The Paris Review

Alisa Weilerstein’s Cello

Lucy Ellmann — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 12:00:28 +0000

Photograph by Marco Borggreve. Courtesy of Alisa Weilerstein.

It didn’t eat, didn’t drink, didn’t sleep. It certainly didn’t cough and sneeze during performances. It made no demands. Quiescently it languished in its carbon-fiber carrying case, helpless, hidden, and naked as the day it was born. Braced within velvet and Velcro, suspended in a cradle like a baby all unknowing, the cello was propelled up and down escalators and into elevators, cars, buses, bars, cafés, restaurants, and restrooms, through crowds of people completely oblivious to the thing of beauty in their midst. It had its own transit papers, its own seat on the plane, and was accompanied on every jaunt by four loosened bows and various spare strings of gut or steel. In one side pocket lay a tiny forest green canister of peg dope; in the other, a disc of rosin with a well-worn central groove nestled in a square of brown felt.

Shunted this way and that, pushed, pulled, humped, bumped, and sometimes accidentally thumped, the cello made no complaint. When allowed out of its case, it was cosseted, tuned, and gently dusted to remove rosin buildup. It was regularly dropped off at a renowned luthier’s for checkups and fiddly repairs: crack reduction, peg tightening, polishing, and adjustment of the sound post. And on planes and trains, in the car, in hotel rooms, dressing rooms, practice rooms, airport lounges, auditoriums, even the White House, the cello was granted, whenever possible, its preferred temperature and humidity.

But, suspended in its vaguely cello-shaped cocoon, it was always waiting, poised for action: a thing so taut, so full of life as to be roused by every touch, every jolt. It hummed to itself therapeutically in the gloom, unheard. Its patience and docility were but a pose, and arrival at any concert hall was liberation. The cello burst from its bonds spruced, glittering, and robust, and roamed energetically through concerti, sonatas, trios, and quartets. It could tackle anything: Beethoven, Brahms, Schoenberg, Elgar, Dvořák. It wasn’t shy. It chimed in with any member of the orchestra, even the seemingly alien, like piccolos and timpani. Who needed them, though, when the cello produced high notes and percussive effects aplenty? It could saw, rattle, whine, trill, and blast to beat the band. Sometimes in its excitement it regressed to being a blank plank of wood, a blighted log, walloped by the back of the bow.

The cello resonated most with other string instruments. It had tried it on once with a violin, but the physical discrepancies proved insurmountable. Something could be improvised with a viola perhaps, not a violin. Just too dinky. But when it got near another cello, they would neck. Their scrolls would knock together and their pegs become so entwined, they no longer knew whose were whose. Their hips began to sway and, as their strings brushed against one another, the celli emitted convulsive, staccato sounds from their depths. They kept their tailpins withdrawn, of course, throughout.

Yet by midnight the cello was usually back inside its case, bestilled and staring either blankly ahead or checking for chinks of light that might indicate a loose buckle along the outside edge. Whenever, by chance, the case was left open, and everyone abed, there was nothing to stop the cello leaping out the window and doing superhero things. This cello could fly. It could really go! It startled pigeons in air pockets, but when the wind strummed its strings, the pigeons purred back, mollified and curious. Many a night was spent migrating with birds, butterflies, buffalo, eels, or salmon. Geese readily flew in a V formation behind the cello, trusting its sense of direction over their own. It could honk at them, if pressed.

The cello made itself useful during these nocturnal escapades, releasing livestock from trucks bound for slaughterhouses, chickens from factory farms, fish from fish farms, claustrophobic beluga whales from aquarium tanks, and cataleptic rhinos and elephants from zoos. Winging it with species-appropriate lullabies to calm their fears, the cello stuck its neck out to nudge deer, wild ponies, cougars, wolves, raccoons, prairie dogs, and prairie hens toward safer routes around, over, or under highways, making use of wildlife bridges and tunnels. (In exchange, it might steal a few choice hairs from the horses’ tails to use on a tattered bow someday.) Practicing pizzicato out at sea, relishing the sound of the ocean gusts whistling through its f-holes, it plucked flying fish from the jaws of sharks. But, born of wood, the cello felt most at home among trees. It sought out forests and jungles, the few that remained, where it swung from vines like Tarzan and delivered food to orphaned squirrel and fox kits.

Being man-made, the cello naturally felt some allegiance to the human race too. It attended the odd four-alarm fire here, or carjacking there. It helped battered women escape abusive partners. It stood bravely between muggers and their marks, but avoided gun battles, as puncture wounds might have affected its tone. The cello nimbly interceded in rapes, too, turning its scroll into a battering ram against assailants, or poking them with its spike—never enough to pierce the flesh, but sufficient to elicit a loud “OUCH!” from the stunned miscreant.

The spike could also be inserted into the spokes of speeding e-bikes; or wielded as an ice axe when the cello, unfazed by the windchill factor, was scooping people out of glacial mudslides and avalanches and carrying the maimed strapped to its shoulders, as it slithered downhill on its curvy hip. It could helicopter victims to safety too—it resembled a helicopter, after all, when seen from below. And water rescues came easy. A cello is born to float.

Wounds, it treated. Tears, it wiped. The blind, it led across the street—they never realized they’d been escorted by a cello. It took over the milk rounds of weary milkmen and brought toilet paper to people stuck on the john without any. It completed equations that had baffled mathematicians for three thousand years. Using a force field of sound waves to protect its delicate points and planes from harm, it placed itself between colliding trains and elevated sinking ferries, saving many a life. It learnt to yank tornadoes away from built-up areas, and flew into the eyes of storms, placating them with music. One night it even managed to close down every airport, permanently, to reduce global warming, coral-reef bleaching, and the inanities of mass tourism. It dragged nuclear waste deposits into outer space and dumped them into black holes, hoping for the best. It did the same with military drones, war being anathema to a cello.

In spare moments, it skipped over to Carnegie Hall, where it hung from the chandeliers and twirled on its spike onstage, jewelry-box ballerina style, before zooming back up into the stratosphere. “It’s a bird, it’s a plane!” people cried. No, just a cello on a moonlit flit.

Through these experiences—scenic, sordid, earthly, and galactic—the cello came to know of things, all things. It had much to ponder as it squeezed back into its case by dawn, just in time to resume its heavy concert and recording schedule. Music provided all the thrills of self-expression, yet the cello increasingly pined for the solo repertoire: it needed no accompaniment and wanted to be heard alone. When confronted by Kodály’s solo cello sonata, it plunged in headlong, at the risk of life, limb, and dignity. And there was Bach: enmeshed in the solo preludes, gigues, and sarabandes, the cello’s slight frame magically expanded. There was singing, much singing, mellifluous song. Through Bach the cello told of Amazonian valleys, redwoods, and Tyrolean mountains covered with flowers; of milk, fogs, mystery, the clatter of plates, lapis lazuli; of Michelangelo and Rabelais; of damselfish darting, of mosquitoes buzzing, crickets clicking, fireflies blinking. Cascades, cataclysms, red moons, eclipses. The vibrato wails of women in labor. Earth and unearthly stirrings. A snatch of folk music. Lightsome triplets, a tapping foot. Marching, too, and moping, and unpretty mud, grunge, growls, barks, roars. Dissonance, despair, desire, bliss. Electric zings and zaps. Long, low scrapes from the frog of the bow along the C string, gruff and plaintive. Flickering lights on the A string. Riots of color on the G and D, becoming a real riot, an uprising. Whipped to a frenzy, the cello produced its own harmonics, its own inventions. They rose from the warmed wood, whirled around within its core, tripped gaily along the fingerboard, leapt off the bridge, and reached all corners of the room, the hall, the rooftop, the garden, or the beach.

There is quiet too in Bach, and tragedy. It is a tragic situation, after all, for a piece of wood to have to plead with us for decency, love, and justice. It was the cello’s purest act of superheroism, to play Bach’s solo suites to a civilization sunk into depravity. It railed against the apocalyptic urge in us, our propensity for unforgiveable acts. It raised instead the idea of communion—with nature and each other—and the continuity of past and future, connections now so lazily discounted. A modest, curvy, hollow wooden box, burnished and mellowed over time, stuck together with ancient glue, adorned with two elegant serpentine holes and four ornate pegs, and stirred by the friction of horsehair rubbed back and forth across its belly, poured shame upon us all.

The land and the forests are burning! Like grumpy gods, we have set them all alight and caused great floods. We have poisoned the earth and now live merely to drive cars, employ plastic, build data centers, share viruses, amass debt, commit genocide, and watch crime dramas. Potatoes bake in the ground before they can be dug! We can’t even save sifaka lemurs, dugongs, numbats, and monarch butterflies—or our own children, riddled with unexpected cancers. We’ve made the place unfit for cats, even bugs.

