I was in an Uber Pool (I guess they’re not called that anymore) with some stranger, both of us going to Brooklyn from Manhattan. Our driver crossed the Williamsburg Bridge, took the first exit, and then followed its loop all the way back onto the bridge, going in the opposite direction, reentering Manhattan. I wasn’t paying attention. My co-rider looked up, at the skyline that was supposed to be behind us, and said something. “Are we going the wrong way?” Our driver laughed. Yes, he had made a wrong turn.

This was a very time-consuming “wrong turn.” We had to go all the way back over the bridge, then get off somewhere in the Lower East Side and find a way back onto Delancey, which isn’t simple, since U-turns aren’t possible, there are so many one-way streets, and there’s always traffic. My co-rider wasn’t done asking our driver questions. What was he doing, instead of watching for the exit? He laughed again and pointed to a phone that was mounted to the left-hand side of his windshield, away from the GPS, which was mid-dash.

“What is that, a gossip website?” she asked. I looked at the small screen (phones were smaller then), making out a pink-and-purple layout; tiny photos of celebrities; text moving upward, ticker-like, in another language, maybe Korean; hearts and sparkles and whatever animating everything. It would be impossible to make out one headline, much less read these articles, and drive, I thought, and I guess that was being proven. Our driver was still smiling, pointing as if we could see the miniaturized information, as if we could read the foreign text and recognize the faces.

I knew from his wordless gestures that something huge had just happened to one of these celebrities, and he was too excited by this event to care about anything else. I was not as mad about the tardiness the detour had caused as I was about the indifference toward it, the way this guy was so elated by some gossip, or, more likely, the way in which he had received such gossip—in the middle of one of those maneuvers that make his job obnoxious, like taking the first exit off a bridge—that he could forget about the exit, about us.

The following three short essays describe Ntozake Shange’s experience with psychoanalysis. After the success of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, she struggled with bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, and drug addiction. Her mental health challenges continued for decades, and she was remarkably open about them and diligent in seeking help through psychoanalysis and traditional talk therapy. Characteristically, Shange’s complicated emotional landscape is rendered with tenderness and beauty, which is particularly important given our collective recognition of the importance of mental health care. In this, too, Shange was ahead of her time.

—Imani Perry

Editor’s note: Except where a change was necessary to avoid errors that altered meaning in the work, Shange’s original handwritten notes and misspellings are how they appear in her archives. The editor aimed to maintain the integrity and urgency of Shange’s writing style, and to publish her work as she left it.

Last Friday afternoon, the first in a series of downpours began in northern Nevada just as Burning Man was preparing to wrap up. Life in Black Rock City, the temporary settlement created for the event, ground to a halt as the hard-packed desert clay turned into a particularly sticky species of mud. Wheeled vehicles from bedazzled bikes to fire-breathing art cars instantly became useless. For approximately two and a half days, festival organizers forbade travel into and out of the city. Burners were asked to conserve food and water, and to live out their espoused principle of radical self-reliance.

As the lockdown dragged on, news reports from Black Rock City were limited and at times sensational. (Rumors of an ebola outbreak on Saturday were quickly debunked.) Social media commentary on the waterlogged festival was, predictably, infused with heavy doses of Schadenfreude. But one source struck a slightly different tone. 

BMIR 94.5, a radio station which surfaces annually for the festival, quickly adapted its programming to the shifting conditions. The station—located in a DJ booth in the makeshift city—allowed walk-up studio guests to mingle with on-air callers from the “default world,” as attendees dub the universe beyond the Black Rock City gates. Over the long weekend, I periodically tuned in online from New York, listening for the vibes.

Every ten minutes or so, BMIR played a series of prerecorded PSAs. Some were earnest exhortations, if slightly surreal: “Please do not climb on art. There are muddy, unsafe conditions on playa and very limited mobile emergency services,” one message went. “Also, refrain from entering the man.” (This refers to the towering wooden effigy ritualistically set aflame at the conclusion of every festival.) 

