July 1, 2022 The Review’s Review Emma Cline, Dan Bevacqua, and Robert Glück Recommend By The Paris Review Photograph by makeshiftlove, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0, This week, we bring you reviews from three of our issue no. 240 contributors. The documentary Rocco, which follows the Italian porn actor and director Rocco Siffredi, feels like a hundred perfect short stories. We learn that Rocco carries around a photo of his mother at all times. We watch Rocco and his teenage sons chat in their cavernous and starkly lit climbing gym/weight room in Croatia. We discover that Rocco’s hapless cameraman of many decades, Gabriel, is actually his cousin, a thwarted porn star. During one virtuosic shoot (Rocco Siffredi Anal Threesome with Abella Danger) Gabriel accidentally leaves the lens cap on, which they discover only after shooting the entire scene. There’s a surprising sweetness in Rocco, a man in the twilight of a certain era. “They used to focus on the women’s faces,” he says, sadly. He’s decided to retire. The final scene finds Rocco carrying a giant wooden cross on his back through the hallways of the Kink.com Armory. This tableau is the brainchild of Gabriel. “Because you die for everyone’s sins,” he tells Rocco. —Emma Cline, author of “Pleasant Glen” Read More
July 1, 2022 Bulletin The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review: Announcing Our Summer Subscription Deal By The Paris Review Love to read but hate to choose? Announcing our summer subscription deal: starting today and through the end of August, you really can have it all when you subscribe to both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for a combined price of $99. That’s one year of issues from both publications, as well as their entire archives—sixty-nine years of The Paris Review and fifty-nine years of The New York Review of Books—for $50 off the regular subscription price. Ever since former Paris Review managing editor Robert Silvers cofounded The New York Review of Books with Barbara Epstein, the two magazines have been closely aligned. With your subscription to both, you’ll have access to fiction, poetry, interviews, criticism, and more from some of the most important writers of our time, from T. S. Eliot to Sigrid Nunez, James Baldwin to Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion to Jamaica Kincaid. Subscribe today and you’ll receive: One year of The Paris Review (4 issues) One year of The New York Review of Books (20 issues) Full access to both the New York Review and Paris Review digital archives—that’s fifty-nine years of The New York Review of Books and sixty-nine years of The Paris Review. If you already subscribe to The Paris Review, we’ve got good news: this deal will extend your current subscription, while your new subscription to The New York Review of Books will begin immediately.
June 30, 2022 On Leonard Cohen A Laborer Called a Writer: On Leonard Cohen By Carina del Valle Schorske Mount Baldy in clouds. Photograph by josephmachine. Licensed under CC0 4.0. To 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. On “Tower of Song” (1988), Leonard Cohen’s weary croak cracks the joke: “I was born like this / I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” He can’t quite sustain his own melody, but some of us remain enchanted—and not merely by his self-effacement. The irony, we suspect, involves us, too. Choicelessness is one of his great themes: we don’t choose our blessings or our deficits, and we don’t choose our material conditions. Fine. But Leonard Cohen takes it further: maybe we can’t even control the impulse to defy our deficits, to work against the grain of what we’ve been given. We feel sentenced to sing even without a golden voice—by our own unruly desires, or by “twenty-seven angels from the great beyond.” The metaphorical cause matters less than the effect: “They tied me to this table right here in the Tower of Song.” Read More
June 29, 2022 First Person Scenes from an Open Marriage By Jean Garnett Illustration by Na Kim. About six months after our daughter was born, my husband calmly set the idea on the table, like a decorative gun. I said I’d think about it. Read More
June 28, 2022 On Leonard Cohen The Other Side of Pleasure: On Leonard Cohen By Daniel Poppick Photo copyright gudenkoa, via Adobe Stock. To 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. If apocalypse were at hand, would you choose to light a seventy-dollar Bois Cire scented candle by your bed and leaf through a Penguin Classics copy of George Herbert’s The Temple as the air conditioner ran on high, “Who By Fire” playing softly on your phone, the world slowly sifting itself down to ash? Some of us might. Some of us would. Leonard Cohen embraced the spiritual and the carnal, and his aching insistence on chasing pleasure at the edges of oblivion has made his voice ever more seductive—comforting, troubling—since his death in 2016. Read More
June 28, 2022 On Poetry Marilyn the Poet By Elisa Gonzalez Monroe in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952), from the July 1953 issue of Modern Screen. “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 East River, and, across it, the neon Pepsi-Cola sign, though, she tells us, “I am not looking at these things. / I am looking for my lover.” The very real moon comes to symbolize the confusion of adult experience. I quote these lines back to myself when I feel acutely that I understand less, not more, than I used to. Read More