Each month, our desks at the Review pile up with dozens of soon-to-be published books. This November, in addition to translator Jennifer Croft’s memoir Notes on Postcards and From Julio, a volume of Julio Cortázar’s selected letters, we read a political thriller-cum-radio broadcast about a Ukrainian barricade pianist. Sometimes, looking through these galleys for invention or inspiration, I keep a few passages for myself. Here’s what struck me lately. 

—Emma Eaton, editorial intern

The German poet Ernst Herbeck, who was institutionalized for schizophrenia at twenty, began writing poems at the encouragement of his clinician. He often wrote in response to a prompt, which would then form his title. This poem, from Herbeck’s In His One Languages (World Poetry), translated from the German by David Brazil and Gary Sullivan, is called “The Cigarette.”

The Cigarette.

is a monopoly and must
be smoked. So Thatit
goes up in flames.

*

Mark Danner’s Crossing the Rubicon: The Betrayal of American Democracy, 2000–2026 (NYRB) offers a comprehensive collection of the writer’s essays from Bush v. Gore to the second Trump administration. From an essay on Obama: 

He seems slender and slight and young, astonishingly young, and you notice first of all, for it is impossible not to, the physical grace; he moves like an athlete much more than a politician, taking pleasure in his body: bursting up onto the stage, the lanky highly stylized movement, shoulders bent slightly concave, gathering everything into those constantly clapping hands, using the hands in their clapping to acknowledge the crowd, his head nodding all the while, as if he is drawing his energy only from them and showing that energy with his clapping and nodding, with the bursting energy of his body that is an embodiment of theirs, an embodied picture of what they’re giving him. He prances with evident pleasure around the little stage, moving his head in big theatrical nods, embracing each politician in turn, big full-bodied embraces, and again one thinks of an athlete on the sidelines or in the dugout: all of it is done with the unhindered pleasure of the body, all of it says confidence and pleasure, as if this, being bathed in the huge cheers, taking sustenance and energy from the wave of sounds and the shouts of his name, is the place where he breathes his true oxygen, where he really lives. He seems made to be precisely here—in the midst of these thousands of sundrenched cheering people.

*

Simon Garfield’s The Pen: A Human History (Crown) introduces us to the characters of pen history, from Joseph Priestley—the eighteenth-century scientist who, in addition to discovering oxygen, was the first person to shove a metal nib onto a quill—to Milton Reynolds, the millionaire inventor of the Reynolds Rocket, the worlds’ first ballpoint pen. In this scene, he’s visiting Axel Nier, “nib specialist”: 

Towards the end of my time in Nibs, my eye was drawn to a single woman in a dust-proof room writing figure eights. This room was known as The Aquarium and was the final stage; the woman was testing nibs for resistance, smoothness and flow, and also sound. “The ideal sound is hard to understand,” Nier explained to me quietly, “but she knows.”

*

The Polish futurist Aleksander Wat wrote his diary primarily in an invented and vowel-less code of his own invention. The loose-leaf papers on which his entries were typed were found after Wat’s death in 1967. NYRB’s new collection of the entries, Diary Without Vowels (NYRB), translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles, does include some vowels:

November 7, 1963

How strong I was today, how resilient, though the day was rather cold and windy, and my pains were mild, despite all the nerves, efforts, and worries. 

*

Some more weather in Siamak Vossoughi’s The Friend Seekers (Sarabande Books), the author’s third book of short stories:

It was a Saturday afternoon and the sky was gray in a way that seemed like Saturday afternoon was always going to be gray from here on out.

*

A passage from Yuri Andrukhovych’s Radio Night (NYRB), translated from the Ukrainian by Mark Andryczyk:

Lady Gaga was heading for Rotsky with such unwavering aim (while limping, no less) that he didn’t have the least bit of doubt: he would now be offered drugs. 

Emma Eaton is an editorial intern at The Paris Review.

Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack, originally published in 1982 and reissued this year by New York Review Books, opens with its young heroine, Katherine, reading the preface of a book written by her beloved professor, Jacob Goldman:

I cannot in good conscience give the statutory thanks to my wife for helpful comments on the manuscript, patient reading of drafts or corrections to proofs, because Jane did none of these things … Going by the lavish thanks to wives which I find in the prefaces to other men’s books, I deem myself uniquely injudicious in having married a woman who refuses to double as a high-grade editorial assistant. Since custom requires me to thank her for something, I thank her instead for the agreeable fact of her continuing presence which in twenty years I have never presumed to expect.

“There is no doubt,” says Katherine, that the preface—the marriage it speaks of and the world it hints at—“influenced the paths that I chose to tread.” There are many people who would probably say the same of Brother of the More Famous Jack. I read it for the first time when I was sixteen; now, decades later, I find it nearly impossible to disentangle some of my own tastes and preferences from those expressed in the novel. Do I think that having revolting handwriting is glamorous because of Brother of the More Famous Jack, or would I have gotten there on my own? Do I think wearing an all-white outfit to play amateur tennis is embarrassing because of the novel, or does that kind of thing become obvious to all adults eventually? I began rereading the novel in preparation for this interview and realized almost immediately that I didn’t need to: I had the whole thing more or less off by heart.

It is a novel about how to live, or how to be: how to be happy, how to be sad, how to fall in love, how to collapse in a heap when love doesn’t work out. Also: what to wear, what to cook, and what to buy an overconfident but ultimately appealing sixteen-year-old boy for his birthday (a bicycle bell).