My favorite reading challenge, The Sealey Challenge, wrapped up at the end of August. Created by poet Nicole Sealey, it’s a challenge where participants read one collection of poetry every day in August. Reading one collection a day can be an incredible experience, but the point is simply to enjoy poetry and connect with other poetry lovers. This was my third time doing the challenge, and, as usual, it brought me so much joy.

One of my favorite things about the challenge is that it I always come out of August hungry for more poetry. This is perfect because fall is a big season for new releases, and poetry is no exception. There are so many incredible collections that have just come out or are coming out soon. Whether you, too, have just finished the Sealey and are excited to ride the momentum into September, or you’re just eager for some new collections to peruse at a leisurely pace this fall, you’re in luck. This list includes a reissue of a classic, a book of poems all about pigs, a collection that wrestles with complicated questions of heritage and erasure, and several exciting debuts.

So what are you waiting for? You know what to do: get those preorders and library requests in now!

Have you ever wondered how life might have turned out if you hadn’t studied that thing… taken that job… married that person… made that decision?

I engage in these existential exercises all the time. Not because I’m unhappy with my life. No, it’s not that. But the thought that if I’d done just one small thing differently, my life might have gone in a completely different direction. The notion is fascinating. Staggering. Mind-boggling.

It’s why I enjoy time travel stories and Sliding Doors-like narratives. I love imagining the endless possibilities that exist, the ways in which life might have spun out. The ways that paths might still be altered.

Multiverse stories — alternate timelines — are similarly satisfying. Because all those possible paths? They exist simultaneously. And if you had the ability to step from one stream to another? Well, what would you do with that power? Would you come to the conclusion that no version of life beats the one you’re already living? Or would you try to step into the life of another you?

There may come a time when you find yourself at just such a crossroads. (Come on. Let me dream.) The books below will prepare you for just such an eventuality.

Summer is nearly in the rearview mirror, which means the big summer crossover events in comics are behind us as well. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some amazing comic book and graphic novel stories on the horizon, though. As the weather starts to turn colder, it always makes me want to curl up with the glossies. Give me cool weather, a couple fingers of Scotch, and great superhero stories any day.

Speaking of which, I’m pretty excited about a ton of new superhero series launching this month with new #1 issues, which are always great jumping-in points. There’s also a true crime in comic book form, which is pretty unusual. There is also a new epic fantasy comic and a wild fantasy/cyberpunk cross-world comic. Oh, and we can’t forget a pair of brilliant new graphic novels tacking coming-of-age and race.

There are a ton of great comics coming to us in September 2023, but I’m keeping the list short and sweet so you don’t get overwhelmed when you visit your local comic book shop. But by all means, peruse the rest of the shelves while you’re there. Without further preamble, here are nine great comics and graphic novels coming this month.

I’d argue that the best thing about the bookish corner of the internet is its capacity to bring people together and form a huge community that can collectively discuss and enjoy books. What’s another way to bring bookish people together? Book clubs, of course! The only problem is that finding the right book club for you can sometimes be a bit difficult. Especially since book clubs tend to be local, and not everyone can meet up at the same time. But I did mention the internet for a reason, which is that there are plenty of online book clubs you can join! Once again, it may be hard to choose one. So that’s why today, we’re taking a look at some of the best online book clubs, 2023 edition.

One of the beauties of these online communities is that, more often than not, you can join in on the discussion in your own time. Of course, when there are scheduled talks or livestreams, things get more complicated. But overall, you could be half a world away and still join in, which is one of the reasons why I like this format so much. For this post, I chose eight of the best online book clubs of 2023 — which I picked because I think they offer a wide variety of books as well as different engagement levels. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you a bit about each — things like pricing or previous picks. Plus, I’m adding their websites so you can learn more if you want to.

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at some of the best online book clubs 2023 edition, shall we?