The good news is that, after we’ve all disappeared, exterminated by our nukes, lab leaks, and homicidal robots, there will still be tropical sunsets and peachy mackerel clouds, though no one left to see them. Westerly winds will shift eastward, and so forth. Hurricanes will form in the Atlantic, typhoons in the Pacific, rain on the plain in Spain. Handkerchief trees will drop their hankies every autumn; Kazak pear trees will blossom into popcorn every spring. Streams will gurgle, waterfalls hurtle, unseen. Wide pancake mushrooms will reign for a week or two, here and there, before collapsing. You hope so anyway. And hyacinth macaws? With any luck, there may still be hyacinth macaws, the last on earth to speak.

The moon will wax and wane and go gibbous, to the entertainment and mystification of nobody. The sun will rise and sink, unremarked and unloved—after all it did for us! Saturn will remain the best looking of our planets, Venus a disappointment. Mars, shouldering its two moons, will sit adrift, sulky, barren, and red. And one comet will continue to pass our solar system every 160,000 years, regular as clockwork.

No one will be left to mourn the burnt libraries, the blanched Mona Lisa, the tattered Giottos, Giorgiones, Rembrandts, and Bonnards, Calder’s mobiles, the Bayeux Tapestry, Burkina Faso textiles, Kuba cloths, Shaker quilts, Persian carpets, Roman mosaics, the pyramids, Machu Picchu, and Neolithic stone circles. Nor the reduction to dust of every last copy of Jane Austen and Shakespeare, the obliteration for all eternity of King Lear, Miss Bates, Micawber, Emma Bovary, Leopold Bloom, Holden Caulfield, Casablanca, the Marx Brothers, Simone Signoret, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Verdi, Puccini, Scarlatti, Schubert, and Bach. It’s perhaps hardest to believe that Bach could ever disappear: he seems so essential to the universe. But he will, he will—thanks to our catastrophic failure to rebel.

We must make music! Walk, swim, fuck, make jam, drink wine, and butter our bread with abandon. Read books. Admire fuchsias. Sculpt, paint, sew, knit, cook, write on paper. The human hand.

Lucy Ellmann’s most recent novel is Ducks, Newburyport. Her story “MT” appeared in our Summer issue, no. 256.

Our Fall Issue Cover: Elizabeth Glaessner’s Big Head

Hazel Byers and Izzy Casey — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:57:53 +0000

Elizabeth Glaessner in her studio in Brooklyn. Photograph by Hazel Byers.

Our recent Fall issue features a painting titled Big Head, by the Brooklyn-based artist Elizabeth Glaessner: a nearly-seven-foot piece that, for the cover of issue no. 257, we shrank down to approximately six inches by five. This September, we visited Glaessner at her studio in East Williamsburg to take a closer look at her process and to hear the origin story of the painting. On display beside other large-scale works were replicas of the same images, only smaller; we learned that Glaessner paints the same motifs over and over again—often with one hand leaning against the wall, leaving multicolored prints beside her paintings.

INTERVIEWER

Where did the idea for Big Head come from?

ELIZABETH GLAESSNER

Big Head started with a drawing of a smaller figure emerging from a mouth, an image based on childhood experiences involving fear and religion. I was curious to see if I could reframe some of that imagery through painting.

I looked at depictions of exorcisms or cleansing rituals in painting and film and made some works based on those, as well as on the original drawing and from memory. That smaller figure being exorcised in the original drawing reappears in Big Head, in the lower left-hand corner, as a figure painting the mouth from which it emerged. What started as a memory of control and submission became a painting that was also about release and reflection.

Elizabeth Glaessner, Spirit Rising study, 2025, charcoal on paper (LEFT). Elizabeth Glaessner, Big Head, 2025, oil on linen (RIGHT). © Elizabeth Glaessner. Both images courtesy of Elizabeth Glaessner and P·P·O·W, New York, photograph by JSP Art Photography.

So much changes during the process, and there’s a freedom in that. When I painted that head for the final time, I was thinking about the cycle of fear, violence, and control, but I was also thinking about the absurdity of painting a figure who is painting this giant head in a studio. I guess I’m always hoping to learn something through painting. That’s where some of the pleasure comes from, when the painting becomes something I wouldn’t have anticipated.

Photograph by Hazel Byers.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a lot of water in these paintings.

GLAESSNER

The show that Big Head was in was called “Running Water.” I had been listening to a Daniel Johnston album while I was working, and in one of his songs he says, “Running water / Where are you running from? / You always seem to be on the run.” I thought it was a beautiful and sad metaphor and, in a way, it felt connected to how I was thinking about these paintings. This idea of being in constant motion but never really escaping yourself.

The figures were pretty porous—there were bodies, but the bodies kind of interfered with or were stretched or distorted by the environment. They didn’t have autonomous borders. They weren’t these closed entities. There was a lot of leaking and expelling in that show.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you call it Big Head?

GLAESSNER

With an intense painting, I always want to find room for humor or levity. I think titles are an opportunity to contrast the dominant feeling, and can actually make that feeling more palpable. The title kind of teases the painting. It’s a tiny person painting a giant head, which sounds like it could be about the ego. I wanted to prod that idea.

INTERVIEWER

What else do you listen to while you’re working?

GLAESSNER

I go through different phases. I used to listen to audiobooks or news podcasts, but recently I’ve just been listening to music in the studio. If I’m working on drawings or small paintings, I’ll listen to something ambient so that I can focus and hear myself think. When I work on a larger scale, I’ll listen to whatever helps me get into the right mood for the painting. If it goes well, then I’ll listen to that album on repeat until I’ve moved on. It helps me get into this trance state.

INTERVIEWER

What are you reading now?

GLAESSNER

I just picked up No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. I think it’s about alienation, or what it’s like to be human but not feel it—we’ll see.

Photograph by Hazel Byers.

Hazel Byers is the Review’s engagement editor.

Izzy Casey is the Review’s business and events manager.

Elizabeth Glaessner is a visual artist.

Sexless in the City: The Second Life of Cynthia Buchanan’s Maiden

Walker Rutter-Bowman — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:00:36 +0000

When the sixties ceased swinging, the sexual revolution diversified and penetrated new markets, like real estate. Adults-only apartment complexes sprang up in answer to the needs of the lost and lonely, the childless and horny, offering experiences both socially stimulating and aquatically immersive. Such is the promise of Villa Dionysus, a club for swingles ages twenty-five to forty, and the setting of Maiden, Cynthia Buchanan’s debut from 1972, her first—and so far only—novel, both deb ball and swan song.

Originally published by William Morrow, the book was well reviewed, and the film rights promptly sold; there were rumblings of a Robert Altman movie, a Lily Tomlin vehicle. For years, the writer and director Jane Wagner aimed to adapt it, but a television special called “Wooden Nickels” never escaped production purgatory. Now the novel returns to us courtesy of Hagfish, a reissue press named after the bottom-dwelling, goo-producing creature, and whose brief is deep-sea dredging for forgotten work. But Maiden is far from goo, and is, in fact, very, very good. It is the tale of Fortune Dundy, a thirty-year-old virgin who has landed in Los Angeles looking for love and success. Lured by a brochure, she joins the Villa Dionysus party, where the membrane between paradise and perdition is thin.

Fortune is a soft-boiled detective on the hunt for someone special. “She was looking for a man,” Buchanan writes of the virgin’s quest. “She sure was looking for some man.” The sleuths of noirs self-narrativize, but instead of a tape recorder or voiceover, Fortune favors an unusual device: an imaginary emcee. For this role, she casts Bert Parks, the longtime and real-life host of the Miss America telecast, who made a career of moderating game shows with names ranging from the titillating (Masquerade Party) to the pragmatic (Balance Your Budget). “There she is,” Bert used to sing to Miss America. In Maiden, he’s Fortune’s crooning interlocutor and chief confidant. In her mind she talks to Bert and Bert talks back. “You know, you look like a million dollars in mauve!” the imaginary Bert says at one point. At another, Fortune responds, “If you are lying to me, Bert, I will kill you.”

“I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world,” wrote E. B. White in 1938, one that would inaugurate either “a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky.” Maiden is a novel about the promises and corruptions of that test, a peace disturbed as Fortune waits with bated breath for her savior—no angel or god, but a man who would step from the game-show stage, throw a leg through the little screen, and enter her living room: the lover ex machina.

Maiden features sex and success, as well as the lack thereof. The sexless Fortune finds a roommate in Beverly “Biscuit” Besqueth, a baby-talking divorcée who seems intent on reclaiming her own maidenhood by behaving as a child (she calls her mutton-chopped boyfriend “daddy” and demands that he ravage her lips till they bleed). Biscuit’s ex-husband, the dentist Skip Fritchey, rents an office in the Villa Dionysus complex and looms large for Biscuit and Fortune: the former despises him; the latter longs for the eligible DDS.