The novel begins with Katherine, a nice, conventionally brought-up, middle-class girl, falling in with her professor’s family, so different from her own. There is such a great number of them, to begin with. There is Jacob, the Marxist professor with the ridiculously hairy chest, and Jane, his beautiful, posh wife, who both loves and resents being the mother of six wild children. There are the six wild children, particularly the two eldest boys, Roger and Jonathan, who play different but almost equally significant roles in Katherine’s sentimental education. She is dazzled by the whole family, who are loud and combative and madly sophisticated without being pompous about it or even seeming to set much store by it (“ ‘I’ll tell you something you’ll hate, shall I?’ I said to him. ‘You’re cultured … You always were,’ ” gives some idea of the attitude). Books and music and politics and sex and money are all discussed at maximum volume over dinner. It stops Katherine in her suburban tracks. Her life is never the same.

I spoke to Trapido about Brother of the More Famous Jack at her house, in Oxford. I was thrilled to discover that she speaks exactly like one of her characters: when making me lunch, she asked if I would like “some dear little tomatoes.” We spoke about structuring a novel, hearing someone say fuck for the first time, and being taken for Doris Lessing.

INTERVIEWER

Could you picture the shape of the book before you started writing it?

BARBARA TRAPIDO

No. You see, I saw no shape. The book is entirely character-based. It progresses via vivid dialogue. Story-wise, it’s simply one episode after another. I began to write it because a friend goaded me. I was chattering out some anecdote and she said, “Tell you what gets on my nerves about you. You dissipate your talent by just talking out stories.” I was a bit stung by this because I thought I’d already been working quite hard, schlepping on two buses, from Durham to the Sunderland Docklands, where I worked and taught. She suggested that I write a story for the Guardian short-story competition. In the end I said I’d give it a go.

Having dreamt up the Goldman family, I couldn’t get enough of them. I kept being drawn back in. I was wanting all the people in my life to go away and get on. I’d wait till the middle of the night and then creep into this little hide. I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. My husband, Stanley, believed I was finishing my thesis on the Pre-Raphaelite poets and instead I was getting high on inventing dialogue. So no, I didn’t see any shape for it. I just thought, Well, today they can go to the beach and then they can go to the cinema. I played around with the dialogue and made it shorter and tighter and even sometimes made shapes on the page with it. I had no idea what I was writing, though I quickly realized it wasn’t a short story.

After a while, I recalled that it was something I used to do in childhood—invent people, sometimes write little stories, and think, This is just playing and it’s the best fun. I couldn’t stop doing it. It was only once I’d written quite a bit of it that I thought, Is this a soap opera? What am I doing, and has it got any shape? What’s going to happen to these people? That led to a sort of shape. In hindsight, I realized—and the writing was all entirely intuitive, I didn’t plan any of it—that I’d made a few linking threads of imagery to compensate. The repeating references to Monteverdi, the “Hamlet hat,” the older Goldman boy’s initials, appearing and re-appearing in upper case, the embroidered butterfly, the falsetto singing—threads of imagery to weave the novel together. What drives it forward is the energy of its quick-fire dialogue and the wish to keep company with the characters. That is what makes it readable. I’m surprised if people think that it has much in the way of a shape.

INTERVIEWER

Where does the character of Katherine come from? Where does Jacob come from?

TRAPIDO

All the characters came out of the back of my head. None of them are based on real-life people. I find in general that any characters in my books who are real-life people, usually walk-on parts, come out two-dimensional, unlike the imaginary ones. With Katherine, I recalled from my own youth that heady feeling of leaving one’s school days behind, anticipating university, the freedom of being a grown-up.

Jacob and Jane are both wholly unlike anyone I knew. But from my own parents I had a blueprint for a cross-cultural marriage. My dad was more dominant, having gotten where he was via his brain. He grew up dirt-poor and went to Leiden University, in the Netherlands, on one of only eight scholarships that I believe existed at the time. My mum had come from a rather sheltered, calm, bourgeois Berlin household, with holiday homes and skiing in the mountains and a boat on the Wannsee. Her family led sweet, quiet, uneventful lives. They watched the coming of Germany’s fascist dictator with great unease and lost everything as a result of the Second World War. She was very timid and not remotely like Jane, except that she played the piano. Both of my parents were “displaced foreigners” in Cape Town, you might say.

In general, the characters in Jack are all imagined, archetypal. I suppose I invented them because I wanted some exciting pretend friends. I think I enjoyed their shoutiness. Katherine’s sewing and obsession with clothes was totally me at that age, forever at the sewing machine with those Vogue “Paris Original” patterns, and getting corrugations in my skull from sleeping in rollers every night to achieve the right undulations in my dead-straight hair.

INTERVIEWER

I’d like to ask you about the preface to Jacob’s book, which appears at the start of the novel.

TRAPIDO

I so enjoyed inventing that. In fact, I was one of those bloody wives who edited and annotated, not only for my husband, but for quite a few academic types who tend to write in paragraph-long sentences.

INTERVIEWER

Katherine says that this preface influenced the paths that she chooses to tread. How do you see that happening in the novel?

TRAPIDO

She learns a whole different way of negotiating family life. In a way, the book reads like a seventies pamphlet on progressive child-rearing. And it’s very liberated in that it involves interactions between people with less inhibition about being respectable and tidy. It’s also a bit of an examination of social class, the different pockets of middle-class life … And of course, I am an outsider, which makes one a bit more of an anthropologist in the way she looks at society.

INTERVIEWER

How do you think that comes through in the novel, your being anthropological?

TRAPIDO

There’s quite an awareness of social class. I think, in general, I’m completely politically obsessed, addicted to newsprint, like Jake.