There was a wordless picture book I loved when I was little about a tricycle that rode all around the town. The photos were black and white, but the tricycle was red. My mother was a librarian at our town’s library, so I got to spend a lot of time staring at the book at the table while she worked. One day, she brought me over to a man by the circulation desk and introduced him as the author of the book. Well, I was stunned! It was already hard for my small brain to comprehend that there was a book with pictures of places where I lived, but now I was meeting the actual author?!? I was too shy to say anything. (And so began my life-long habit of being awkward in front of authors.)

Many, many years later, I had the luck of becoming a bookseller at a small independent bookstore. Indie booksellers are amazing; they’re like one big family across the country, and I quickly learned that so many of the booksellers I met were also writers. Authors who work as booksellers? AMAZING. I worked with two award-winning poets; my fellow Mainer Josh Christie had begun publishing books about skiing and brewing beer; Jami Attenberg worked a shift behind the counter at WORD in Brooklyn. Every year, there were more booksellers announcing that they were writing books!

What a great place a bookstore is for an author or an aspiring author! As a ravenous reader turned bookslinger, I was all about the employee discount. Before I was a bookseller, I was the store’s biggest customer, but I bought even more books when I worked there. (My boss was no fool.) As a writer, you are surrounded by inspiration, some in the form of books by your heroes, and you get to talk about books all day and meet authors and listen to them talk about the craft.

It’s no wonder that so many amazing authors were booksellers or that several authors have opened bookstores! Authors who currently own bookstores include Judy Blume, Ann Patchett, Louise Erdrich, Kelly Link, Alex George, Jenny Lawson, George R. R. Martin, Kristen Iskandrian, Emma Straub, Jeff Kinney, and Josh Cook. And there’s a whole other enormous group of authors who have been librarians, including my hero Elizabeth McCracken and our very own Kelly Jensen, Jessica Pryde, and Tirzah Price. But let’s get back to the booksellers!

Banned Books Week is less than one month away, but for those of us who’ve been engaged in the anti-censorship movement over the last several years, it’s far from the only time to highlight and emphasize the growing power of book banners. Although it draws attention to the reality of censorship in America, ultimately, Banned Books Week — all capitals — is a marketing campaign. Whether or not it empowers the everyday person to engage in anti-censorship efforts the other 51 weeks of the year is hard to say.

Although Banned Books Week can be as annoying as it is important, it can and should be reframed as an opportunity to revisit library policies and procedures to ensure that the First Amendment Rights of every individual within a community are being considered, addressed, and honored. Build those good banned book displays and provide information to users about how to push back against ongoing censorship, but also turn the lens inward toward your own institutions to ensure you’re living the values expressed over the course of the week.

This applies whether you work in a library or are a library user. You have the power to speak up and help codify the rights of all to see and be seen within the library, its programs, its books, and all of its services.

Libraries of all stripes — public, school, and academic — should have strong policies around how they build their collections, the types of materials they include, where and how items are removed (generally following the MUSTIE guidelines), and where and how people can challenge those materials/ask for reconsideration of their inclusion (hereafter referred to collectively as “collection policies”). Not all libraries put this information directly on their websites, though that is good practice, but it should be available to patrons if they ask to see it. Libraries who do not make these available on their websites might want to consider the implications of that choice. Many of those demanding book bans do so under the guise of libraries trying to hide an agenda, but by making those policies and forms readily accessible, book banners can’t as easily fall onto that belief. Be as transparent as possible.

Though there are numerous examples of robust collection policies out there to help in modeling and strengthening current policies — or developing them if none exist — one element missing from even some of the best policies is one that deserves to be included: the explicit naming of identities and beliefs protected under those policies. Too few policies state that their collection policies are crafted with the belief that people of LGBTQ+ identities, of varying abilities, of a range of racial and cultural backgrounds, all ages, and an array of religious beliefs are at the heart of the decisions made about the materials acquired for the library. Simply stating “all people” feels inclusive, of course, but without explicitly naming who “all people” two things can happen.

