter moment. On the flip side, though, early on I also wrote to Kamau Brathwaite asking for work. The last poem he published before his death was in the pages of The Paris Review.

John Train, a cofounder of The Paris Review and its first managing editor—or “so-called managing editor,” as he often put it—died last month, at age ninety-four. It was Train who coined the Review’s name and, in its early days in Paris, as a member of the Café Tournon crowd, he pushed the magazine away from criticism, writing later that “theories, both literary and political, are the enemy of art.”

Train went on to become “an operator in high finance and world affairs,” as the Times obituary put it today, but many will remember him best for his love of small idiosyncrasies: in the early fifties, while studying for a master’s degree at Harvard in comparative literature, Train noticed in Collier’s magazine a Mr. Katz Meow, which led to an earnest obsession with collecting what he called “remarkable names of real people.” You can find some of these in our Summer 1976 issue, no. 66, which features a fourteen-page list of names Train had unearthed in the records of a very real and now-defunct state department called the Office of Nomenclature Stabilization. (We published an appreciation of “How to Name Your Baby” online in 2015.) Train announced his departure from his post as managing editor, as George Plimpton and Norman Mailer recall, with singularly dry humor:

One day in 1954, after a year of organizing things in the office, he left a note in his In-box stating, “Do not put anything in this box.” By this he meant to tell the rest of the staff that he was moving on to something else.

From the Chelsea office, the staff of the Review are thinking of Train, his legacy and “In-box,” his family and friends. He will be missed.

This week, we remember Hilary Mantel (1952–2022), and bring you recommendations from two of our issue no. 241 contributors. 

On holiday in France, I went to Colmar to see the Isenheim Altarpiece in the Musée Unterlinden. Afterward, wandering through the museum’s collection of medieval and Renaissance art, I came across a small oil painting: part of an altarpiece attributed to Gabriel Mälesskircher, a fifteenth-century German artist from Colmar. Saint Guy Healing a Possessed Man has clear, singing colors, predominantly reds and greens. While Saint Guy looks on, the possessed man in question is being restrained by three other men. His head is thrown back, and the expelled demon, a tiny black humanoid, has just flown out of his gaping mouth. 

I thought at once of Mavis Gallant’s story “In the Tunnel,” which ends with the protagonist, Sarah, writing a jokey, flirtatious invitation to dinner on the back of a postcard that shows a miniature human figure cast out from a man’s body: “This person must have eaten my cooking.” I remembered that another of Gallant’s stories, “Virus X,” is set partly in Colmar, and I felt certain that she knew Mälesskircher’s painting. I imagined her looking at it, taking in its detail as I was, and the thrill of connection ran through me like bright wire. 

Nancy Lemann’s work is deceptive in its meandering. She is thinking deeply even when it seems as if her thoughts are floating. Her laser powers slice into idiocy (and dice it) while they also beam sympathetically onto, as she would call it, the folly of the human condition. Her work evokes something old-fashioned in its manner and tone, and this proves to be a way she keeps herself from being subsumed in the clichés of modern culture even as she is examining it. But she is observing the human being of today. One of her passions is history, with particular attention to architectural preservation and travel. Though she is describing us, we feel she is looking at us from another time, through the lens of the ages.

Nobody writes like Nancy Lemann. You might recognize slivers of other writers within her work, writers whom she first revered: Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Hardwick, Barry Hannah, and her beloved mentor, Walker Percy.

Ted Berrigan was the first in the circle of poets around the Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church to ask me to design an announcement mailer for one of his readings. He encouraged others to do the same. In the late sixties, I designed a number of flyers and covers for mimeographed poetry books. These gave me the first public exposure for my work.

Ted and I saw one another off and on for about five years. In the spring of 1970, we lived together on Saint Mark’s Place in the East Village, until June, when Ted went to teach a course in Buffalo. I moved into the artists Rudy Burckhardt and Yvonne Jacquette’s loft on East Fourteenth Street while they summered in Maine. Ted stayed with me for a number of weekends that summer, and he proposed that we undertake a collaborative book. As I remember, I began the collaboration by making drawings with empty word balloons. I’m pretty sure Ted provided the project’s title at the outset. Ted would take the drawings—I think I made them in batches of four or five—back to Buffalo, where he began to fill in the words. We went back and forth this way, sometimes in person, sometimes by mail. I had forgotten all about this collaboration by the time Ted Berrigan’s youngest son, Eddie, contacted me in the summer of 2018. He wanted to bring me something his father and I had done together, which had recently turned up. As I looked at sixteen pages of my drawings and Ted’s handwritten words, the memories came back. These diaries describe some of them, along with the artistic milieu I was in in New York at that time—which included the painter Martha Diamond and the poets Bernadette Mayer, Michael Brownstein, Anne Waldman, and John Giorno.