We once had a lovely lodger who played the piano, a librarian at the Bodleian Library, a rather effete boy called James, who managed to wedge a small grand piano into our little basement studio flat. This was at the time when the Labour Party was trying to supplant Ken Livingstone and impose poor old Frank Dobson in his place as the mayoral candidate—big news day-to-day at the time. “Who’s Ken Livingstone?” James asked me one day, during one of my rants. I thought, I am so envious of you. You don’t have to waste your days fretting about what’s going on, whether it’s the German election or the Labour Party. You are free to think about Dutch landscape paintings and playing the piano.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think Katherine’s political?

TRAPIDO

I think she probably becomes so as a result of the Goldmans. Jane says that Jacob’s so obsessed with newsprint that if he’s away from his copy of the Guardian, he’ll look through old chest drawers to see if they’ve been lined with two-year-old issues of the Hampstead and Highgate Gazette.

I suppose it’s interesting how quite a lot of English graduates are totally unaware of social class and socioeconomic context. I remember an English fellow, a graduate student, saying, “But it’s got nothing to do with Wordsworth.” And I thought, But of course it has! The socioeconomic context in which these people grow up and survive—you need to know that in order to appreciate the way that the verse kind of explodes. The times through which these people were living impinges on the way they think and write.

INTERVIEWER

Did you show the novel to your husband or did you keep it to yourself?

TRAPIDO

No. I read bits to my teenage daughter, who relished it. I gave Stan the completed proof copy only after it was accepted. I read him the first chapter and he said, “Hey, this is good!” All throughout my secret scribblings, he’d say, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but why don’t you finish your thesis?” Which thankfully ended up turning into papier-mâché in a cardboard box.

The book is very talky. I do like that. I read everything aloud. I write it up by hand. Then I think, Oh God, that’s terrible. I do massive scribbled amendments, read it aloud again—and again. Then I tape-record it and I play it back to myself and I talk some more into the mirror. It’s a sort of staging. And, rather than plotting, what I do is a kind of choreography. I’ll think, Okay, there’s a dining table, this person’s sitting here, and that person’s sitting there. I’ll move myself around, changing chairs, doing dialogue. I’ll be this person, then that person.

INTERVIEWER

As in, you’ll move from one side of the table to the other?

TRAPIDO

Yeah. Or on a train, I’ll determine which way they’re facing. It’s quite hard working out chronology and such things as, Is the season right for them to be eating this or that? Can I get this person on a train from one place to another place before closing time? All that can be a bit of a headache.

But the book is quite polished, because I’d been working it more than for a decade, playing with it. Then one of my friends who was typesetting for Gollancz suggested I submit it. I thought, Oh yeah, Gollancz published all those left book-club books that Jake’s shelves were full of. Maybe they’d like mine. They wrote back within the week saying, “We love your novel. We’d like to publish it. Tell us who you are.” Doris Lessing had just conned a publisher by sending in a manuscript under another name. They thought maybe I was someone a bit experienced who was wanting to make an idiot of them. Well, it was a ten-years-being-polished first novel, so in a sense maybe I was quite “experienced.”

My editor changed nothing except for my spelling of righteous—and she added three commas. I remember this very nice posh girl editor phoning me one day, saying, “Barbara, shouldn’t it be, ‘Fuck off’ comma ‘you old cow?’ ” I remember the very first time somebody said fuck in front of me …

INTERVIEWER

How old were you?

TRAPIDO

I was about twenty-one. It was a Dutch poet who had come to stay.

INTERVIEWER

Does Katherine …

TRAPIDO

She doesn’t. And neither does Jane. They don’t use bad language. But the boys do.

INTERVIEWER

Yes.

TRAPIDO

One woman who reviewed my book said, “This is a book in which the women smile and knit and the men have all the good lines.”

INTERVIEWER

I don’t think that’s true.

TRAPIDO

I think, actually, it is, because the women are more confident, in a way. They don’t need to be shouting and showing off. Though Katherine as the storyteller has some good lines.

INTERVIEWER

Who did you think of as an influence when you were writing?

TRAPIDO

I wasn’t conscious of anybody, really. And I do get so tired of the way nearly every woman writer says, “Oh, Jane Austen was my influence.” I think the one thing I maybe got from Jane Austen is the energy, the way the dialogue dances and sparkles. The first thing one of my friends who read it said was, “You don’t waste any time on the scenery, do you?” Maybe I got that from Jane Austen, the way that she’ll just bounce into, “My dear Mr. Bennet …” I remembered, as a child, how I quite often just skipped bits that you thought of as “description.” With Jack, I evidently just dispensed with the description.

One novel that I suppose was buried in the back of my mind was Iris Murdoch’s first, Under the Net, which I came across when I was sixteen. It’s so theatrical. It ends with a film set that’s collapsing and these two guys who’ve lost their rental and are wandering about London, not knowing quite what to do. They sort of map London, walking around, over Vauxhall Bridge, visiting this person and that. When I read it, I just thought, I love these people. I want to join them. These are my people. I want to be with them crossing Vauxhall Bridge.

Another is a book that my school friend Sue flung at me when I was a bit older, probably eighteen—The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy.

INTERVIEWER

You wrote Brother of the More Famous Jack when you were forty. Did you always think you’d end up writing books?

TRAPIDO

I don’t think I ever had any clear ambitions, being a dreamy, dozy, unmotivated younger sister. Though, thinking back, all through my childhood and adolescence I wrote stories—for my mother, for friends’ children. I didn’t think of it as something I could “market.” With Brother of the More Famous Jack, I rewrote and edited madly at around age forty, but I’d started it a decade earlier. When we left Durham for Oxford, in 1970, I’d put it in a box and forgotten about it, then was pretty preoccupied for the next decade with childcare and part-time teaching. I hauled the box out of the attic when triggered by one of my son’s playgroup friends’ mothers around 1980 and finished it as a sort of serial for her. I rediscovered it as that same blissful sort of playing I mentioned earlier. I couldn’t stop. I never thought of it as something I’d publish.