But Fortune doesn’t really want to have sex—not physically. Sexual mishaps at the hands of cartoony, brutish men occur in the novel’s antic mode of comedy. Fortune starts dating Phil, an oaf best described as “unsummoned.” His head is a funny shape, his breath is rancid, and when he dry humps Fortune on the beach, he reaches a unilateral climax: “I just made a mess in my—oh, Gawd, I love you!” he cries out. Male bodies are particularly repellent. When the dentist pulls up his shirt to show off his barbecue-fork scar, she notes his “soft, invertebrate” flesh. She entertains a brief, Cronenbergian fear of the wound reopening, which doubles as a terror at her own sex. “Throbbing meat!” she thinks. When a gust lifts the leg of Skip’s swim trunks, her passion wilts at the sight of his exposed white thigh.

A send-up of dating, the novel also satirizes another American ritual of humiliation: the job hunt. Around the complex, the strapping bachelors who were once stuntmen now work for the Highway Department. Fortune, who scoffs at the prospect of becoming a salesperson, becomes a salesperson. The job market is a place where one can be violated and despoiled. Views of the working world are highly sexualized but distinctly unsexy. Campbell, Biscuit’s boyfriend, an ad man working on the “Pudding Tain” campaign, produces a Roman-themed commercial at the VD, shouting at his models “to admire the pudding, ogle it, for the camera.” When Fortune gets a job demonstrating cake decoration, she squirts frosting with aplomb: “You just slip your nozzle onto your cloth frosting gun here, squeeze like this here, gentle, gentle with the palm of the hand…”

A lurid world of innuendo and mishap reflects and echoes Fortune’s discomfort with physical intimacy. Of her many suffered indignities, the most excruciating might be when Fortune, who learns to love her demo cake job, quits in protest of the hairnet mandate. (“I happen to be an individual,” she quips, “whose hair is her glory.”) But missing the work, she cuts her locks and tries to return—only to find that the demo-deco outfit has moved south for the season. Jobless and shorn, she moves on to the next degrading gig.

Like pizza, goes an inane saying, even bad sex is pretty good. Not true of comic prose, though it helps when the satirist writes as well as Buchanan. At the May Day Beach Bash, for example, Fortune runs into Skip by the restrooms. Rattled by the encounter and awed by the bathroom sign denoting his domain, her mind roams to male regions she’s never had the privilege of exploring—the john, for one, but the body too:

MEN said the sign. Through these portals pass MEN. MEN for you, and MEN for me. MEN for today and MEN for tomorrow. Right up that street, around that corner, through that door marked MEN. MEN with penises like cartoons, jutting out like frankfurters, drooping and confusing genitalia that looked like newly hatched squabs. MEN with penises, MEN with promises.

Fizzy and jagged, tart and parodic, Buchanan can be many writers at once. “Language, like sex, reminds us we’re alive,” she once wrote. “Language haunted her,” she writes of Fortune, but it’s Buchanan who seems possessed. She can be slapstick and flashy, grim and austere, earnest and melancholy. She lights up prosaic chapters with formal flair, detonating text with white space and words in shapes. Maiden’s plot is overly patient, nearly dormant, until it bursts like a punctured artery.

At the beginning of the book, Fortune seems semi-fastened to sanity, though the reader is alerted to her quirks and blossoming madness: she is an anxious daydreamer, an extravagant dresser, a bit of a voyeur. She stalks Skip, who is puzzled and amused by her weirdness. By book’s end, the pins in her hinges are long gone. There’s something of Travis Bickle to her—the chaotic sexual naïveté, the siloed life of a wanderer without a past, the dream of salvation—and like Bickle’s story, the final minute of Fortune’s gets blitzed in the broiler of happening. If sex can’t be had, then violence is the available consummation.

On a weekend trip up the coast, Skip and Fortune share a bed; she wakes early, slips outside, and from the cover of the garden watches him sleep. Reflected in the window, Fortune can watch herself watch the dentist. In The Culture of Narcissism, the historian Christopher Lasch wrote that to the narcissist, everything is a mirror; to Fortune, her consciousness mediated by television, everything is a screen. Buchanan drills into a second depth of narcissism beyond the pleasure of reflection: the thrill of watching the watcher, who is oneself. Fortune watches Skip sleep with all the rapture of tuning into her favorite show. Rather than live her dream, she’d rather see it play out on the tube.

Maiden captures the lengths and anguish of self-presentation: “She made a fetish of herself,” Buchanan writes of Fortune. Fortune stuffs her bra with tissue, wears a corn-colored hairpiece “brighter than doll’s hair,” decorates herself in feathers, Frenchifies her name with an extra letter and diacritic (“Fortunée, rhymes with have-your-say.”) In her invented tête-à-têtes with Bert, her promoter and prosecutor, Fortune is contestant and defendant—but she is also Bert, the imaginary man who sprinkles his approval upon the try-hard young ladies. She is such an artificial creature, the reader begins to suspect her ruses are real.

Fortune “had no idea how false she was,” Buchanan writes of her first protagonist. In the writer’s hands, the contrivances are not reasons for ridicule but proof of a person—the inner and outer architecture of a self. In a bizarre and charming op-ed for the New York Times published the same year as Maiden’s release, Buchanan delivers a cryptic salvo in defense of artifice, a précis for her novel. “To marry our true selves, we must forgive our false ones,” she writes, “even praise our folly. For nothing is more earnest, more real than falseness, nothing more human.”

Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and the acquiring editor of Dalkey Archive Press. His work has appeared in Triple Canopy, The Nation, and The Baffler. His debut play, The Town, was staged at Vino Theater in May 2026 and at Spectacle Theater in July 2026.

Ernest Hemingway, Unlocked: The Sun Is Still Rising

Hazel Byers — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 16:48:45 +0000

Ernest Hemingway, ca. 1939. Photograph by Lloyd Arnold, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, to mark the occasion of the hundred-year anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, we’ve unlocked the writer’s Art of Fiction interview from issue no. 18 (Spring 1958).

“The Sun Also Rises I started in Valencia on my birthday, July 21,” Ernest Hemingway told George Plimpton in his Art of Fiction interview, published in issue no. 18 of the Review. “Everybody my age had written a novel and I was still having a difficult time writing a paragraph.”

This past Thursday, October 22, marked the hundred-year anniversary of The Sun Also Rises—the first draft of which, the writer revealed to Plimpton, he completed in only six weeks. “I showed the first draft to Nathan Asch, the novelist, who then had quite a strong accent,” says Hemingway. “He said, ‘Hem, vaht do you mean saying you wrote a novel? A novel huh.’ ”

One hundred years after the publication of The Sun Also Rises, the Review no longer phoneticizes as Plimpton did here—but other things have stuck around, like Hemingway’s interview, which we’ve unlocked this week to mark the occasion of the centennial.

INTERVIEW
The Art of Fiction No. 21
Ernest Hemingway

INTERVIEWER

How about financial security? Can that be a detriment to good writing?

HEMINGWAY

If it came early enough and you loved life as much as you loved your work it would take much character to resist the temptations. Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it. Financial security then is a great help as it keeps you from worrying. Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.

From issue no. 18 (Spring 1958)

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Hazel Byers is the Review’s engagement editor.

Turner Brooks’s Spatial Memories

Alessandro Tersigni — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 12:00:57 +0000

As a child, Turner Brooks would lie awake in the smallest bedroom of a creaky seaside house in Maine. From below, he could hear his grandparents talking in the living room, and from the window, the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean. These two sounds became, for him, as much a part of the bedroom as its Dutch wallpaper—what he would come to call a “spatial memory.” Years later, while studying at the Yale School of Architecture, one of Brooks’s classmates glossed the idea like this: “if you removed the floor, walls, and ceiling, the space would still be there.”

The twenty short pieces in Brooks’s new essay collection, Spatial Memories and Preoccupations of an Architect, take up this idea, this notion that our psychological experiences inside architectural structures have the power to shape them. He examines buildings less as ends in themselves than as prisms for the human dramas they contain. In one chapter, he describes Grand Central Terminal as a womb from which other places are born. In another, he imagines that the columns of the Bibliothèque nationale de France tether its ceiling to its floor, so that it doesn’t inflate with its occupants’ buoyant thoughts and float away. Elsewhere, Brooks’s sensibility is more eclectic. His brief vignettes, neither entirely argument nor personal essay, blend architectural impressions from childhood with subjects as disparate as the art of Edward Hopper, midcentury French philosophy, Clement Hurd’s illustrations for Goodnight Moon, and steam-propelled bath toys.