The summer of 1970 was a turbulent time in our relationship. Where would Ted be in the fall, and with whom? Could I live with someone and make my work in the same space? In September I moved out of Rudy and Yvonne’s place and into a loft on Grand Street in Little Italy. One day, Ted came to pick something up while I was at work. I had left him a note saying that I couldn’t go on with the relationship. He left a note in response, clearly upset. Separately, we each created one more drawing for our collaboration. I made an angry alternative version of the cover and Ted made an angry drawing for the end. Neither of us ever saw these private expressions of pain and disappointment until Eddie brought the long-ago collaboration to me in 2018. I had kept mine over the years, and now here was Ted’s.

In the end, Ted and I remained great friends. When I completed a new piece, he’d often be the first to see it. His enthusiastic reactions and always interesting observations meant the world to me. When he died in 1983 at age forty-eight, I realized that he had been my mentor. One thing I learned from him was to always finish what I began. I learned that when I kept going, past the hope of creating anything good, I often had my breakthroughs. 

When we asked Terrance Hayes to make a playlist for you, our readers, he wrote us a poem. Of course he did. As Hayes told Hilton Als in his Art of Poetry interview in our new Fall issue, formal constraints offer him “a way to get free.” Many of Hayes’s poems derive their titles from song names and lyrics; others are influenced by the mood of a particular album or track. Music, he tells Als, “changes the air in the room.” This particular playlist-poem has a track for almost any kind of air—or room—you might find yourself in this week. Read and listen to “Occasional Soundtracks” below.

Soundtrack for almost any morning: “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You” by James Ray

Soundtrack for twelve minutes in the bathroom: “Mind Power” by James Brown

Soundtrack for grooming: “Look” by Leikeli47

Today’s Featured Deals

In Case You Missed Yesterday’s Most Popular Deals

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Today’s Featured Deals

In Case You Missed Yesterday’s Most Popular Deals

Previous Daily Deals

The New York Times has reported on the passing of Hilary Mantel. Mantel, 70, died from a stroke on Thursday.

The British author, two-time winner of the Booker Prize, was a prolific author of literature, including historical fiction, personal memoirs, and short stories. She authored Wolf Hall (Booker Prize winner), Bring Up the Bodies (Booker Prize winner), The Mirror and the Light (Booker Prize longlist), and published a collection of essays, entitled Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books, among many other works.

Find more on Hilary Mantel and her work here.

This week, PEN America released a report on the current state of book bans in the USA. The report discusses the 50+ “parents’ rights” groups operating across the country, both on the national and local levels, and how these groups are responsible or connected to at least half of the book bans that have taken place since July 2021. But who are these groups? Where are they located?

PEN’s report lays out and links to several stories about various groups, including this box exploring some of the nationally-organized groups.

Read the report, particularly this section, to get a sense of what ideas these groups are formed around. For the most part, it’s not just book bans. It’s the broader issue of “parental rights,” which became a movement in 2020 with parents demanding that schools “reopen” during the pandemic (the language here matters, as schools were open but operating virtually). The movement shifted in 2021 to demand that their children be unmasked in schools, and thereafter/simultaneously, to demanding oversight and say in curriculum and materials made available to students in schools.

The database linked here is not comprehensive, but represents a look at the groups who have been connected with or directly linked to book bans or challenges (or other curriculum changes under the guise of “parental rights”). Some are more active than others, and some have changed their names, consolidated, or otherwise reworked their structures even since this list was complied. Some are parent groups and others are political action groups. Many of the groups are linked to either their Facebook or website presence. Not all states are represented, which does not mean there are not groups in those states. There are not national groups or their affiliated chapters included; PEN outlines those nicely above, and the embedded Tweet above shows, in gold, where the biggest organization currently has active chapters.