Rosa Lyster is a writer who lives in London. She previously interviewed the author Laura B. McGrath for our website. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates panel. © Siriot de la Petra.

This summer, Festival America, a four-day event that is not in America, released its trailer—a supercut of iconic imagery spanning the history of the United States. Native American men riding horses. A portrait of George Washington. The site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. Men digging a mass grave. Suffragists parading. Troops storming Normandy. A mushroom cloud. A rocket launch. And text: 

Littérature.

Expositions. 

60 autrices et auteurs américains.

Next came the headshots of John Grisham and Joyce Carol Oates, Laura Kasischke and Ta-Nehisi Coates, superimposed over scenes from the March on Washington. Next, a ticker tape of sixty names, one of them my husband’s, scrolled across footage of men marching into war. The mostly black-and-white montage switched into color as Ronald Reagan signed a bill and a plane smashed into the Twin Towers. 

Festival America, which is held every two years, typically invites authors from across the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean whose works have recently been translated into French for a series of panels and workshops in Vincennes, a town just outside Paris. But the 2026 lineup was 100 percent from the U.S.A. in honor of the country’s semiquincentennial. Among those invited were Alison Bechdel, Tommy Orange, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Karen Russell, Patrick Radden Keefe, and many more of our nation’s best-known working writers, plus my husband, Jake, who was suffering from an acute case of impostor syndrome. 

To say Jake was surprised to be included in this lineup is an understatement. His debut novel, Slime Line, was published so quietly by a university press that when he signed with a larger imprint in New York for his next book, his editor still referred to him as a “debut author.” Nevertheless, a major French publisher acquired Slime Line—or as it’s known in French, Alaska Parano—and two years after its U.S. release, we flew from Pennsylvania to Paris to find that he’d amassed a not-insubstantial Francophone following. His book was front and center on the NEW AND NOTABLE table at the bookstore near our hotel. It was there, too, at a bookstore on the next block. And guess who was a STAFF PICK at Shakespeare and Company.

Jake was beside himself with a confused sort of glee. The fawning messages he’d received from French-language accounts on Instagram were beginning to make sense. One post praised his novel—which is based on his experience working in the commercial-fishing industry—for being a beautiful treatise on the “solidarity of magnificent losers.” 

Around this time his French publicist reached out. She wanted to know if he would speak to a journalist at a major French magazine for a profile as the “new voice of America.” Evidence was mounting that Jake’s work was touching a very specific French sensibility. In Vincennes, I made it my mission to find out what. 

*

That’s not exactly true. That’s just something journalists say to end their opener with a little narrative thrust. Getting to the bottom of French literary sensibilities was more of a secondary reason for me, trailing wine and cheese. On the festival’s first full day, authors and their plus-ones were invited to a “cocktail lunch” at the Château de Vincennes, the seat of French kings from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. There, we chewed on skewered radish slices, thin breads topped with charcuterie, and pert meringues in the shadow of the tallest donjon in Europe. 

Château de Vincennes, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Over drinks, I asked the festival’s head interpreter if there was any historical torture equipment around. She told me that the most terrible death at the château had less to do with torture than with disease. During the Hundred Years’ War, King Henry V of England had retreated there shortly after the Siege of Meaux. He’d just conquered Normandy and was near to becoming king of France. But the man barely had time to settle into his new digs before he got dysentery and died. That was in 1422. 

Observing the United States’s birthday in Europe is a reminder that we have a minuscule history—a cultural handicap that our literature must overcome. “Compared to Europe,” the festival’s founder, Francis Geffard, told me, “it’s very recent.” Nevertheless, two hundred fifty is a pleasingly round number, and he saw “a good occasion” to make this year’s festival about the U.S. It also allowed him to pursue what might seem like a lofty goal: to assemble enough American authors, spanning generations, geographies, and identities, to see once and for all “what American fiction has to say to readers outside of America.” 

This seems like an impossible task until you remember the one thing that unites American writers, old and young, established and emerging: they will nearly always accept a free trip to Paris. As Francis told me, “It is very unusual for a writer to turn down the invitation.” 

*

After cocktail lunch, Francis was moderating “The French Taste for American Literature,” a roundtable with three Francophone experts on American letters, at the Hôtel de Ville, Vincennes’s nineteenth-century town hall. To enter the building, I had first to walk along a red carpet, flanked by a photography exhibition featuring, among others, an image of terrified migrants paddling across the Rio Grande. Inside, more than two hundred people had climbed the grand staircase to the marriage hall, where frescoed aristocrats looked down from the walls. The previous festival had drawn sixty thousand people—the press team didn’t seem to think this year’s turnout would be any less.

This was a French-language panel, and Francis’s questions hinted at certain shared assumptions among French readers. “We agree that American writers aren’t quite the same as, say, French writers,” began one. “From France, we often tend to imagine the United States as a country without culture,” began another. 

One of the panelists was Sébastien Bonifay, a Corsican writer and bookseller who traveled to the U.S. more than twenty times to visit his favorite American authors at their homes, often for days at a time. His recent book, (Not) Born in the USA, recounts meetings with James Ellroy, Chris Offutt, Donald Ray Pollock, Stuart Dybek, James McBride, and more. These are known names, if not exactly those an American would pick. “The literature that nourishes me,” he said, “is an American literature that Americans don’t like.”

He called it “a literature of the margins,” and panelists riffed on what those rough edges were. One placed marginal American literature in a lineage of countercultures that rail against l’establishment (anglicism, pejorative)—rock and roll, psychedelia, punk. Another said that the United States has two literatures: one of “the coasts” and one of “the other,” rarely published but often excellent. This thrilling literature of the margins was often published by universities, which, the panelist said, “have wonderful presses.” It didn’t matter that this type of book didn’t always achieve mainstream acclaim; the panelists seemed to trust their own taste. 