A passage about LA (“ellay”) from Henry Hoke’s Open Throat, a novel narrated by a mountain lion:

the bright world below the park at night is a blur to me when I try to look out over it

but if I get close enough to a creature’s eye I can see what it sees and in the owl’s eye I see ellay clearly

more lights than I could ever count stretch out into the darkness and don’t stop stretching

The latest image in our recently relaunched print series is by Sam McKinniss and features the singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey—white-gloved, in a sun hat—reading the Review. The lithograph print, based on a painting by McKinniss, was made with the help of Dusty Hollensteiner at Publicide Inc.; on Friday, September 8, at 9 P.M., the print, made in a limited edition of twenty-five, will be made available for sale to the public at parisreviewprints.org. McKinniss and I talked on the phone a few weeks ago about his process, Lana’s latest album, and images of women reading on the internet.

INTERVIEWER

What led you to make an image of Lana Del Rey reading The Paris Review?

SAM McKINNISS

Happy X-Files anniversary! *sings* It was thirty years ago today / Agent Skinner taught the band to play… Okay, so Skinner didn’t show up until the 21st episode of the first season, and I can’t sing, but you get the idea. I’m excited for the anniversary of The X-Files! It was three decades ago, on September 10, 1993, that one of the most iconic duos in television history made their first appearance on screen. The FBI recruited Agent Dana Scully, a skeptical, by-the-book doctor, to partner with Fox Mulder, a conspiracy-loving loose cannon whose sister went missing when they were young. From their unglamorous office in the basement, the pair investigated stories of sewer monsters, ghosts, aliens, vampires, murderous insects, psychokinetic teens, cults, and more. And then there was that black goo. (Oil, that is. Black gold, Texas tea…)

Like with many successful sci-fi franchises, there are dozens of tie-in novels (including by author Ben Mezrich), and books about the show. And the two stars, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, both have written books themselves! This post is about fun books with aliens and creatures for you to enjoy if you’re an X-Files fan, or if you just love books about aliens and creatures. So grab one of these books, kick back, relax, and try not to think about Eugene Tooms staring at you through your window or heat vent. I want to believe…that you’re going to love these books!

Saturday was Richard’s birthday, and we drove to Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, where we met seventeen years ago. We hadn’t been back to the artists’ colony together since. Standing on the lawn, looking up at the great mansion, we were a bit like bears on the wrong side of the zoo. When we were residents, we were free to roam the grounds, walking so close our coats swished together as we circled the four small lakes that dot the rich people’s estate. You don’t even notice there are visitors, welcome only on some woodland trails and in the rose gardens, laid out like those at a French palace. 

Whatever memories were stirred as we retraced our steps weren’t sharp. It was like rewatching a movie with different actors in the parts. Even if we’d entered the buildings now and the rooms where we’d talked, I doubt it would have made much difference. The movie I watch is in my head, and I run it more or less all the time.

This is the movie. I arrive at Yaddo lost. I’m absolutely lost in my life, and I turn sixty at the colony, and there’s something about a man there I find easy to be with. The first time we talk, we’re in a little parlor outside the room where meals are served, and I don’t know how Foucault comes up. It will turn out Foucault is always on Richard’s mind the way this conversation in the little parlor is always, more or less, on my mind. I say, “I find Foucault overdetermined.” Or maybe I say, without qualification, “Foucault is overdetermined,” and even though Richard loves Foucault and doesn’t for one moment believe this is true, he bursts into a smile because he’s never heard anyone say this before, because he’s not sure what I mean by it, and because he’s astonished by the chutzpah of such a blunt summation. 

