It’s hard to believe Lyn is dead, because her mind, her spirit, if you will, was always so full of life. The last time I saw her, when she was already quite ill, she talked about the comical way the Hollywood writers’ strike had affected commencement speeches, and about what she’d learned about AI from a scientist she knew on the Berkeley faculty. She was still engaged with the world, in other words, despite her situation. She was a very private person, yet she opened herself up to other people and to new experiences again and again. As she says in her book The Fatalist, ”I adventure and consider fate / as occurrence and happenstance as destiny. I recite an epigraph. / It seems as applicable to the remarks I want to make as disorder / is to order.” It was like her to see opposites (order/disorder) as part of a whole—which is not to say she couldn’t take sides against oppression. She could and did.

As a girl, she loved reading the journals of explorers. She was a kind of explorer herself. For example, in the late eighties, she taught herself Russian and traveled first with other poets and then alone to the Soviet Union to translate the work of outsider poets such as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. (And she was scheduled to spend a winter with scientists in Antarctica when she was diagnosed with breast cancer some twenty-odd years ago.) She didn’t believe in borders or in endings. As she says in My Life, “But a word is a bottomless pit.” She didn’t think that was a bad thing. It made her curious.

She had a unique combination of generosity and discernment, equanimity and élan. I admire her more than anyone I know. Her generosity was utterly without self-interest; her curiosity was never intrusive. These traits shone in her poetry as in her life. When I had cancer in 2006, she helped to organize a kind of private fundraising campaign among friends and sent me several thousand dollars. Because of her discretion, I don’t know who had contributed what exactly, but I’ve always suspected she was a major contributor herself.

She has influenced countless other poets, but no one else could come close to writing a “Lyn Hejinian” poem. I was impressed, influenced perhaps, by the way her poetry was, to quote one of her titles, a “language of inquiry.” The first book of hers I read, back in the mid-seventies, was called A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking. Back then the consensus seemed to be that “thought” was the province of philosophy. But as I’ve said, Lyn didn’t believe in borders. Her “October 6, 1986” poem in her book The Cell presents resistance as a kind of measuring device: “resistance is accurate—it / rocks and rides the momentum.” It is like her to cast resistance as a form of exploration, of appreciation even. That poem concludes with her characteristic humor: “It is not imperfect to / have died.” Those lines strike me with full force now. I want to scream that it is far from perfect that Lyn is dead, but she knew best.

Gabriel García Márquez died ten years ago this April, but people all over the world continue to be stunned, moved, seduced, and transformed by the beauty of his writing and the wildness of his imagination. He is the most translated Spanish-language author of this past century, and in many ways, rightly or wrongly, the made-up Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to define the image of Latin America—especially for those of us from the Colombian Caribbean.

I have been writing about Gabo since 1995, when I met him for three days during a journalism workshop he led and decided that he himself would make an interesting subject. Colombia’s god of magical realism reminded me of my grandfather, I wrote in my first piece about him, which was later published in the Winter 1996 issue of The Paris Review. In the early 2000s, I began interviewing his friends, family, fans, and naysayers for an oral biography that appeared in an early form in the magazine’s Summer 2003 issue. When he died in 2014, I was putting the final touches on the book that came of it: Solitude & Company, my collection of voices about the prankster who lifted himself from the provinces and won the Nobel Prize. A few days after his death, his agent and confidant, Carmen Balcells, told me, close to tears, that the world would now see the rise of a new religion: Gabismo. I was interested in this prediction, as a journalist.

And so I kept abreast of the story of Gabo’s life and legacy after he died. His archives were transferred to the University of Texas at Austin. In 2020, his wife, Mercedes Barcha, whom he called his sacred crocodile, died. In Colombia, the itinerant school of journalism that he started—the one where I attended his workshop—became the Gabo Foundation. And then there were unexpected developments: in 2019, Netflix announced a series based on One Hundred Years of Solitude—an adaptation he’d sworn would never occur. (Macondo has been rebuilt by art directors somewhere in the interior of Colombia.) In 2022 a journalist reported that he’d had a daughter, who was born in Mexico City in 1990 and whose existence he’d kept secret from the public. And this week, a novel, Until August, is being published posthumously in Spanish, English, and twenty other languages. It’s the story of a forty-six-year-old married woman who decides she’ll have a one-night stand every August 16, the day she makes a solo overnight trip to the unnamed Caribbean island where her mother is buried to put gladioli on her grave.