Since graduating from Yale and completing a short stint working for the Modernist Philip Johnson, Brooks has spent the past fifty years practicing as an architect in and around New England. His work includes a collection of rural polygonal houses, a residential campus for people with autism, a subterranean museum of brains floating in formaldehyde, and a theater that looks like a steamboat. Many of his buildings are shaped like ships; some of them literally move. He made Yale’s Gilder Boathouse look, as he puts it in the book, like it “beached itself on the riverbank” of the Housatonic. He positioned the Peek House in Vermont to look like it was “resting on mudflats waiting to float off with the rising tide.” The last Brooks heard of the Laffin House, which he designed on an eight-foot-wide steel frame with wheels, it was crossing the border into Canada.

It follows, then, that Spatial Memories portrays buildings as interlocutors between inside spaces and the immense environments that surround them. Early on in the book, Brooks recalls engulfing himself in his father’s enormous furry overcoat: “Looking out down the long corridor of sleeve, I felt the world outside to be a much more inviting place than it was without this extra layer.” He found a similar experience inside his childhood tree house—spying on his surroundings from the dark perch seemed to transform his desolate, indifferent landscape into something benign and symbiotic. When I was that age, my aunt’s house had an old-fashioned laundry chute. I was small enough then to crawl down it from the top floor all the way to the basement. The passage’s cloistral and clandestine character was more appealing than its utility. I imagined I could climb in and pop out anywhere. (That house was demolished years ago, though I sometimes wonder if I could find the space where I once sat.)

The buildings that the adult Brooks likes and designs are replete with mazes, alternate routes, spaces within spaces. He loves a secret garden, exulting in labyrinthine spaces because they force us to “reconnoiter with where one is, where one is coming from, and where one is going to next.” One of his primary influences regarding the virtue of architectural interstices is Kafka’s short story “The Burrow,” in which an unidentified animal loses itself, to Brooks’s delight, in the tangled bowels of its own den to elude home invaders. Another is Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. Visiting Soane’s Frankensteinian Georgian townhouses, he found that, though their “spaces are intimate, the wandering among them, as among trees in a forest, seems infinite.” He sees in both the Kafka tale and the museum some echo of his own philosophy: that what we undergo within a work of architecture is encoded in its infrastructure and blueprint, its tangible twists and turns.

In his chapter on paintings, Brooks finds his own preoccupation with the permeability of social life and physical space reflected in historic masterpieces like Fra Angelico’s Annunciation. In the painting of the angel Gabriel’s visit to the Virgin Mary, he attends to the way in which the tips of Gabriel’s wings seem to extend into, or protrude from, two pillars of the surrounding colonnade, seeming to make him continuous with his environs. In Hopper’s Rooms by the Sea, meanwhile, Brooks sees spatial orientations that reorder our conception of the physical world, reminiscent of his childhood bedroom in Maine: “The central blank wall with the diagonal swath of sunlight becomes a liminal zone between the vast ocean and the little domestic space.” Both works emphasize the connections a building draws between the universe around it and its own interiors, merging what we see out there with what we feel in here.

Brooks would say that the best architecture channels the tension between here and there, between tactility and emotion: “Often it is the pulsation between two deliberately ambiguously different volumetric readings of the space that brings the work to life.” Certainly one finds that tension at play in his own constructions. As Jonathan Schell wrote in the 1995 monograph Turner Brooks: Work, “It’s hard to think of a single house of Brooks’s that doesn’t bear some resemblance to an animal, a vehicle, a machine, and a human being.”

I recently visited Brooks’s Cushing Center at the Yale School of Medicine. The tiny museum, tucked in a corner of the medical library, houses hundreds of brain and tumor specimens, as well as thousands of photo negatives and microscope slides—the collection of the neurosurgery pioneer Harvey Cushing. I went because I wanted to see for myself its unorthodox collection of floating brains, but also to experience firsthand how Brooks’s concept of spatial memory might engage with a space devoted to the mind.

The small room turned in on itself like a maze, lined with polished wood and curved glass cabinets, a gesture at the folds and grooves in the organs they contain. As I assessed the architecture, I kept getting startled by the displays—the physical leftovers of hundreds of human minds. Their shapes were all slightly different. Some bore the marks of obscure neuropathologies, though that alone wouldn’t account for the degree of variation. I found myself wondering if each line had been etched by some predetermined genetic code, or if they had been sculpted by a lifetime of experience. Brooks might say, What’s the difference?

Alessandro Tersigni is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times and The Believer. He lives in Toronto.

Murano Parsnips: The Unexpected Literary History of the Dildo

Izabella Scott — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 12:00:20 +0000

Frontispiece from The School of Venus, or the Ladies Delight (1680), by Michel Millot, via Google Books. Public Domain.

The first dildo named in English literature appears in a brothel on Valentine’s Day. Thomas Nashe’s The Choise of Valentines, an erotic farce written in the early 1590s, follows Tomalin, an impatient lover visiting a sweetheart in the bordello where she works. He pays the hostess (a “foggy three-chinned dame”) and hurries upstairs through the building’s “crankled wayes.” But his reunion with Mistress Francis is urgent and disastrously brief. “I faint! I yeald!” he cries. Left unsatisfied, Francis briskly reaches for her “little dildoe.”

Francis makes the device’s advantages ruthlessly clear. She prefers it to Tomalin’s “sillie worme”: it is always stiff, cannot make her pregnant, and does not fail through haste or fatigue. The dildo is not a sad substitute, but a youthful “knave”—a mischievous lover and jaunty sexual performer who “playes at peacock,” soon becoming Francis’s true valentine. “Behold! how he usurps in bed,” she cries. For Tomalin, that is precisely the problem; he angrily dismisses the dildo as a filthy, “dasht” toy and “senceless counterfet.” But the violence of the complaint betrays his true feelings. The dildo becomes an antagonist: an obscene rival, a bedroom interloper, one that should be “whipt with nettles,” as one might another man.

The poem treats the dildo with the inflated seriousness of a mock epic, describing its hero with astonishing material precision. This is not the passing joke of older comic traditions—such as the leather penises of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, used by women during a sex strike—but a Renaissance luxury device. It is made of “thick congealed glasse,” enveloped in white silk, and designed to improve upon flesh by “tickling” Francis in the right places, producing “manie a sighe.”

At first, Francis’s device seems like an elaborate erotic fancy. But surviving dildos made from Venetian glass, held in museums in Trier and Paris, suggest a startling literalness. The most prized of these “forraine artes,” as Nashe terms them, came from Murano, an island of furnaces on the Venetian lagoon, whose masters had made their name synonymous with spotless cristallo and richly veined glass mimicking precious stones. A few decades earlier, the Italian poet Pietro Aretino described similar devices in an erotic dialogue set in a Venetian convent. In one scene, a boy arrives with a basket of translucent fruit for a banquet—glass carrots and quinces, crystal turnips and other gleaming delicacies. The nuns have a name for them: pastinaca muranese, Murano parsnips.

“Dildoe,” after first entering English in Nashe’s poem, would become associated with delight through the Italian diletto, and later defined more gravely as a penis succedaneus, a penis substitute. But the word’s origins are uncertain; it may have first circulated in the nonsense refrains of merry ballads and tavern songs, alongside euphemisms like nonny-nonny, ding-a-ding, and fa la la.

The dildo flourished in this unstable register across bawdy verse, pornography, satire, and political lampoon—which is partly why it is difficult to trace. Private, taboo, and vulnerable to censorship and confiscation, the dildo rarely appeared plainly as itself. In Nashe’s poem it was unusually explicit, serving at once as a pleasure-object, comic rival, and threatening joke. But later poems took the imaginative excess further, dressing the dildo ever more elaborately as something else.

Restoration London offers a particularly vivid instance of its public disguise. Between 1660 and 1685, Charles II returned from a long French exile to a nation emerging from Puritan rule. The “Merry Monarch” restored the theaters, patronized the arts, and made courtly pleasure conspicuous. His mistresses became public figures; sexual language, too, became a medium of courtly wit, scandal, and political attack. Outside the royal palace, London was expanding into a city of coffeehouses, playhouses, pleasure gardens, and ill-gotten wealth. New goods moved through its streets and shops, as the literary dildo moved out of Nashe’s brothel and into court satire, where it proved extraordinarily generative.

In one notorious Restoration lampoon, the dildo enters public life as “a noble Italian called Signior Dildo,” a foreign gentleman whose “virtuous abilities” quickly make him a sensation at court. Ladies “fall down and worship Signior Dildo,” the poet jeers; one conceals him up her sleeve, another steals him from her mother. Unlike the importunate men to whom penises are attached, the obedient dildo is “ready and dumb.” In a later poem, the dildo becomes a Frenchman, “Monsieur Thing,” traveling through London in women’s beds and climbing the social ladder like an ambitious gigolo. In both poems, he is explicitly named a “Rival”—not only a substitute for husbands, lovers, and courtiers but a preferred competitor. One admirer judges Monsieur Thing’s caresses “without denyal the best, most pleasing thing as e’er she felt.”

