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.

Kathi Hofer: “Grandma” Prisbrey’s Bottle Village, published last year by Leipzig’s Spector Books, is a nice-looking hardback about the vernacular art environment Tressa Prisbrey built in Santa Susana, California, a former railroad town now incorporated into Simi Valley. The volume was compiled, introduced, and translated into German by Hofer, an Austrian artist who first encountered Prisbrey’s pencil assemblages in an exhibition at the Los Angeles Public Library.

Prisbrey, the daughter of German immigrants, was married at fifteen to a man almost forty years her senior; they had seven children together before she left him and began an itinerant life with her kids in the late twenties. When she finally settled in Santa Susana in 1946, she met her second husband, and together they bought a plot of land, about a third of an acre in size, which they leveled and was where they parked their trailer after removing its wheels. Prisbrey began building the Bottle Village in 1956, at the age of sixty. Looking for a way to improve the property—to “make it pay”—she chose bottles as a building material because there were plenty of them around, and made daily trips to the local dump to collect other materials. She planted cacti everywhere—hundreds of varieties—because they are “independent, prickly, and ask nothing from anybody” and because, she said, “they remind me of myself.” Her sons handled roofing and doors, but otherwise, every structure in the Bottle Village—sixteen houses total—was built by Prisbrey. For years, she gave guided tours for a small admission fee, and children were often preoccupied by Prisbrey’s white cat and her kittens, who had their own Prisbrey house made from the nose of a plane and whom Prisbrey combed with food coloring: pink, green, and yellow animals roamed the place.

She left it, finally, in 1982, at the age of eighty-six, and died in 1988. But the site, though in disrepair, remains and is protected as a historical landmark. Hofer’s book—an elegant intervention and homage—includes texts, color photographs of the Bottle Village, and a facsimile edition of the essay Prisbrey wrote about her creation in 1960, which she published as a pamphlet and gave (or mailed) to anyone who asked. Reading Prisbrey’s charming, conversational descriptions of her village, you get a sense of what it might’ve been like to tour it with her, and how important that social aspect was to the project. “Oh, this is an interesting place to see,” she says, “and you hear such funny things, too.”

—Kathryn Scanlan, author of “Backsiders”

In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

Ten years after Monica Baldwin voluntarily entered an enclosed religious order of Augustinian nuns, she began to think she might have made a mistake. She had entered the order on October 26, 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the World War I, when she was just twenty-one years old. At thirty-one, she hadn’t lost her faith, but she had begun to doubt her vocation; the sacrifices that cloistered life entailed did not come easily to her, and unlike many around her, she hadn’t experienced a “vital encounter” between her soul and God. Eighteen years later, she finally knew for sure: it was time to leave. Granted special dispensation from the Vatican to leave the order but remain a Roman Catholic, Baldwin—who was now forty-nine years old—quit the only adult life she’d known, that of the “strictest possible enclosure,” and emerged back into the world in 1941, into a world that had just plunged, once again, into war.

Baldwin relates the trials and tribulations that followed in her delightful memoir, I Leap Over the Wall: A Return to the World After Twenty-Eight Years in a Convent. A best seller on its initial release in 1949, it won its author plenty of fans—including the film star Vivian Leigh, who named Baldwin’s book as one of her four favorite titles published that year, in the Sunday Times. It has been reprinted on a number of occasions since. All the same, its popularity has waned over the years, and it’s not a book mentioned often today. I picked it up again as I began my own reentrance into the world, after two years of lockdowns, isolation, and quarantine.

It would be wrong to draw too many parallels between Baldwin’s experience and mine, though. Whereas the hiatus in our lives now has been a largely shared ordeal, the marvel of Baldwin’s situation is its singularity: she missed the entire world between the wars while life went on. Her portrait of Britain in wartime is therefore unique. She’s like an alien visiting Earth, taking nothing around her for granted; it’s all equally fascinating, from the rows of “hatless” young women sitting on trains and smoking cigarettes with their “padded shoulders and purple nails,” to the ravioli she nervously orders from a café lunch menu that seems to her written in gibberish. (When the meal arrives, she remains just as confused—it “might have been anything from cats’ meat to fried spam,” she attests, bemused.) We’re used to accounts of life on the home front that are steeped in the “keep calm and carry on” wartime mentality, so it can be hard to find those that convey the sheer incongruity, as Baldwin’s does, of the experience of a world turned uncanny. This is not to say that I Leap Over the Wall could quite be described as an eerie or a haunting book—if anything, Baldwin’s portrait of a country during one of its darkest hours is lit with an oddly wondrous naivete. Nevertheless, she captures a world turned upside down and inside out, one in which everyone feels displaced and unmoored, and which she observes with eyes wide open. She had spent twenty-eight years trying to disengage from life. “You can’t be completely wrapped up in God (and he is a jealous lover) unless you are unwrapped-up in what this world has to offer you,” she explains. “In convents, this process of unwrapping is effected by a system of remorseless separation from everything that is not God.” Thus her return to the world, which necessarily forces her to “sit up and take notice of what was going on,” nearly drives her crazy.

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.