I decided, last year, to turn on my recorder again and ask about these past ten years since Gabo died. As I’ve continued to follow his story, Gabo, always a prankster, continues to surprise.

We are excited to announce that on April 2, at our Spring Revel, Moira McCavana will receive the George Plimpton Prize, presented by the 2020 winner, Jonathan Escoffery, and the Susannah Hunnewell Prize will be presented to Caleb Crain by Jhumpa Lahiri. Both prizewinners were selected by the editorial committee of the Review’s board of directors.

The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993, honors our founding editor’s commitment to championing new talent and recognizes an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the magazine during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Yiyun Li, Isabella Hammad, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jesse Ball, Emma Cline, and the 2023 winner, Harriet Clark.

Moira McCavana is the recipient of a 2019 O. Henry Prize, and her work has appeared in Guernica, The Drift, Harvard Review, and The London Magazine. Her debut short-story collection, Electrodomésticos, was published by Sarabande Books in February. “Every Hair Casts a Shadow,” which appeared in our Fall 2023 issue (no. 245), is narrated by Inma, the owner of a failing shoe shop in Barcelona. The Paris Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:

“Every Hair Casts a Shadow” leaves most of its mysteries intact. Moira McCavana traces disparate characters in their obscure movements through grief. One believes her dead son communicates through trivia questions on a television game show. Another takes an interest in a younger man, her only employee in her failing shoe store, who charms her “by asking about my parents despite my age.” The young man shows a touching kindness to their few customers: “I watched Víctor’s silhouette sit the man down on the bench, remove his shoe, and gently extend the man’s foot out before him, nestling it inside the metal measuring device,” writes the narrator. It is only in the story’s last line that we learn about the “you” to whom the story is addressed.

Established in 2023, the Susannah Hunnewell Prize is awarded to a writer for an outstanding piece of prose or poetry published by the Review in the previous year and is given in memory of the Review’s beloved former publisher, who died in 2019. Hunnewell first joined the Review as an intern during George Plimpton’s editorship, and later served as Paris editor before taking on the role of publisher. Among her contributions to the magazine are some of the finest interviews in the Writers at Work series, including conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, Emmanuel Carrère, Harry Mathews, and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

What do you have to give up in order to feel alive? To answer this question we need to have some sense of what aliveness might mean to us, of what we have to do to feel alive, and how we know when we are feeling this seemingly most obvious and ordinary thing (at its most abstract we might be wondering, as a kind of guideline, what our criteria are for feeling alive). It may seem odd to think that feeling alive is not only an issue—is something that needs to be assessed—but requires a sacrifice of sorts, or is indeed a sacrificial act; that to feel alive involves us in some kind of renunciation. It is, of course, glibly and not so glibly true that in order to feel alive one might have to give up, say, one’s habitual tactics and techniques for deadening oneself, the anaesthesias of everyday life that can seem to make it livable. At its most minimal, after all, it is not unusual for people to feel profoundly ambivalent about being fully alive to the climate of terror and delight in which we live. In order to answer this question you would, of course, need to have some sense of what aliveness means, if anything. How do you feel alive, and how do you know if you feel it?

Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist literary critic, wrote in his famous essay “Art as Technique” of 1917:

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war … And art [through its defamiliarizing practices] exists that one may recover the sensation of life … The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

It is, perhaps, an ironic inevitability integral to what Shklovsky proposes that art as a process and practice of defamiliarization is now all too familiar to us. Whether or not we agree with Walter Pater’s remark that “our failure is to form habits,” when Shklovsky invokes the whole idea of recovering the sensation of life, he reminds us—and clearly we need reminding—that the sensation of life can be lost. And he implies, without making this as explicit as he might, that we also want to relinquish or even sometimes attack the sensation of life; as though, as I say, in psychoanalytic language, we are ambivalent about the sensation of life and can happily, as it were, dispense with it.