The more the panelists riffed, the more they came to describe my husband. A panelist brought up the idea of “an American-style résumé”—belonging, it seemed, to someone who fits writing in between blue-collar gigs. The panelists called this type of writer “artisanal,” someone “whose real-life experience shows through in their work.” This writer “had lived.” And this writer had done so in places the French reader could hardly imagine, like Ohio.

It’s in this misunderstood land that Sébastien begins his book: in a Wendy’s parking lot, sweating with anxiety about his impending visit to Donald Ray Pollock’s house. After the panel, I found Sébastien sitting behind a stack of copies in the book-signing tent, and he told me he fell in love with American literature at fourteen, reading Stephen King. It wasn’t the horror that gripped him; it was the way King described small American towns. Before a single plot twist even dropped, Sébastien was entranced by Derry, King’s fictional Maine hamlet. This pleased me, as someone from an American town. 

“The writers who have a lot of success in France,” he said, often aren’t as successful at home, and sometimes “are not even published in America.” I asked him why French people liked American literature that doesn’t get much attention in the U.S. He had a theory about this. “French people, they’ve got a problem with America,” he said. “We are fascinated by America. But we truly, deeply think we should be, as France, as a country, where America is.” 

For one, France has so much more history, whereas the history of the United States is terribly short. That’s why many of the American books that become popular in France show America’s darker, shittier, seedier side. He pointed to Benjamin Whitmer, an American writer whose noirs have a much larger audience in France. Sébastien visited Whitmer in Colorado as part of his series of pilgrimages to the United States. 

“This guy has got thirteen guns,” Sébastien told me. French people think owning a gun means you’re a redneck, he said. But when Sébastien visited him in Colorado, Whitmer asked him about Maurice Blanchot. “Maurice Blanchot!” The fact that someone could own thirteen guns and be a fan of the French literary theorist Maurice Blanchot was significant enough to warrant repetition. “Benjamin Whitmer knows Maurice Blanchot,” he said. “He reads Maurice Blanchot, and he’s got thirteen guns.” He moved his fist emphatically, then clarified. “One of them is for the grizzlies. One of them is for the coyotes.” 

To Sébastien, Whitmer was one kind of writer, to be juxtaposed against another. “It’s just my opinion, but these writers are a lot better than the other ones,” he said. “Really, I don’t care about Jeffrey Eugenides! Really, I don’t care.”

*

© Siriot de la Petra.

Elsewhere in the bookselling tent, Jake, the proud author of a title published by West Virginia University Press, was already flying through book sales. He had just spoken to a class of teens who had mobbed him like a rock star.  When I told him about Sébastien, he said, “That guy rules. I think he wants us to come to Corsica.”

A long queue for Joyce Maynard snaked around the booths. I introduced myself to two women thumbing through books, asking them what they liked about American literature. “The stories, the journey, the wide-open spaces, and all that,” said the younger one, who quickly turned her own questions on me. They had come here to learn about America, and here I was, a real, live American. At their prodding, I told them about my husband’s work.

“Ah, that wouldn’t exist here, someone who writes about being a fisherman,” the woman said. “In France, it’s more l’establishment.”

I asked what she meant by l’establishment. 

“Professionals,” her companion clarified. “I thought your husband would be more like a banker, to be writing about capitalism.” 

To understand French literature today, the younger went on, I ought to consider the woman in the black hat with the red lipstick. “She has her own myth,” the older woman said. 

I’ll confess that at this point, I assumed my French was failing me. The older woman had just made a point about le wokisme that I couldn’t quite follow and, out of fear, didn’t ask her to clarify. But I looked up the lady with the black hat and red lipstick later, and it turns out they were speaking about Amélie Nothomb, a Belgian-Francophone novelist with a penchant for wearing large hats and appearing on TV. She was named a baroness by King Philippe. 

There seemed to be all sorts of fashionable characters floating around the French literary world. The novelist Rob Franklin told me he was at the festival’s opening ceremony when an older woman named Sophie introduced herself to him. She was around ninety and striking, with a pixie cut and an eccentric style. Rob had been told that his French editor was named Sophie. This woman asked if she could take his picture. “I was like, ‘Okay, sure. My publisher wants to take my photo,’ ” he told me. Sophie pulled out a monocle to look at her schedule. Then she did a portrait session with him. 

The next day, Rob went to meet Sophie at his publisher’s tent. It was a different woman. He spent the festival wondering who the hell had taken his photo until the last day, when Sophie No. 1 found him again and handed him her business card. It turned out she was France’s most famous photographer of writers, and she’d been doing it for sixty years. “I found out she’s like … quite famous,” he told me. On her card was a black-and-white portrait she’d taken of Michel Foucault. 

*

There was one person I wanted to ask about the word l’establishment: Fabienne Gondrand, a literary translator who served as Jake’s interpreter throughout the festival. Fabienne had sat beside him on panels, repeating his comments in French. I told Fabienne that a few people had used this word with me to pinpoint the differences between French and American contemporary literature. I wondered if she, too, thought American writers were more anti-l’establishment. 

“That’s a little reductive,” she said, seeming surprised. She thought perhaps the people I’d spoken to had used that word because the festival had done a good job curating diverse voices, such as nonwhite and Indigenous writers whose works explicitly challenge American cultural norms. It occurred to me that I had perhaps oversimplified what French readers had intended l’establishment to mean. I’d developed a self-serving theory that the writing world consisted of two camps (coastal literati and scrappy Rust Belt writers with jobs) and that in France, everyone recognized the latter as superior. This is silly, when l’establishment is so obviously not writers in major metro areas with big book deals. L’establishment américain, really, had been invited and declined. I’m talking about Charles Kushner. 