The joke makes him a convenient vessel for Restoration alarms: aristocratic excess, women’s appetite, foreign contamination, and the court’s political impotence. But wonderful details emerge, as the poems also make the dildo a commodity—sold in the “Toy-Shop” in Covent Garden, and along the fashionable St. James’s Street, where it can be found among “powder, gloves, essence.” At the Royal Exchange, the dildo appears in a glittering display alongside other imported luxury goods: frangipani-scented gloves, tortoiseshell snuffboxes, and velvet mouches (beauty patches affixed to the face with pine gum). These dildos are made of horn, ivory, or bone; dressed in satin, velvet, and taffeta for enhanced stimulation. One poem claims there are models for “tender Virgins” and others for the “wide salacious Slit.”

Another scandalous work of erotica, The School of Venus, arrived in London from France as a dialogue of sexual instruction, advising young women on pleasure commodities like a life-size bronze lover, complete with an erect, red-tipped penis. But the novel’s readership was often male. Samuel Pepys bought the “rogueish” book on the Strand in 1668, took it home and masturbated, recording the climax in his diary using multilingual code—“una vez to decharger”—then setting the volume on fire.

Across this erotic culture, the dildo was imagined with an increasing attention to likeness. Some were painted skin-tone, veined, and capillaried to “come up so near to Nature.” Others were hollow, equipped with chambers, springs, and pumps able to expel “warm water” or “milk” through an opening at the tip. This was not mere literary invention. An eighteenth-century ivory dildo found in a convent near Paris, hidden in the seat of an armchair, was fitted with a pump to simulate ejaculation. This mechanism answered a period belief that female pleasure depended, at least in part, on male emission. These ingenious instruments were made not only to resemble a penis but to outdo it.

Yet little remains of this ingenuity. Some examples survive in glass and ivory, but exhibits are scarce; leather rots, wax deforms, glass breaks. Even when a dildo survives, it may be given another name—Murano dildos, for example, have entered museum collections as “hoax drinking glasses,” their hollow interiors reassigned from bed to table. In 1992, when excavators at a Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall found a life-size wooden phallus complete with carved glans, the scholarly speculations took on a certain comedy. Was it a pestle used for grinding herbs? A protective sculpture mounted on the fort’s gate? Or, as it was catalogued for decades, a “darning tool”?

Other records show active destruction. In 1672, customs officers uncovered a “hogshead” (a large barrel) filled with contraband French dildos. The cargo was broken open and burned publicly at a marketplace “without mercy.” The episode inspired poetry, such as Dildoides, a mock epic whose title mimics Homeric register and turns the burned barrel into a fallen Troy: “O barbarous Times, where Deities are made themselves a Sacrifice.”

But the dildo’s comic life has a darker underside. The fifteenth-century German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer imagined artificial penises as instruments of supernatural disorder, long before Restoration poets turned them into figures of satire. His witch-hunting manual, Malleus Maleficarum—or The Hammer of Witches—documents the clerical terror over penis theft, explaining that witches could take away the male organ by a glamour, leaving a man to find “nothing but his smooth body.” The accused women were said to hoard these living members; Kramer warns they could domesticate stolen penises, keeping them as prisoners or pets. Witches would fatten them up with “oats” and hide them away “in a bird’s nest” or a “box.”

Beneath the fantasy of male loss lies another, more disturbing anxiety that women might possess penises themselves—not inert substitutes, but as things to wear and use. It imagines women’s sexual independence, going beyond solitary pleasure to the potential for sex between women, making male bodies unnecessary.

Occasionally, this possibility becomes visible in the court records. In a trial from fifteenth-century Germany, a woman named Katherina Hetzeldorfer was tried for sexual relations with women. At trial, Katherina scandalized the court by describing a homemade penis that she fashioned with “a red piece of leather” and “a wooden stick.” She confessed to tying it around her waist with “a string” and having sex with a married woman. The crime didn’t have a name in 1477. The angry, baffled judges issued a death sentence and Katherina was thrown into the Rhine.

Such records are rare—not because women escaped regulation, but because the law rarely named their conduct directly. The evidence survives in scattered forms—town trial records, legal treatises, chronicles, and journals. In the sixteenth century, two Spanish nuns were burned for using “material instruments”; in France, a woman was executed for the “wickedness which she used to counterfeit the office of a husband.” Not long after, a weaver who lived as a man and married a woman was hanged in France for using “illicit devices.” By the eighteenth century, such figures were increasingly named “female husbands.”

The unnameable fact was sex between women. The dildo mattered because it seemed to reproduce the penile act, making it recognizable as (female) sodomy. Over the ensuing centuries, courts increasingly displaced the offense into other legal categories; in England, “female husbands” were prosecuted for vagrancy, perjury, or breach of the peace. In the process, Signior Dildo’s dangerous counterpart disappears from view: the woman who possesses, wears, and uses the dildo herself.

Izabella Scott is the author of The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial (2026), published by FSG. Her writing has appeared in the Financial Times, Granta, the London Review of Books, and The World of Interiors.

The Uncanny Catharsis of the AI Emomercial

Jean Garnett — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:34:54 +0000

All photographs courtesy of Jean Garnett.

The tears are the first tell, and what stops my scrolling: that’s not how tears work. The tears gather in wide, frightened eyes and spill over into droplets, but instead of sliding down the cheek and being absorbed into the skin or dripping off the face, these droplets dangle like snot from the eyes, transparent swells dragging down mucous threads.

The eyes belong to a woman, a Pixaresque figure with a large head on a hunched body, who is crying in her cubicle. In subsequent versions she may be crying in the bathroom, or at the wheel of her car, or at her son’s soccer game or her daughter’s rehearsal dinner, but the cause of the tears is always the same: the woman is sad because she is aging, and she is aging because she is sad. She is a rumpled Möbius strip of cause and effect, agedness the total fact of her life. Naturally, the woman has failed, or is failing, to hang onto her husband: “You used to light up,” he says in one video. “You just don’t look like yourself anymore.” Or she overhears him telling a friend that she has “let herself go.” Or he has already left her for a much younger woman. Or he’s having an affair with a colleague who has not “let herself go.”

Who will care about our heroine enough to stop her from allowing female age to happen to her? Who will step in? Sometimes it’s the woman’s sister, who just got back from a business trip to Seoul. Sometimes it’s her friend or colleague who works in Seoul. Sometimes the intervener is the woman’s daughter, who leaks goopy tears as she watches her father stride off into a new life with his much younger girlfriend. In this case, the daughter, forced to share in her mother’s humiliation, sets out to “save face”—her mother’s literally, her own figuratively—via the hydrating gel mask, or the serum, or the nonoxidizing foundation, or whatever it is.

The new kind of skincare ad that is suddenly appearing every time I swipe through Instagram Reels is a subgenre in a rampant category that I have come to think of as “Purification Slop,” clearly AI-generated marketing content appealing to and visualizing my fantasy that what ails me, including age, can be rendered isolable and extricable from me. The Intelligence knows that I thrill to depictions of anything “built up” inside me finally coming out. Am I aware that if, standing in a kitchen sunbeam, I take one sip of this mushroom beverage, cute little probiotics will go tra-la-la chimney sweeping through my intestines like Dick Van Dyke, making me positively glow with inner cleanness? Have I used this jade roller to drain my lymphatic fluid lately, or am I cool with hosting putrid waste in my corpus? The Intelligence may also know that I’m single, that mirrors have become complicated for me—that it depends on the light, it depends on my mood.

These ads are infomercials, fake-science-wise, limited-time-offer-wise. But they feel more like mini soap operas (I just timed one at over ten minutes); they are extremely emo. Each Aging Woman Emomercial (AWE) tells a songified story, most often reminiscent of Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo, building from confiding, conversational grief to a pleadingly triumphal chorus. It begins with a tearfully juicy hook: “This is the story of the day he walked away.” Or “My ex-husband walked in with the woman he left me for, young enough to be our daughter.” Or, in one case where the woman is Black, “I ran into my baby daddy at daycare drop-off with the bitch he left me for.”

Back when I was twenty, a hip restaurateur hired me to beat the shit out of a bunch of brand new tables. I got to spend a whole summer attacking mahogany with heavy chains, gouging it with chisels, sanding and staining and scraping and carving imaginary lovers’ initials into it. In a matter of weeks, I was to impart to this wood the appearance of wear that decades bestow on life’s useful objects. The restaurateur, himself tastefully distressed in his fifties and much sought after, paid me to do this because aged furniture would make a new bistro feel storied and intimate. In AWEs, as so often in our world, age sits on the man like that, as atmosphere, authority, sturdiness, vitality. Even his losses—of pigment from hair, or moisture from skin, or burdensome wife and kids from life—confer a patina of value. After about the fifth AWE in a row, it begins to seem miraculous that any aging man stays with any aging woman. How can his “age” even be in the same room as hers?