The Institute of Illegal Images (III) is housed in a dilapidated shotgun Victorian in San Francisco’s Mission District, which also happens to be the home of a gentleman named Mark McCloud. The shades are always drawn; the stairs are rotting; the door is peppered with stickers declaring various subcultural affiliations: “Acid Baby Jesus,” “Haight Street Art Center,” “I’m Still Voting for Zappa.” As in many buildings from that era, at least in this city, the first floor parlor has high ceilings, whose walls are packed salon-style with the core holdings of the institute: a few hundred mounted and framed examples of LSD blotter.

The III maintains the largest and most extensive collection of such paper products in the world, along with thousands of pieces of the materials—illustration boards, photostats, perforation boards—used to create them. Gazing at these crowded walls, the visitor is confronted with a riot of icons and designs, many drawn from art history, pop media, and the countercultural unconscious, here crammed together according to the horror vacui that drives so much psychedelic art. There are flying saucers, clowns, gryphons, superheroes, cartoon characters, Escher prints, landscapes, op art swirls, magic sigils, Japanese crests, and wallpaper patterns, often in multiple color variations.

Balancing this carnivalesque excess, at least to some degree, is a modernist sense of order. This announces itself principally through two core features of the blotter form: repetition and the grid. Many frames house full “sheets” of blotter: square or rectangular pieces of cardstock, printed and often perforated according to an abstract rectilinear grid demanded by the exigencies of blotter production. These grids are made up of individual hits or tabs, generally a quarter inch square or so and numbering anywhere from one hundred to four hundred to nine hundred units per sheet, depending on block size and design. While some sheets are illustrated with a single image that cloaks the entire grid, many assign the exact same figure to each hit, resulting in sheets that loosely resemble Andy Warhol’s canvases of Campbell’s soup cans. Other framed exhibits contain mere fragments from larger designs, sometimes nothing more than a single, hairy hit, perhaps the last extant example of a run from the eighties that has otherwise been literally swallowed up.

How to refer to all this paper? Users have called the stuff “blotter” or “tickets,” while police have used terms like “paper doses.” These days such pieces are often known as “blotter art,” a term that in many ways reflects the III’s own efforts to reframe this illicit ephemera into aesthetic objects (which is why I will stick to the more neutral “blotter”). There is another factor: over the last few decades, the blotter format has become a genre of popular art and a perfectly legal collectable. Though formally resembling their illegal forebears, editions of so called “vanity blotters,” undipped in LSD and frequently signed, are produced for collectors and casual fans rather than drug traffickers—who nonetheless can and do dose such wares when they need or want to. Though ignored by the larger art world, the vanity blotter market keeps on trucking, despite (or because of) the low cost of entry and a lack of critical valuation or collector apparatus.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the afterlife and if it’s real. It’s always been hard for me to completely believe in it. I can be skeptical about everything, particularly mystical things. Perhaps because I had learned early on in school that having a spiritual side meant you weren’t as intelligent as other people, and intelligent was what I most wanted to be. The unspoken/spoken law of most academic settings is that to know better is to know that real knowledge has nothing to do with faith. (This is, in part, what my poem in the Review’s Winter issue is about.) 

Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy” is one of my go-to anthems when I want to think about the purpose of life and what it means to believe beyond plain knowledge. Prince has always been a kind of spiritual guide to me. One of my first poetry chapbooks was named Alphabets & Portraits. For the epigraph, I chose the opening lines of his song “Alphabet St.” as a reminder of what miraculous things poetry can do (“I’m going down to Alphabet Street / I’m gonna crown the first girl that I meet / I’m gonna talk so sexy / She’ll want me from my head to my feet”). These days, the opening monologue of “Let’s Go Crazy” gets to me especially:

Dearly beloved, we have gathered here today
To get through this thing called life
Electric word life, it means forever and that’s a mighty long time
But I’m here to tell you, there’s something else
The afterworld, a world of never-ending happiness
You can always see the sun, day or night
So when you call up that shrink in Beverly Hills
You know the one, Dr. Everything’ll Be Alright
Instead of asking him how much of your time is left?
Ask him how much of your mind, baby
‘Cause in this life things are much harder than in the afterworld
This life you’re on your own
And if the elevator tries to bring you down
Go crazy, punch a higher floor

The song’s upbeat rhythm and the salaciousness of his dig at that overpriced therapist always get my blood pumping when I’m down. I love the possessed elevator in the song, ready to bring you down to hell (or to a life full of low vibrations, which could be the same thing). Who doesn’t strive to “punch a higher floor” daily? When I hear Prince’s encouraging words, I too want to rise above all the bullshit of existence.