At every edition of Festival America since 2002, Francis told me, the U.S. ambassador to France has given a speech on opening night. Currently, that position is held by Kushner, the real-estate developer and pardoned felon. The U.S. Embassy typically forks over a little cultural funding for the festival—less than the Canadian embassy, but not nothing—and this year they slashed their contribution by 80 percent. Francis took this as a sign of distrust and refused the embassy’s money altogether. 

Francis told me that French people “are feeling a little estranged” from the U.S. at the moment. Shortly after we spoke, Festival America distributed a press release with sharper wording. “Ironically,” it said, this funding cut had occurred during “the very year of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,” when the festival was hosting the largest delegation of American writers ever “in our country, and likely in Europe or anywhere else.”

The festival is right to point out the rarity of this delegation, as these writers would rarely be grouped together. On home turf, they’d more likely be gathered by subject matter, identity, or genre, because in the U.S., “American” is not a uniting descriptor—we’re too close to see clearly. But in Vincennes, we can step back and see the whole picture. What struck me about French readers was their confidence in their own taste, in how it could supersede that of most American readers. But French people have been gazing upon America their whole lives. When I returned from the festival, I found myself in a rare moment of America gazing back. Kushner’s embassy was advising Americans to “exercise caution.” Since the festival, student protests there have erupted into widespread riots, and I think we could safely say those were aimed at l’establishment. 

Photograph by Lee Friedlander. From a portfolio in issue no. 169.

Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, we’ve unlocked Robert Caro’s Art of Biography interview, along with Matthew Baker’s short story “Why Visit America,” from the archive.

At a town hall meeting, the residents of Plainsfield, Texas, the fictional town featured in Matthew Baker’s story “Why Visit America,” vote unanimously to secede from the United States. They call their new nation “America.”

“We were fed up with our country,” writes Baker in issue no. 230 of the Review. “The executives were busy making donations that funded the campaigns of the politicians, the politicians were busy passing laws that protected the interests of the executives, and pretty much nothing else seemed to be getting done. We were antigovernment, we were anticorporate, but mostly we were normal people who couldn’t afford to buy an election and had come to understand that our votes didn’t mean shit.”

Several of us at the Review returned to Baker’s story after last week’s midterm elections yielded once-unthinkable results, including in Texas, where Democrats won their first Senate seat since 1988, their first governorship since 1995, and control over the state House for the first time in more than two decades.

“We live in a democracy, so ultimately, even despite a Robert Moses, a lot of political power comes from our votes,” says Robert Caro in his Art of Biography interview, published in issue no. 216 of the Review. “The more we understand about the realities of the political process, the better informed our votes will be. And then, presumably, in some very diffuse, very inchoate way, the better our country will be.”

This week, to celebrate, we’ve unlocked Caro’s interview and Baker’s “Why Visit America” from the archive.

INTERVIEW
The Art of Biography No. 5
Robert Caro

CARO

I thought, There’s one guy who’s with Lyndon Johnson most of the day, and it’s not his campaign manager, it’s his chauffeur! Because in the Texas Hill Country, a lot of anything is driving—that’s ninety percent of the time. His chauffeur was a guy named Carroll Keach. He lived in some place outside Corpus Christi, and it was hard to get to. It was, like, a 180-mile drive or something. But I kept going back to him.

He wasn’t a loquacious Texan, he was a laconic Texan. I would ask, What was Johnson doing between campaign stops? And he would say something like, Oh, he was just sitting there in the backseat. I just had to keep asking him questions. I mean, you’re driving, Carroll, and Lyndon Johnson is in the backseat? What was he doing in the backseat? Finally, he told me that Johnson often would be talking to himself. So I’d call and say, Carroll, when you said he was talking to himself, what was he saying? Finally, Carroll told me, It was like he was having discussions with himself about whether he had had a successful day, and if he had made a good impression on voters or not. So I’d say, What do you mean by that? How do you know that’s what he was talking about?

From issue no. 216 (Spring 2016)

PROSE
Why Visit America
Matthew Baker

There wasn’t anything special about us. We were just an average town. Porch swings, wading pools, split rail fences, pump jacks bobbing for oil on the horizon. Meetings at town hall were well attended, sure, but we weren’t some hotbed of insurgents. We didn’t subscribe to any one brand of politics. We couldn’t even be plotted onto your basic left/right binary. Our town had everything: pro-lifers who supported gay marriage, pro-choicers who opposed gay marriage, climate change deniers who owned solar panels, universal health care campaigners who preferred private insurance, creationists with degrees in biology and geology, loyal conservatives, staunch liberals, moderates, radicals, and ornery retirees whose only real issue was guns. And yet that winter we found ourselves united by a common sentiment.

From issue no. 230 (Fall 2019)

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Hazel Byers is the Review’s engagement editor.

MJ Lenderman. Photograph by Sol Procter-Tarabanov. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I came to the work of Harry Crews through word of mouth about the printed page. When I was still a teenager, I used to stay up late on the front porch of my friend’s house, behind a grocery store near downtown Asheville, North Carolina. We’d attempt to write songs, but mostly we’d get drunk and talk about writing and people who had figured out how to do it. One time, he was telling me about this fucked-up guy, Harry Crews, and his book A Feast of Snakes, a mid-seventies masterpiece set in Mystic, Georgia.

But I was really hooked when he told me about The Knockout Artist, a book that came a decade later and captured a kid named Eugene Talmadge Biggs who knocked himself out for paying spectators. The next morning, I ordered The Knockout Artist and A Feast of Snakes and a collection featuring his memoir, A Childhood, and the novels The Gypsy’s Curse and Car. I found myself immediately captured by Crews’s books. The dialogue felt so real, the Southernness so pronounced. It was like a warped version of where I was from—not things I had really seen, but scenes I could maybe imagine happening to friends I’d made, like my landlord Gary.