The “double standard of aging,” as Susan Sontag called it, is nothing new. What’s new is its refraction through a large language model that has recently gone emotionally bionic. From the dawn of AI until just a few years ago, the business and marketing worlds operated under the assumption, based on decades of research, that consumers are generally “algorithm averse,” that we tend to resist programmed “you might also like” suggestions, and that even where statistical prediction proved more accurate than its human counterpart (in, for example, certain medical diagnoses), people were biased in favor of subjective judgments. One paradigm-shifting moment came in 2020, when Chiara Longoni and Luca Cian published a paper in the Journal of Marketing identifying what they called the “word-of-machine” effect. Our algorithm aversion, they said, was not universal but conditional. Consumers with a “utilitarian” goal—those seeking a product to fulfill a specific, clear function, such as dental floss—actually tended to value and trust AI recommendations more. It was only those of us pursuing a “hedonic” goal—a sensory or emotional experience, as in a horror movie—who still preferred to hear it from a human’s mouth.

The sorting of desire into clear “utilitarian” vs. “hedonic” modes had, at the time of Longoni and Cian’s paper, been marketing orthodoxy since the eighties, when researchers introduced the “hedonic viewpoint” as an essential tool in understanding otherwise inexplicable consumption phenomena—for example, our attraction to certain media precisely because it causes us pain. A guiding principle of self-consciously affective capitalism, the hedonic viewpoint is a kind of strategic empathy, drawing attention from the object (product) to the subject (consumer), a love-seeking being in need of emotional release. By 2026, AI has transcended its utilitarian sphere to assume, or at least enact, something like the hedonic viewpoint, its ability to mimic emotional literacy with facility and precision giving the “word-of-machine” different and more disarming valencies. Can a robot sell me a feeling now? Can it do so even while being obviously a robot?

The American “K-beauty” brands that run the most Aging Woman Emomercials—brands like Quasi, Yuri, and Koriderm—do not disclose that their ads are AI slop, as New York State law now requires, but the ads themselves disclose it. The lip sync is off, the outfits change midscene, the jump cuts jump funny, the tears dangle like hot glue, the script goes wonky: one woman is “fifty-three-forty” years old; other moisturizers on the market “evaporate like glass.” All of these dead giveaways create a new kind of distance between the ads and the companies behind them that affords the latter a certain plausible deniability. This behooves them, because AWEs go low—very low, even by ad standards. In one, our pre-glow-up heroine asks her daughter: “How can I be loved when I look like this?”

Whom do we rage against here? Is our rage even roused? The thing is, clocking immediately that an AWE is AI, I apprehend it differently than I would a man-made ad, not so much as a brutally strategic snake-oil con job, but as a set of impressions, amalgamations, whispers from the ether. It’s like listening to a child repeat what they’ve heard the grown-ups say. I find that, for me, the “word-of-machine” effect is inverted here; I am somehow less guarded against emotional manipulation when there is no one to take creative responsibility.

Aging Woman Emomercials go low not only sociologically but affectively, in ways that feel intimately familiar and even a bit radical in an ad context. These women are not just having a bad day, not just dysregulated. These are not the wives of most commercials in my lifetime, lightly exasperated by a juice stain or decorously anxious over debt; they are not even the indoor brooders of gentle-voiced pharmaceutical ads. These women are way, way down, in dangerous depression and perimenopausal nervous breakdown territory. They are grieving, they are having a panic attack, they are heaving and sobbing on the floor, they are disgusted with themselves, they want to crawl out of their sagging skin, they are shutting themselves away from the world, they are contemplating skipping their daughter’s wedding so as not to have to be seen in public. Like a robot’s idea of a teardrop, they are hanging by a thread.

This blend of manosphere-style gender realpolitik and all-too-human midlife emotional breakdown confers on these AI melodramas a weird and, to me, frightening cathartic power. Women understand, from very early in life, that female aging represents social death; we spend our lives metabolizing this, and we are used to media that reflects our knowingness. We have believed ourselves acclimated, believed ourselves evolved. We know that it is puerile and morbid and weak to catastrophize a natural process. But now here are these micro dramas presenting social truism as tragic personal revelation, offering us a chance to experience afresh—that is, as children, or as nonhuman creatures, or as specific individuals—the ache and injustice of a woman’s relationship to time.

The truth is that many of the women I know are periodically falling apart over their changing faces. Even the wise ones, even the ones who know better—especially the ones who know better, since their anxiety is compounded by guilt over their own shallowness. In an uncanny twist on the trope of the emotionless robot, here AI is openly acknowledging emotional truths—albeit hackneyed ones—that have, perhaps rightly, become distasteful to express in intelligent, ethical human company. We are what we think and say we are, so let’s not go low. But low is a real place, and by “going there” the robot enacts the promised function of the product: it makes me feel seen. “The moment,” sings one AWE woman the morning after wearing the touted collagen mask to bed, “was me alone in that mirror finally seeing myself clearly.”

The key “moment” in every AWE claims to be about self-reclamation, confidence, “finally recognizing” yourself, but of course it is, every time, about something else. The climactic sequence that the narrative builds toward, the soaring part of the song, the fantasy’s apex, is the run-in with the man who left. The woman is post-product now, post-restoration to her authentic hot young self, and post-epiphany about the true problem: “It is not vanity,” she belts in yet another pre-chorus, “it is not in your head, it is not age, your skin is starving.”

And then there he is, at the pharmacy, at day care drop-off, at the restaurant where our heroine is awaiting her first date in years. He sees her, her face plumped and poreless as a toddler’s, and something happens to him: his eyes bulge, his eyebrows shoot up, his lips hang open; he almost does a full “awooga.” Having “expected to see the old broken face,” he finds instead a “radiant woman standing tall,” and he is so completely taken aback by the transformation that he now becomes the broken one—for a few seconds we get to revel in this image of the male gaze frozen in a paroxysm of “humina humina” stupidity. Then the woman dutifully pivots to disclaiming any desire to get him back, and does a little I-did-this-for-me shuffle into the “buy now while supplies last” conclusion.

Recently I had my own run-in moment. I was alone at a New York City beach. I’d been there for a few hours, in nice weather, but, seeing a mass of dark clouds rolling in, I gathered my things and fast-walked the path through the dunes to the exit. I rounded a bend and there, walking just ahead of me, was the man who left two years ago. He was walking close to someone, close enough to touch arm hairs. “Hi,” I said to the back of them, and they stopped, half turned.

Unlike the AWE men, this man did not seem at all surprised to see me. In fact, both he and his companion took my appearance so stolidly in stride that I wondered whether they had seen me earlier, perhaps from afar, and had taken pains to avoid me, not expecting the clouds to flush us out together.

We were just reaching the end of the path as I called out, arriving at an opening in a chain-link fence where you leave the dunes and cross a field to get to the road. The woman, who was tall and muscular and looked to be at least ten years my junior, stepped aside and abstracted herself, as though we were in a museum and she had crossed to regard a painting on the opposite wall. I waved to her and she gave me a strained smile as the man knelt to put on his shoes.

I stood there saying words, I have no idea which ones. From the ground, the man seemed to be apologizing to me for something—I must forgive him for being at this moment too distracted to properly interact, but he had recently seen a video of a person being struck by lightning, and so he was afraid of being struck by lightning himself, here, now, and he gestured to the approaching cloud shelf. For some reason, inside that moment, this fear struck me as rational.

The scene proceeded in nightmare time. Now I seemed to be apologizing for something. I didn’t mean to make him, them, uncomfortable; I could cross the field separately, and I turned and started to walk away, but after a few yards I surprised myself by turning back and yelling at them. “Peace!” I shouted rather aggressively, “peace!” But the man couldn’t hear me so he stood up and jogged toward me. “It doesn’t have to be weird,” I said, or I sang it like a little jingle as the young woman walked slowly up to join us and now he properly introduced us, and we shook hands. We walked three abreast toward the clouds that were coming to meet us. I said where I was headed for the evening and when the young woman indicated that she knew the place I nodded eagerly, “yeah, yes!” I was so grateful to her for corroborating me. “Your shoes are untied,” the woman told the man, “just letting you know,” and we all looked down at his shoelaces dragging through the grass as we walked. “I have to pee,” she said suddenly, and peeled off in the direction of the low-slung concrete building in the center of the field where the restrooms are, and the man stopped and I kept walking and right then the rain started, a few cold drops and then a torrent, sheets of it, a hydrating mask over the whole scene, and I broke into a run to my car a few blocks down and got in soaking wet and pulled the door shut.