Everybody in the New Wave–nostalgia hotel has their phones out, which makes me pretty much like everybody else. After breezing past the lobby desk, I peek around: slate colors, fresh leather. There are scented candles burning somewhere. There’s a coffee bar selling things at New York prices, and while I wait for what will be a bitter, strong, iced $5.50 Americano, I see them: maybe 1,500 antique books, lined up in a custom black bookcase that’s about twenty feet tall.

In their latest show, Fixer Upper: The Hotel, the home-and-lifestyle reality stars Joanna and Chip Gaines renovate and redesign the Karem Hotel in downtown Waco, Texas, into what they name the Hotel 1928. (The original hotel was built in 1928.) The Gaines family struck gold in the 2010s with their house-flipping show Fixer Upper, and they eventually outgrew HGTV to form their own network, Magnolia. What’s not to like about the duo? Joanna Gaines looks like a movie star, and she’s unreasonably charming. And Chip is a dang goofball! Their dynamic onscreen is instantly recognizable, harkening back to classic sitcom marriages—loud, foolish husbands with extraordinary wives. Joanna barely bats an eye when Chip shows up in the first episode in a bellboy uniform just for some fun. The pair decided that their hotel lobby needed a library, and upon Joanna’s request for “a ton of books,” Chip purchased around 300,000, the entire collection of Larry McMurtry, the Texan writer who died in 2021. McMurtry spent a lifetime collecting books—more time collecting than writing, even. He opened a used-and-rare bookstore called Booked Up in Washington, D.C., in 1971; by the eighties, he had amassed enough books to outpace Georgetown real estate and expanded to stores in several cities out West. In 1986, he opened several locations of Booked Up in Archer City, Texas, where he eventually condensed his vast collection.

Chip Gaines’s parents grew up in Archer City as well. In the third episode of Fixer Upper: The Hotel, Chip takes Joanna on a roadtrip to take a look at the books. In a tone just this side of menacing, he says to Joanna, “We’re gonna see … this amazing bookstore that I bought,” a combination of understatement and confession. (Gaines purchased both the books and the two remaining storefronts in Archer City.)

After some standard husband-wife “Babe, what did you do” dialogue, Joanna concludes, as she wanders the stacks and stacks of the store, “I think this is the coolest thing you’ve ever bought in your entire life.”

Hebe Uhart had a unique way of looking—a power of observation that was streaked with humor, but which above all spoke to her tremendous curiosity. Uhart, a prolific Argentine writer of novels, short stories, and travel logs, died in 2018. “In the last years of her life, Hebe Uhart read as much fiction as nonfiction, but she preferred writing crónicas, she used to say, because she felt that what the world had to offer was more interesting than her own experience or imagination,” writes Mariana Enríquez in an introduction to a newly translated volume of these crónicas, which will be published in May by Archipelago Books. At the Review, where we published one of Uhart’s short stories posthumously in 2019, we will be publishing a series of these crónicas in the coming months. Read others in the series here.

Yesterday I was riding the 92. The bus was half-empty and a woman of about sixty or seventy caught my eye. It was difficult to get a sense of her age, or her social class. Could she be poor? No, but she didn’t seem rich either, nor did I pick up on any of that visible effort the middle class put into their appearance: dressing neatly, in complementary colors. Her clothes reminded me, more than anything, of someone trying to go incognito. She didn’t come off as a housewife; I decided she had the look of a government inspector. She sat down beside me.

“Señora, I’m getting off at Pueyrredón,” I said, so I wouldn’t have to get up if her stop was before mine.