At the time, I was living in a mountain holler called Haw Creek. It was less a band house than a band compound, a couple of houses clustered together where some of my friends and bandmates all lived and worked and barbecued. Gary King owned and lived on the property with us. He’d rattle off dirty limericks in his kitchen and chain-smoke Pall Mall Blues while hooked up to oxygen. He’d park outside our house and lay on the horn until we came out just to talk shit. But he loved us as if we were his grandchildren, and he never raised the rent.

The pandemic came soon, so I stayed home and spent my time playing music and reading and writing. It was—up to that point and maybe even up to right now—the most devoted and formative songwriting phase of my life. Crews helped a lot.

My girlfriend at the time and Wednesday bandmate, Karly Hartzman, had gifted me several of his books that I didn’t have yet, some even signed. And I’d found an index of his interviews that became sort of a self-help guide for writing songs. Crews was born to tenant farmers in Bacon County, Georgia, a name he would have invented for his novels had it not already been real. He had almost no advantages as a young artist, a self-taught kid who had to be tough enough to keep going when no one cared. In those interviews, he said something about how any artistic pursuit involves your ability to withstand failure. That meant so much to me. Crews could seem like such a hard-ass, but that advice was vulnerable and real, a lesson from a guy who had realized that you have to put the idea on the page before you could even start to know if it’s any good.

This was around the time that I was writing what became Boat Songs, the album that led people outside of Asheville to pay a little attention to what I was doing. I knew these songs could look stupid on paper, but they felt right to me. Crews talked, too, about writing as an act of courage. In my own way, singing those songs felt a little like that. I needed that advice to make that music back then, and I still do.

Crews’s very specific, serious, and silly language was an inspiration, too. Someone is always “hustling his balls” in one of his books, and I think you could write an essay unpacking the implications of those three words. It became a goal to find phrases like that. I borrowed or stole from Crews, too. People love to quote a line from my song “Joker Lips” from Manning Fireworks, a batch of stuff that came near the end of my time at Haw Creek: “Every Catholic knows he could have been Pope.” Except, of course, I didn’t write it; Crews did. If you have a first edition of Gospel Singer, from William Morrow & Company in 1968, it’s on page 209, toward the middle. I like the way that passage ends, too: “Every man knows that his gift will set him free if he is just lucky enough. Or unlucky enough, depending upon your point of view.”

That bit reminds me of Body, a book that is, at least on the surface, about a bodybuilding standoff between Shereel Dupont and Marvella Washington. Marvella is an imposing Black woman from Detroit; Shereel is a small and sculpted white woman from Waycross, Georgia, so country that her name used to be Dorothy Turnipseed. But Body is barely about them at all. It is, instead, about a stubborn rivalry between Russell “Muscle” Morgan and Wallace “The Wall” Wilson, two over-the-hill coaches who, though still enormous, have only one way left to win a bodybuilding championship: via the women they now command. Muscle so controls Dupont that he forces her to change her name, regulates every drop of water she drinks, keeps her from her family, and determines when she needs to have sex with him. She just wanted to be his secretary; he must make her Ms. Cosmos.

Body is a ridiculous book, every action and name and figure so exaggerated it can feel like a caricature. But that is what makes Crews so compelling: Even inside this absurd universe, he manages to humanize everyone, to find the softness among these hard bodies. How loving can a man named Nail Head be? Very, it turns out. How can a freak-of-nature bodybuilder named Billy Bat find the family and romance he didn’t know he’d been looking for with Shereel’s sister, Earline, so addicted to food that she carries around spare pieces of fried chicken? Easily, it turns out. The bodybuilding competition that Crews depicts at the Blue Flamingo is a hilarious shitshow; because it’s Crews, it is also full of heart.

I should offer a warning: Like pretty much every Crews book, Body overflows with vile things. The relationship between the white Muscle and the Wall, who is Black, means there’s a lot of racist epithets, fired back and forth like volleys between North and South. And there’s a lot of demeaning sex where the woman has little to no say in the ordeal. It opens with sex so barbaric that Muscle breaks the hotel furniture; the hotel manager—a dork so ashamed of himself he won’t sleep with a woman because it would mean her seeing him without his terrible toupee—hires and fires a series of secretaries he calls only “Miss Beverly,” who give him blowjobs beneath his desk on demand. Crews is a little like a literary highlighter, occasionally using garish colors to show us that this is the way people really can be.

I am not out to spoil Body for you, but I should say something about the end. I’ve talked about how Crews likes to blow things up, to exaggerate and emphasize the messes we make. But the last three pages are a masterstroke of subtlety, a big reveal so nuanced and particular I had to read it a few times to make sure I understood. Every time I have revisited Body since, though, I’ve noticed new clues, breadcrumbs Crews was tossing out to lead us to the inevitability of the end. Following him there didn’t just make me a better reader and writer. Body helped me appreciate how most people—however strange their actions may seem to me—are mostly trying to do their best.

MJ Lenderman was born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina and is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. His albums include the critically acclaimed Boat Songs (2022) and his breakthrough release, Manning Fireworks (2024), which was named one of the year’s best albums by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Paste, and The New Yorker.

From the foreword to Harry Crews’s Body, to be published by Penguin Classics on November 10.

All photographs courtesy of Sara Van Horn.