I love cosmic horror. As the world has become increasingly baffling, nonsensical, and outright terrifying, I’ve been drawn to reading cosmic horror stories more and more. There’s something about humans facing overwhelming powers beyond our comprehension that’s…definitely not comforting, but kind of relatable. H. P. Lovecraft may not be the creator of the cosmic horror genre, but he is perhaps the figure that looms largest in its history. While his stories vary wildly in quality, there are some brilliant moments that have influenced media from books and films to video games and TTRPGs for the past century. However, Lovecraft’s literary legacy is tainted by Lovecraft himself.

H. P. Lovecraft is almost as famous for his racism and antisemitism as he is for his cosmic horror fiction. While many problematic authors of the past have been defended by apologists, with the repeated refrain “they were a product of their time,” this already-flimsy defense cannot be applied to Lovecraft. As Jason Sanford notes in a blog post, Lovecraft was virulently racist even by the standards of the 1910s. Lovecraft is long-dead and long-since public domain, meaning that readers can consume his stories without worrying that they’re funding his positions, unlike with living bigoted authors; however, the racism is still deeply unpleasant to read. Fortunately, there are many books inspired by Lovecraft that have done cosmic horror better in every respect.

I’ve always enjoyed what I think of as “Lovecraft Minus Lovecraft”: cosmic horror stories that draw on the interesting and inventive aspects of Lovecraft’s stories, but excise, or actively hit back, against his horrific beliefs. Here are some of the best Lovecraft-minus-Lovecraft stories for all cosmic horror fans.

Recent political events have me considering the way our history shapes the books that writers write and publishers publish. After the summer of protests in 2020, publishers have made an attempt to push forward more books by authors of color and diversify the industry overall. As for recent events, I’m wondering how the overturning of Roe v. Wade will influence book trends.

Women have of course written books throughout history, and the best ones reflected the difficult realities of the time. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë focused on a woman making her way through the world with limited options. The Millstone by Margaret Drabble (published in 1965) follows a woman who decides to raise a baby alone, despite the intense societal pressure to marry. After Roe v. Wade, stories written by women for women became much more common and not all were focused exclusively on marriage and motherhood.

It’s important to understand this basic history and how radically things can change with expanded access to one legal right. Before Roe, women got married and had children at much younger ages. The average age of first-time American mothers in 1970 was under 22. Today, more women are able to choose to wait for marriage until they are ready for it, with the average age of marriage steadily climbing since 1970.

Ready means a variety of different things: financially, socially, but also emotionally. For a lot of women, this meant joining the workforce first and advancing their careers in fields that were previously closed off to women. This was especially important for women becoming lawyers and spearheading cases that gave women even more access to formerly restricted rights.

I’m new to the world of the best word search games. I first started playing mobile apps during quarantine. Before the lockdowns, I had certainly experienced idle time, but never quite so much as I did in April 2020. People I knew played farming simulators and Candy Crush, but I found myself drawn to puzzles. I left the stress of a pandemic behind as I matched colorful dots, found hidden pictures, and dove into word puzzles. Most free games include some time watching ads, and while slightly irritating, I also developed a list of other games I might want to try. My little cache of numbing time fillers grew, and even though my life is busier now, I still turn to mobile games and puzzles daily.

There are numerous reasons why people download word search games. There are people trying to spend less time scrolling their social media feeds. Other people find comfort in language based pursuits and prefer finding words to getting fish to eat each other. Still others recognize that all puzzle games can sharpen your brain while they pass the time. Below I’ve gathered eight of the best word search games available right now. Whatever your reason for playing, I’m sure you’ll find something that catches your eye.

The Nancy Drew PC games were a huge part of my life for years. From the time I discovered them circa 2000 until 2015, two games were released every year, one in winter and one in summer. Since then, there has only been one game released, but I live in hope that more are on the way. And until then, I can replay the thirty-plus existing games whenever the mood strikes.

If you, too, would like to (re)play these wonderfully detailed and educational Nancy Drew games, you could play them in order, or you could shake things up by playing according to season — the games aren’t so tightly connected that you’ll get too confused this way, I promise. The company behind the games, HeR Interactive, encourages this to an extent, making “winter” and “summer” game bundles available for purchase. I did not look at these bundles before making my selections, instead choosing to categorize the games in the way I thought best. And I added categories for spring and autumn, too, so now you can keep playing all year round!

Some of the selections were obvious — the one where you’re snowed in at a castle-turned-ski-resort is clearly winter — while others I categorized based on vibes more than objective evidence. Feel free to arrange the playing order to suit your own taste, perception, and memory, if you like. All that matters is that you have a good time!