The Paris Review21 hours agoMarilyn the PoetThe Paris Review - Elisa Gonzalez“It’s good they told me what / the moon was when I was a child,” reads a line from a poem by Marilyn Monroe. “It’s better they told me as a child what it was / for I could not understand it now.” The untitled poem, narrating a nighttime taxi ride in Manhattan, flits between the cityscape, a view of …
The Paris Review1 day agoPassing Through: On Leonard CohenThe Paris Review - Andrew MartinTo mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work. When Leonard Cohen starts singing “Passing Through” on his 1973 Live Songs album, he sounds tentative, like a child who’s been asked to sing a song he learned …
The Paris Review5 days agoOn Hannah Black’s Pandemic Novella, Barthelme, and PessoaThe Paris Review - Olivia Kan-SperlingHannah Black’s novella Tuesday or September or the End begins in the early months of 2020, on the heels of a strange discovery: an alien object, oak-tree-like but seemingly machine-fabricated, has materialized on the shore of Jones Beach. According to the frenetic narrative of the news, one that …
The Paris Review4 days agoA Brighter Kind of Madness: On Leonard CohenThe Paris Review - Ottessa MoshfeghTo mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work. In 2002, the year I graduated from college, I had a young male psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian who called me the night before every session to confirm …
The Paris Review5 days agoThe Plants Are WatchingThe Paris Review - Elvia WilkTell Us What You Know One day in 1966, the CIA interrogation specialist Cleve Backster was feeling silly. On a whim, he tried clipping a polygraph wire to the leaf of a common houseplant. A polygraph, or lie detector, is typically hooked up to a person to measure factors like increased heart rate …
The Paris ReviewRe-Covered: A Sultry Month by Alethea HayterThe Paris Review - Lucy ScholesOne hundred and seventy-six years ago today, on the evening of Monday, June 22, 1846, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon—sixty years old and facing imminent financial ruin—locked himself in his studio in his house on Burwood Place, just off London’s Edgware Road. The month had been the hottest …