“Works for me,” she said, “I’m getting off at Laprida.”

Twice in his life, Ellis made a contract with himself. He’d promised he would give himself five years and by the end of them, if he still wanted to kill himself, he would. Both times he’d made this contract, he still wanted to die at year five. But since, for a few months during each five-year span, he had a break from his compulsive ideations, he told himself it meant that the clock had reset and the contract was void. That, and he didn’t want to kill himself, not really.

I met Ellis in New York when I was twenty-six. He was the soft-spoken cybergoth—black mesh top, bleached-blond hair shaved to a perennial buzz—who always danced by the speaker stacks at warehouse parties. The angles of his jaw and his heavy brow lent him a harsh beauty.

He told me about his suicidal thoughts the first time we had dinner. We didn’t know each other well, really at all, so his pain alarmed me.

“I’ve had them ever since I was young,” he added.

Parable of the Movie

“I like your movie. I can tell that horror is a big influence.”

“Thank you, yes, I love horror movies.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean horror movies. I meant horror.”

Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

It Feels Like a Lot Because It Is a Lot

If your latest scroll through the Netflix menu left you feeling like every other option was based on a book, you’re not super wrong. Nearly one-third of the English-language shows Netflix has released so far this year are adapted from existing IP. Leading the way are the limited series Fool Me Once, based on the novel by Harlan Coben, and One Day, adapted from David Nicholls’s 2009 novel, which was previously adapted for film in 2011. When we look beyond Netflix, 7 of the 10 highest-grossing movies of last year were based on existing work, and—here’s the real  👀 stat—the last time the highest-earning film of the year was not adapted from existing IP or part of a franchise was 1998 when Titanic raked in the equivalent of $600 million (equivalent to $1.2 billion today) in the U.S. alone. That’s a full quarter-century of adaptation domination, and there’s no slow-down in sight. 

Color Purple Actress Criticizes Film for Queer Erasure

Speaking of adaptations! In a wide-ranging interview at BuzzFeed, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who appeared in last year’s adaptation of The Color Purple, goes on the record to criticize the filmmakers for downplaying the lesbian relationshipbetween main character Celie and her life-changing lover Shug Avery.

The Color Purple is a book about Black lesbians. Whether the choice was made to focus on that or not in the cinematic iterations of The Color Purple, it’s still a movie about Black lesbians. People can try to say the story is about sisterhood, but it’s a story about Black lesbians. Period.

This is a familiar debate and hardly the first time an adaptation of Alice Walker’s beloved novel has failed its queer characters and missed an important opportunity to meet queer audiences where they are. It’s especially disappointing, though, coming out of a year in which some of the most celebrated films and series—All of Us Strangers, Passages, and Fellow Travelers—were about queer relationships. Can it be a coincidence that writers, producers, and studios were more comfortable with those stories about white men than with this one about Black women? 🤔

It’s been close to two years since writing about why libraries need to have strong book challenge policies; in the fall, this guide helped to consider where and how to actively incorporate inclusivity in collection policies. Because library collection policies are living documents and need to be regularly updated to accommodate the climate around them, it’s time to revisit this topic and look at what contemporary book banning has made clear needs to be better articulated in these policies.

This guide is for library workers, of course, but it is also useful for library advocates. It is an opportunity for you to look at your local library’s policies and champion strengthening them in order to encourage and support the most inclusive collection possible.

Below are four areas of consideration. It’s not comprehensive, but instead, a series of places to start now.

Demco, Broadart, and other library suppliers create an array of stickers for use in helping readers find items of interest quickly while browsing. These stickers include genre — mystery, science fiction, romance — as well as themes — humor, holiday, LGBTQ+. What is meant to help readers find, though, can be used to not only stigmatize but to target those titles.

Welcome to Read this Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that needs to jump onto your TBR pile! Sometimes, these books are brand-new releases that I don’t want you to miss, while others are some of my backlist favorites. I adore cookbooks, food writing, and food memoirs. There’s just something special about diving into a world of culinary enthusiasm that sparks so much joy. This week, I’m recommending a cookbook that I can already tell will be my favorite cookbook that I read this year.

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