The painter Alex Katz is best known for his portraits—colorful, flat, rich, and realistic, in a style that has become immediately recognizable as his own. Katz has always been fascinated by poetry, and especially by the work that came out of the New York School in the fifties and sixties. “What Katz found so compelling about this scene was its complete disregard for aesthetic precedent, irreverence for an academy of poetry, and gravitation toward vernacular expression, where words were less pondered and possessed an immediacy that spoke of nowness,” writes the art historian Debra Bricker Balken in the forthcoming book Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets. These qualities have something in common with Katz’s own work, which might help to explain why he has been so drawn to collaborations with poets—among them illustrations, prints, and covers for books by Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Alice Notley, and Ron Padgett. Katz has also painted portraits of a number of poets, including his personal favorite, Frank O’Hara, who was himself interested in the crossover between painting and poetry, and occasionally jealous of painters themselves. (“I am not a painter, I am a poet,” one O’Hara poem begins. “Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.”) Below are several of Katz’s literary collaborations, including a cover he made for this very magazine in 1985.

The Maison de Balzac is located in the sixteenth arrondissement at 47, rue Raynouard, Paris, in the heart of the former village of Passy. If you visit, chances are you’ll approach it along the rue de l’Annonciation, which is pleasantly quiet and perfectly shaded, and boasts, according to Google Maps, a Pizza Hut that I don’t remember seeing when I visited in April. What I do remember seeing was an unaccompanied Alsatian with some sort of harness girding its chest, loping through a small nearby park. When I looked around, vaguely nonplussed, I noticed a clinique vétérinaire directly across the street.

If I’d had to explain to myself why, with only three days to spend in Paris, I felt such an acute need to visit the home where Honoré de Balzac, a writer I wasn’t even that familiar with, had composed the bulk of The Human Comedy, a fictional project I’d barely even dipped my toes into, I’m not sure what I would have said. Probably it just seemed that if anyone would have had an interesting house, it would have been him. Open one of his novels at random, and chances are you’ll find a gratuitous description of a room and its furnishings, a flurry of signifiers that, today, can seem hard to place. Take Monsieur Grandet’s living room, for instance, as it appears in the opening chapter of Eugénie Grandet. We learn the room has two windows that “gave on to the street,” that its floor is wooden, that “grey, wooden panelling with antique moulding lined the walls from top to bottom,” that its ceiling is dominated by exposed beams. “An old copper clock, inlaid with tortoiseshell arabesques, adorned the white, badly carved, stone chimney-piece,” Balzac goes on. “Above it hung a greenish mirror, whose edges, bevelled to show its thickness, reflected a thin stream of light along an old-fashioned pier-mirror of damascened steel.” I don’t know what a pier-mirror is, and I couldn’t begin to differentiate an old-fashioned model from a sleeker, more modern one. In a sense, this feeling of being lost was part of the appeal of Balzac’s world as I’d imagined it. 

Which is another way of saying that when I contemplated a sort of generic Balzacian space, a vision of plushness, of pure and overwhelming material profusion would unfurl in my mind: a little room fitted out with dark wood and damask curtains, gilt mirrors and stubbornly bombé furniture, its walnut shelves and limestone mantelpieces offering stable quarters to a full range of dandy’s trinkets, like engraved pistols and silver-handled riding whips and even, glowing palely in the manufactured dusk like a sturdy snowball, a fine Sèvres sugar bowl—every detail, down to the motes of light-struck dust spinning in the sepia-toned air, tuned precisely to some ideal of costive, costly languor. You know, luxus, as the Romans must have done it. Who wouldn’t want to disappear into this?

So, here I was. There was a false start: a pleasant little gate with a plastic-sheathed slip of paper taped to it declaring that the gate was no longer the entrance to the Maison de Balzac. Through the gate I could see a set of steps leading down to the grounds of the museum, which occupies a sort of plateau between the rue Raynouard above and the rue Berton below, but I was directed instead down the road some thirty yards, to a squat, flat-roofed, glass-walled hutch. When I entered, the young woman manning the information desk swiftly rerouted me to a side door, which deposited me at the top of a set of open-air stairs that, it turns out, are completely accessible from the street. Dizzily, I descended.