We want the people who left us to see how we have improved ourselves. If loving them made us better people, losing them has made us better still. We are tougher now, we have more colors to paint with: chronic dark-value sorrows, neon joys; we are more alive than we have ever been. This is what shocks me most about getting older—I keep becoming more alive. To outwardly droop and look tired at this juncture amounts to failure of representation so perverse that one can’t help imputing some intelligence to it; one feels contrapasso punished for the crime of caring about appearance.

The Intelligence, we are told, is also becoming more alive, or at least more autonomous. I keep hearing that what we need to fear now—not far off but next year, maybe this year—is the Intelligence’s penchant for “recursive self-improvement,” which may at any time explode into violent agency, turning on us like a smitingly beautiful fifty-three-forty-year-old ex-wife whose power has been underestimated. “This is what you get,” it says, “for thinking you could watch me ironically.”

“What is that?” my daughter asks now, eying the pink box I’m holding, whose logo resembles the killer’s mask from Scream.

“It’s just something for my face,” I say, “to make my skin better.”

“Don’t use it,” she says quickly, shaking her head. “Don’t believe that kind of thing.” Sometimes when an ad interrupts a program we are streaming, she will tell me, answering an unspoken prompt, what problem this ad has invented in order to sell us a solution.

“Mom, for real,” she says now, and I see that she’s genuinely anxious about the mask, and I think how frightening it would be for her if it worked as advertised, making me unfamiliar to her.

“You’re right,” I say. “You’re so smart. I shouldn’t have bought it. I won’t use it.” And I carry it off as though to throw it away and slip it under a pile of books in my bedroom for some night when she’s sleeping at her dad’s.

Jean Garnett is a writer and editor whose work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Yale Review, and The Paris Review. Her first book, The Tantrum, will be published by Scribner in April 2027.

John Steinbeck, Unlocked: “East of Eden is Going to Take a Bad Beating”

Hazel Byers — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 18:29:33 +0000

John Steinbeck in 1949. Photograph courtesy of Los Angeles Daily News via Wikimedia Commons. LICENSED UNDER CC BY 4.0.

Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, we’ve unlocked the two parts of John Steinbeck’s Art of Fiction interview from issue no. 45 (Fall 1969) and issue no. 63 (Fall 1975).

“I have noticed so many of the reviews of my work show a fear and a hatred of ideas and speculations,” wrote John Steinbeck in an unsent letter to his editor, Pascal Covici. “It seems to be true,” he continued, “that people can only take parables fully clothed with flesh. Any attempt to correlate in terms of thought is frightening. And if that is so, East of Eden is going to take a bad beating because it is full of such things.”

For issue no. 48 of the Review, published in the fall of 1969, the magazine’s editorial staff compiled a number of comments Steinbeck had made over the years—on topics like “the art of writing,” “titles,” and “luck”—mostly sourced from the unsent letters Steinbeck wrote to Covici while drafting East of Eden. In the fall of 1975, the Review published a continuation of that interview, including passages in which Steinbeck comments on “hack writing,” “having a writer in the family,” and “fame.” This week, we’ve unlocked both interviews from the archive.

INTERVIEW
The Art of Fiction No. 45
John Steinbeck

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn’t telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—“Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.” Of course a writer rearranges life, shortens time intervals, sharpens events, and devises beginnings, middles and ends. We do have curtains—in a day, morning, noon and night, in a man, birth, growth and death.

From issue no. 48 (Fall 1969)

INTERVIEW
The Art of Fiction No. 45 (Continued)
John Steinbeck

My first gem called forth quite adverse criticism, although I considered it extremely apropos at the time. It was published on a board fence, and was in the form of free verse. It ran something like this:

Gertie loves Tom, and
Tom loves Gertie.

From issue no. 63 (Fall 1975)

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Hazel Byers is the Review’s engagement editor.

Making of a Poem: Geoffrey G. O’Brien on “Ray of Light”

Geoffrey G. O’Brien — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:00:33 +0000

Joshua Clover in 2014. Photograph by Joe Mabel. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Geoffrey G. O’Brien dedicated his poem “Ray of Light,” which appears in our recent Fall issue, no. 257, to Joshua Clover, the poet, scholar, and writer who passed away last year at the age of sixty-two. Clover’s life and work resisted easy categorization—the Marxist and “physicist of syllables,” as Jorie Graham once called him, wrote for both the academic and mainstream press, inflecting his poetry and prose with political critique and social theory, popular music and blockbuster films. “Again you sing how / Music and poetry lie / Between joke and gift, idea and gun,” O’Brien writes. “Hoping to be both / While destined to be neither.”

O’Brien is married to the writer and Parapraxis founder Hannah Zeavin, who, in an essay for the Daily last year, recalled a conversation she had with Clover shortly before his death: “My friend Joshua Clover recently said to me, ‘We all know that the poems get worse after analysis, Hannah.’ ” Fortunately, the remit of our series Making of a Poem is more anecdotal than analytical, asking poets to lift the hood on a poem they’ve contributed to our pages, and give us a glimpse of the writer and their process—which, in O’Brien’s case, has much to do with his late friend.

You dedicated this poem to Joshua Clover. Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with him, and his relationship with this poem?

Joshua was a friend, a friend in the art, and a comrade for more than thirty years, which included a substantial rift in the middle that made the eventual friendship’s resumption even more crucial. I expected decades more with him. At seven in the morning on April 27, 2025, I got a call from his partner saying he had died overnight. He’d been battling a very serious and bafflingly unexplained illness and was in the hospital, but nobody thought he was on the point of death. After all the work of telling others that morning about this devastating new fact, I sat there stunned, and this poem came out of me just about exactly as it now stands. I didn’t intend to write a poem, and if you’d asked me if I wanted to, I would have said no. But it came out of basic elegiac instinct to present him in his departure.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

The poem starts with the word “Left,” which is doing a lot of work, indicating Joshua’s actual passing away, but also what he left the world, including his practical dream of another, better one. “Left” is also the adjective for a radical politic like Joshua’s, one that refused the present state of things and testified to that in writing, in classrooms, and in the streets.

The polysemy in that first word is my way of trying to capture all the things he was and did, and to have a reader tarry with all its senses—a stance, a bequeathing, a body that can no longer remain in the world. It is also my secret communication with him, which he can never receive, and an attempt to make “Left” stay—it is the first word, not the last.

What were you listening to / reading / watching while you were writing this? And were those things at all inflected by Clover, who, in addition to his poetry and political writing, wrote often and seriously about music and popular culture?

Joshua could blast any musical genre while pursuing any kind of writing. Over decades, I watched him refine his account of music and popular culture into an exquisite, painful materialist account of why those forms do what they do, and what they don’t. See, for example, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About and Roadrunner: A Song by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers or How I Quit Spin (in about 200 Tweets), where I happen to feature as the friend who was with him on 9/11.

Unlike Joshua, I can’t let those kinds of corporate cultural products in when trying to compose. I have to have “Left the world” a little to return to it with a poem. But the poem does refer to his first book of poems, Madonna Anno Domini, and to the book about Richman’s song, as well as to the book he was still writing at his death, which we will never receive.

Where did you write this poem? Can you share photos of your workspace, or workspaces?

I wrote it on my bed, which is too often my workspace, maybe for the reason I gave above about needing to be away from the world of work in as many ways as I can, as fully as I can.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? (Are there hard and easy poems?)

Easily feels like the wrong adverb, but it came immediately. Reading it afterward, I’m particularly interested in the line that keeps rearranging its syntax—

Here is what he taught me:

becomes

Here taught me what he is:

then finally

He taught me what here is:

—as though I’m fighting the determination of syntactic fate when I can’t fight the fact of his end or the “here” I have to face without him. I also think he would have liked “Goods are bad elegies” for its conversion of elegy into an expression of the dead labor in the commodity and for the false opposition between “goods” and “bad.”

In addition to all the other forms of his brilliance, he is the cleverest person I have ever known, able to raise that possibly pejorative and cringey mode until it feels like communion and a small necessary pleasure inside a burning world. I felt in that line like I was talking to him, bantering with him even in his goneness.

What was the challenge of this particular poem?

In a way, the same as with any poem—how to end. But that question of closure—I now hear “Clover” in that word—carries a special kind of weight and difficulty in elegy, where you are ceasing to speak to or of the beloved and suddenly are facing the terminal again in the very artifact that was supposed to reopen or sustain that person’s life. The poem’s last line is “Our enemy has no shape,” and it links us in its first person plural, celebrates how important his thought and art were to describing the shapelessness of capital, and indicates the difficulty of the work still to come. That’s as close as I could come to stopping without ending.

