What really happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?
#HackerNews #CIA #ParisReview #Conversation #LanceRichardson #Mystery
#ParisReview
Ah yes, the riveting exposé where the #CIA and The Paris Review are entangled in a yarn so complex, even a spy would yawn 💤. Spoiler alert: it's mostly about subscribing to a literary magazine 📚. As thrilling as watching paint dry, but hey, at least you can donate! 💰
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/11/11/what-really-happened-with-the-cia-and-the-paris-review-a-conversation-with-lance-richardson/ #ParisReview #LiteraryMagazine #Subscription #Donate #Boredom #HackerNews #ngated
What Happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?
#HackerNews #What #Happened #with #the #CIA #and #The #Paris #Review? #CIA #ParisReview #LanceRichardson #Journalism #Conspiracy
Rejected In Paris
I got told off by The Paris Review today. Maybe it wasn’t necessarily directed at me, but as they say in the, now old, new lingo, I felt attacked. You see, recently, drawing on the well of inspiration that is history I succeeded in writing a poem, but not just any poem. I wrote a ghazal.
Those who know me for any amount of time are made aware of my taste for writing poetry. It’s usually pretty bad but I persist, cause why not. The OG is long gone anyway. The ghazal is an especially ambitious type of poetry to be taken up my someone with my modest talents. To make matters worse, as I learned today, the ghazal is really well suited for the Urdu. For all practical matters, I know only English.
By me! San Diego Botanic Garden, California Poppy (I think).For anyone with any little interest in love and romance, being born in South Asia is a special kind of blessing. We are lucky to have had Urdu poetry reach its peak here. Urdu is perhaps the perfect medium to transmit mischief, passion, pain, longing, and the myriad other emotions which are handmaidens to big Love. Not any kind of expert, but all my life I’ve consumed shayari, sher, ghazals, whether in mainstream Bollywood or in sparkling corners of the internet.
Armed with the internet, full of inspiration, my trusty editor, Mir ChatGPT, in the other tab. I decided it was time to go all in. The Ghazal was to be written. It was, it follows all the rules, I even make a self reference in the last couplet as is the tradition, but it lacks oomph. A good sher, a good ghazal, should pierce you and make you blush for it’s andaaz, mischief and audacity.
Mine… well, you can read it here yourself, don’t forget to play the tiny desk concert, it is lovely.
Definitely read The Paris Review article for it’s a great take of view from a writer who transfers the styles of poetry in one language to another.
#bollywoodPoetry #creativeWriting #crossCulturalWriting #expatWriting #ghazal #languageAndTranslation #literaryCulture #literaryHumor #literaryMagazines #lovePoetry #parisReview #personalEssay #poemWriting #Poetry #poetryCommunity #poetrySubmission #shayari #urduPoetry #writerSLife #writingProcess #writingRejection
“To repeat them, to use them over and over again and to keep on speaking of the hranräd, waelräd, or “road of the whale” instead of “the sea”—that kind of thing—and “the seawood,” “the stallion of the sea” instead of “the ship.” So I decided finally to stop using them, the metaphors, that is; but in the meanwhile I had begun studying the language, and I fell in love with it.” #JorgeLuisBorges #ParisReview
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4331/the-art-of-fiction-no-39-jorge-luis-borges
“The resonances between life and art continued: a year after Camus’s death, Casares reprised her role as the Princess, the female face of death, in the final installment of Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy. In the play, there is a love triangle between the Princess, the poet, and his wife, the pregnant Eurydice. The story is set in a dreamlike postwar Paris.”
#AlbertCamus #loveletters #ParisReview
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/11/illicit-love-letters-albert-camus-and-maria-casares/
"Within the story, Jack’s problem, which becomes the reader’s, is that Roy has a theory, and the theory is just *too much.*"
For the Paris Review, I ask whether the demons of David Lynch's Twin Peaks universe were inspired by a 1982 short story by Norman Rush.
https://mailchi.mp/theparisreview/calebcrainnormanrush?e=224caefe41
"I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian."
#parisreview #hilarymantel #books #interview
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6360/the-art-of-fiction-no-226-hilary-mantel
Paul Auster
The art of fiction
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/121/the-art-of-fiction-no-178-paul-auster
Unlikely to me that #Israel sees another Nobel Prize in Lit. — most subjective of subjective prizes — anytime soon. Why not? #Antisemitism is more prevalent than many believe — in places of power & more populist threads (tho' not always). I didn't always believe that; came to the sad conclusion over time — well before the most recent upswelling of antipathy in the US & 🌍.
Many worthy to consider for that Nobel, David Grossman among them. #ParisReview interview (2007) https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5794/the-art-of-fiction-no-194-david-grossman
The #TrumanCapote interview in our #BowieBookClub pick, “Writers at Work,” is an indulgent romp: “I intend to have footloose escapades as long as the frontiers stay open,” says the boy genius.
He comes across much more likable than #Faulkner does earlier in the collection.
#parisreview #authorinterviews @bookstodon
A fun part of our #BowieBookClub pick this month are these little manuscript peeks for each author interviewed in the Writers at Work collection from the #parisreview
#dorothyparker #authorinterviews @bookstodon
“There are two perfumes to a book.
If a book is new, it smells great.
If a book is old, it smells even better.
It smells like ancient Egypt.
A book has got to smell.”
"I have a theory that people who don’t read much before the age of fourteen never fully develop areas in the brain that process text into images or experiences. If you become a serious reader only in college, you interpret everything analytically. I sometimes see this in academic critics—they’re so intelligent, and yet something eludes them."
Brilliant take by Olga Tokarczuk in the #ParisReview #ArtOfFiction258 #Literature #Learning #ReadingIsFundamental
Can’t get James Lasdun’s story “Helen” out of my head (latest Paris Review). Best short fiction I’ve read in months. #parisreview #jameslasdon
A new short story of mine, "The Letter," is in the latest issue of the Paris Review, which just dropped. It’s about exes, surviving, being an artist and not being an artist, and how impossible it is to tell the difference.
https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/7995/the-letter-caleb-crain
The Paris Review - Camus’s New York Diary, 1946 - The Paris Review
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/03/14/camuss-new-york-diary-1946/ #ParisReview #Existentialism
This piece, comparing Leonard Cohen (quite positively) to Bob Dylan using the lyrics of "I'm Your Man," gets to the core of why Leonard was able to connect with people (not just women) right to the very end of his life.
The Paris Review - Love Songs: “I’m Your Man”
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/02/14/love-songs-im-your-man/
"Have you ever smoked a cigarette in a small room...? Cigarette smoke is distilled in the lungs, and upon exhalation, the nicotine adheres to the moisture in the environment, the droplets land, the nicotine is absorbed, and the poison never leaves. The interior of the house had a layer of nicotine varnish that made everything sepia and gross. You cannot scrub this stuff off anything except, maybe, stainless steel." Ottessa Moshfegh, "The Smoker"
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/02/07/the-smoker/?mc_cid=92ad0102cb&mc_eid=26d4e3eb79
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