Artists & Writers Annual Charity Softball Game in East Hampton, August 19: Should you be lucky enough to find yourself in East Hampton at a loose end this coming Sunday, it is the annual artists vs. writers softball game. In fact, it is the seventy-fifth anniversary of said game, which began as a picnic in 1948 and has seen the likes of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Joan Mitchell at bat. Anyone can spectate. (The Review’s softball team, meanwhile, is coming off three straight rainouts.) 

U.S. Open qualifiers at Flushing Meadows, August 22–25: Next week, 128 men’s players and 128 women’s players will be vying for the final 32 spots in the tournament. The beauty of this particular week is that it’s 100 percent free and open to the public. Our intern Izzy Ampil plans to be in attendance, and friend of the Review and Club Leftist Tennis cohead Charlie Dulik says it’s a “great way to scout up-and-coming guys in the tennis world.”

What That Quilt Knows About Me at the American Folk Art Museum, through October 29: This exhibition, recommended by our intern Anna Rahkonen, showcases forty quilts, some dating back to the nineteenth century. The quilts were made by a wide-ranging group of artists and craftspeople, among them a pair of enslaved sisters from antebellum Kentucky and an unnamed British soldier during the Crimean War. 

Kazuo Hara retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, August 16–31: At Anthology, a run of the intimate, activist documentaries of the Japanese filmmaker Kazuo Hara—including portraits of life with cerebral palsy (Goodbye CP, 1972); victims of asbestos exposure (Sennan Asbestos Disaster, 2016) and mercury poisoning (Minamata Mandala, 2020); and an increasingly unhinged Pacific War veteran seeking answers about the mysterious deaths in his regiment (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, 1987). Most exciting to our associate editor Amanda Gersten: the by all accounts brutally voyeuristic Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974). After Hara’s ex-wife leaves him for a relationship with a woman, he follows her to Okinawa for a year, where she opens a nursery for the children of sex workers, joins a women’s commune, begins seeing an American GI, gives birth to her second child on camera, and enumerates Hara’s many flaws for his then girlfriend (who is also the film’s producer).

I’m interested in stories that gently erase the boundaries between love and friendship, featuring characters who shuffle the two feelings in unexpected ways. I like narratives that navigate contradictions and do away with false binaries, illustrating the complexity of what we humans call intimacy. Who is really capable of drawing a hard boundary between feelings? My story in the Summer issue of the Review, “My Good Friend,” follows two elderly friends who have shared a lifetime of friendship right in the neighborhood of romance. For these two old folks, friendship is the mountain one climbs to reach a deeper viewpoint on love.

Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Inseparables, about the friendship between two young girls, Sylvie and Andrée, is one of the many gems I’ve encountered. Based on de Beauvoir’s own passionate friendship that began in youth, with a girl named Zaza, the book was written five years after she published The Second Sex, and it’s clear how the feelings born from that friendship structured her personality and helped to shape even her philosophical interests. “Nothing so interesting had ever happened to me,” Sylvie says of the first time she met Andrée. “It suddenly seemed as if nothing had ever happened to me at all.”

Young Sylvie wants to express this feeling somehow, to tell her friend about the transformation that has happened inside her. On Andrée’s thirteenth birthday, Sylvie carefully and anxiously sews a silk purse by hand as a gift, hoping it will tell her friend something that words can’t quite. Sylvie hands the bag to Andrée and, seeing her astonishment, she has the impression that something would have happened between them, maybe a tender kiss, had it not been for the presence of their mothers.

Together they become teenagers, and Andrée, the more extroverted of the pair, begins a little romance with a boy against her mother’s wishes. Sylvie starts to feel jealous before she even knows the name of the feeling. Andrée is forced to admit to her mother that, yes, she had kissed the boy, she had kissed him because she loved him. She later tells Sylvie, who is overcome by complete shock: “I lowered my head. Andrée was unhappy and the idea of it was unbearable. But her unhappiness was so foreign to me; the kind of love where you kiss had no truth for me.” After a few pages we realize that a kiss is something of a metric of passion for the two young girls, the naive way in which they measure the beginnings of love even as they wrestle with the ambiguity of their own relationship.