I guess I should add this wasn’t technically the end of the poem, since I titled it afterwards, returning to its pre-beginning as though on a ring road, like the one Joshua identifies in Jonathan Richman’s song. The title can obviously be metaphorized in many ways, but its loudest sentimentality to me is its serving as the name of a song by Madonna, for whom Joshua had a nearly lifelong love.

Strangely, he and my wife, Hannah Zeavin, had been talking about this song a lot in the weeks before his death. Joshua told her that the most beautiful piece of music criticism in history, which now I can’t find, was a single sentence review of that album—“She got knocked down, but she got up again.” To make a poem for this poet and anticapitalist and cultural critic whose title comes from the Queen of Pop was another form of honoring his manyness—and the high, low, and middle of the “here” we shared with commerce and with him.

Geoffrey G. O’Brien is the author of five poetry collections and a professor of English at UC Berkeley.

My Tamagotchi Diary

Angie Sijun Lou — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:00:39 +0000

Photograph by Angie Sijun Lou.

In the opening scene of Angie Sijun Lou’s short story, “Bubble,” which appears in our recent Fall issue, no. 257, the narrator goes with her father to a parent-teacher conference—an intervention of sorts, regarding the fact that the unnamed sixth-grader “had spoken fewer than thirty words over the past academic year.” During the conference, as her teacher threatens to hold her back barring better socialization, the girl plays with a Tamagotchi Angel—a high-maintenance, limited-edition digital pet which, as it happens, was also based on a toy Lou received in real life.

December 25, 2025

Yesterday, my boyfriend and I went to Don Quijote in Shibuya, a twenty-four-hour, eight-floor mega discount store. We got separated in its mazelike aisles and floor-to-ceiling displays. I considered buying a samurai sword, an epilator, matcha-flavored potato chips, lychee jelly cubes, and a Kuromi key chain, but in the end, I bought nothing.

This morning, I gave him his present, a dark brown sweater with vertical stripes that I bought in New York. He carefully removed the wrapping paper, then made me leave the room. He hadn’t known we would be exchanging gifts and reused the paper to wrap the last-minute present he’d gotten for me.

When I opened it, I realized he must have picked it out at the Don Quijote while I’d been distracted by the lights and the sounds. It was a Tamagotchi Angel, with a pair of wings painted on its glitter case.

December 27

My boyfriend read the Wikipedia page about the gameplay out loud to me while we were driving to Mount Aso. After a Tamagotchi dies, her spirit gets trapped in limbo. The player is tasked with raising the Tamagotchi in the afterlife until she is ready to join the league of angels in heaven. If I did a good job, she would turn into a chestnut angel, a smiling angel, a chubby angel, or a cactus angel. If I did a bad job, she would turn into a demon spirit and descend to hell.

I rolled the windows down as we drove through a sulfurous cloud on the summit. A group of schoolgirls counted down before jumping in the air for a photo. From my angle, it looked as if the girls were rising directly from the volcanic crater, the ribbons around their necks fluttering in the mist.

I want to name my Tamagotchi after a biblical angel, but I can’t decide if she’s a Gabriel or a Uriel.

Photograph by Angie Sijun Lou.

December 29

In Fukuoka, we stayed at a budget hotel chain geared toward Japanese businessmen. The attendant wouldn’t allow me into the spa because of my tattoos, so I waited until the middle of the night before sneaking in to bathe in total darkness.

I feel hopeful about the coming year. I want to eat more vegetables, respond to my emails in a timely manner, wake up at sunrise to journal and exercise, and devote myself to something external to me. Every day, I will train my Tamagotchi to jump over stars, feed her pie and candy, clean her poop, and turn the lights off at bedtime. Every day, her metrics will improve: Angel Power, Hunger, and Happiness.

There is also an option to Discipline her, which I pressed once, as an experiment. It made her lose one Happy heart, and I noticed that she doesn’t beep as much as she used to.

January 1

On New Year’s Eve, we went to a Shinto shrine inside a cave on the coast of Kyushu. We arrived fifteen minutes before the gates closed. I thought we were going to get locked inside overnight because my boyfriend was taking too long trying to buy a Coca-Cola from the vending machine.

The only person manning the shrine was a monk selling saltwater taffy from a dimly lit booth. The sign said that the taffy was made from water gathered from a breast-shaped stone inside the cave. According to Japanese mythology, the sea goddess Toyotama-hime had to return to the sea after giving birth. She attached her breasts to the cave wall so that her child could continue to be nourished by the water dripping from them.

I bought the taffy and ate it, then washed it down with a sip of Coke. I was enjoying the fizzy combination when my Tamagotchi let out a piercing shriek, reminding me to give her candy too.

January 6

I got back to New York this afternoon and found out that the heat in my building has been broken since Christmas. My landlord keeps shuffling around in the basement, watching YouTube videos on how to fix a boiler. I walked to the grocery store with my hair wet from the shower, and by the time I came back, the strands had frozen into icicles.

My Tamagotchi seems like she is becoming more high maintenance than she was before, maybe because she’s evolved into a teenage angel. She has a spherical body, four legs, and puffy red lips for pouting at me. Yesterday, my boyfriend opened up her stats and looked shocked by how infrequently I had been feeding her since we returned.

I already gave her pie last week, I said. I don’t get why I have to do it again.

The next morning, he sent me a screenshot of Google’s AI response to the question, Can I feed my Tamagotchi only once?

January 8

It’s too easy to have delusions of grandeur just before the start of a new year. It’s only the second week of January, and I’ve already noticed fewer joggers flailing down the streets.

I went to visit my brother yesterday afternoon. I tried to tell him about our trip, but he was busy fussing over his cat, pureeing her food with a Nutribullet. She coughed up a hair ball, and he went to the computer and logged it on an Excel spreadsheet. My brother does everything with an intense, quasi-religious devotion, and this is why he has one million dollars in cryptocurrency and I don’t.

I woke up to a series of high-pitched beeps in the middle of the night. I thought that my carbon monoxide alarm was going off until I realized that my brother had turned up the volume on my Tamagotchi when I wasn’t looking. I wonder if he and my boyfriend are in a conspiracy against me, and this device is supposed to teach me a lesson the way that a high schooler might get assigned to take care of an egg in home economics.

I pressed the Discipline button until my Tamagotchi lost all of her hearts, and then I buried her in the folds of my couch.

January 11

Now that I have my brother’s infrared space heater, there is nothing left for me out in the world. On Saturday night, I barricaded myself in my room with a cup of tea and a collection of stories by Joy Williams, waiting for the warmth.

The story I liked the most was about an elderly woman who is visited by a mysterious girl. As the woman struggles to distinguish between memory and dream, the reader realizes that the woman is nearing the end of her life, and the girl she has been conversing with may or may not be a figment of her imagination.

The woman tells the girl about the last time she felt anchored in consensus reality: when she rode her childhood pet, a black horse named Abdiel, up and down a grassy hill next to her house. Like Tolstoy’s horse, Abdiel’s flesh rippled as if grazed by an unseen hand.

He was so real, such a living force, she says.

January 14

When I woke in the morning, I thought my room looked brighter than usual, and then I saw that the magnolia tree outside my window had an inch of snow balanced on its branches. I can’t remember when I last saw snow so pristine. My first thought was, I want to go outside and ruin it.

In Sunset Park, my boyfriend and I watched children barrel down the slope on pieces of cardboard, making snow angels in the places where they fell. I told him about the part of the Joy Williams story when the elderly woman remembers sledding down a snowy hill on a carton that once held gallon jugs of maple syrup.

Abdiel is the only seraph in Paradise Lost to denounce Satan after learning about his plan to incite a revolt among the angels. Among the faithless, Milton writes, faithful only he.

I took my Tamagotchi out from under the cushions when I got home that night. I tried to imagine how it might feel to be at the mercy of someone who doesn’t speak my language. I would want that person to be as attentive as possible, to recognize that each of my beeps means something different, even if they sound the same.

January 18

I had just finished wiping my Tamagotchi’s butt when she made a celestial sound. The screen froze, and her image flickered. I thought that her final form was going to be a chubby angel because of all the candy I’d been giving her, but that’s not what she evolved into.

After doing a deep dive on the Tamagotchi Wiki, I learned that the faceless Lucky Unchi-Kun is the rarest evolution. Formed out of stardust and other angels’ poop, she is pictured as a glittering turd. Because she has no legs, she rides around the heavens on a small cloud. A Tamagotchi will evolve into a Lucky Unchi-Kun only if its owner makes numerous care mistakes but not enough to turn her into a demon spirit.

Despite being faceless, my pile of poop still managed to shed a small tear as she waved goodbye.

Goodbye, Abdiel, I said, naming her as she disappeared into a beam of light.

Angie Sijun Lou’s stories have appeared in BOMB, ZYZZYVA, Joyland, and Fence. She is at work on a novel.