It was overcast and drizzling just after sunrise, a relative rarity for Austin, and I decided to vote at a nearby theological seminary, hoping a religious spirit might carry into the day. James Talarico, the thirty-seven-year-old state legislator running for the U.S. Senate, is also a Presbyterian seminarian, and was now contesting religious terrain long vacated by Texas Democrats. He has called the relationship binding the governors to the governed a “covenant,” albeit a broken one. He intends, like one barefoot rabbi in the temple courts, to “start flipping tables.” 

Pick the right polling place in Texas and you will be hand-shaked and possibly hip-checked. But the seminary, teeming with UT students, was completely silent—nary a campaign flyer in sight. Still, everyone I asked on the street was hopeful, hopeful, more hopeful. Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa was still considered a gubernatorial long shot—with Kalshi traders predicting her victory at just 37% even on Election Day. But even then, it seemed Talarico was going to win, giving the Democrats their first statewide victory in thirty-two years. 

A trio of nonpartisan observers wearing “Election Protection” baseball caps were beaming at me. Anyone with an “I voted” sticker could pick up a free slice from Austin’s beloved Home Slice Pizza (“In Crust We Trust!”). A reporter for an Italian newspaper called Il manifesto assured me that Talarico would make tomorrow’s front page. “So this a big election for you in Italy?” I asked her. “Oh my God!” she cried, admonishing me. “That is an understatement!” 

***

Outside the Texas Union, a bustling polling place just off Austin’s main commercial strip, sacred covenants were held more loosely. A cadre of City Council hopefuls, armed with campaign literature, jostled for position between two fast-moving tributaries: voters searching for the polls and a stream of indifferent college students, who ducked their heads, refused the flyers, and speedwalked to class. The candidates were fearless in their extroversion, forcing the unvoted to slalom quickly between them as if navigating a particularly treacherous obstacle course. Had I voted? Once asked a certain number of times, I started to doubt myself. 

Like all sphinxes, city council aspirants will step aside upon hearing the correct answer. Approached by a candidate whose tousled hair I suddenly recognized, I tried my hand. “I just voted for you,” I said, which turned out to be an even better answer. I received a fist bump. The candidate, Rich Heyman, was fired by the University of Texas in 2024 after getting arrested at a pro-Palestine protest. Today, he told me, he was feeling “really good,” at least before one of his opponents nearly slammed into him. She’d rushed over to tell me about her platform, accompanied by visual aids—a collection of personalized animal stickers, each with their own Austin-specific meaning: an armadillo, a salamander, and a bat in bright pastels, surrounding a slogan that read “Make Austin Magical.” I asked them how it felt to be rivals, eliciting an unconvincing side-hug. They are friends, they assure me. Loving your enemy, proclaims Talarico after all, is “good strategic advice.”

The Senate-hopeful’s own enemy was decidedly less easy to love. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had withstood many scandals: felony securities fraud, cutting sweetheart deals for confessed pedophiles, two extramarital affairs, pocketing a very expensive pen. But “Teflon Ken” seemed impervious; though indicted and impeached (then acquitted), he had remained in public office for over a decade, winning election after election, pushing his party farther to the right, and eliciting a string of bizarre endorsements. One PAC-funded ad intended to tout Paxton’s record on combating human trafficking went viral for effectively communicating the opposite: “When missing posters go up, Ken Paxton takes them down.” As even our president put it, Paxton “may not dress right, he may not talk exactly perfectly, and he may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen.” None of this has stopped Elon Musk from shelling out at least $212 million in donations to his campaign, helping make this contest the most expensive non-presidential election in the nation’s history.

***

In the afternoon, I headed to a polling place in East Austin flagged as a potential hot spot for ICE activity. I took a Waymo rideshare there and back, closely supervising the steering wheel’s countless micro-adjustments and reflecting on Greg Abbott’s legacy. Over the past eleven years as governor, Abbott has been responsible for one of the “hardest right turns in recent state history,” according to the New York Times. His most infamous triumph is Operation Lone Star, a military initiative which skyrocketed the number of migrant apprehensions along the border, and resulted in a vehicle pursuit death rate eight times higher than the national average.

We pulled to a superbly smooth stop at a traffic light. In September, ICE shot a delivery driver named Wilber Rafael Garces Perez in the back. He was brought to Dell Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas, where he was discharged into ICE custody with the bullet still lodged against his spine. 

But at the George Washington Carver Museum, I learned there had been no sign of ICE all day—in fact, no sign of ICE at polling places in Texas at all (ICE had been given orders, it turned out, to stand down on Election Day). The sun was setting, slicing across the extravagant mural on the museum’s south-facing wall. Two Election Protection volunteers were relaxing on lawn chairs. They’d flown down together from New York: one was a member of the Park Slope Food Coop, the other from Manhattan.

I spoke with more city council hopefuls, who seemed as a cohort to have relaxed over the course of the day. One candidate, Misael Ramos, had been arrested at a recent protest over the shooting of Garces Perez; soon after, he’d secured a national nomination from the Democratic Socialists of America. Misael invited me to his watch party, promising free food, free booze, and a Trump piñata.

***

Misael’s party was not as large as Hinojosa’s or Talarico’s—the latter so oversubscribed that when I emailed for a press credential, his comms team wrote “please do not show up”—but the energy was certainly better. People packed themselves under a backyard tent hung with string lights and screen-printed T-shirts, chattering in English and Spanish, eyes trained on the giant projected television. On a table inside, I found campaign flyers, aforementioned free booze, and containers of taco fillings, scraped clean. Organizers were gathering signatures to end the development of a massive Amazon facility nearby, and the Trump piñata rested on the lawn—still, for now, intact. 

As the results rolled in, the DJ switched between reggaeton and “Party in the U.S.A.” But all music was drowned out by shouting when the Senate race was called for Talarico. “Is Texas blue now?” strangers voiced aloud to each other, incredulous, while others made jubilant phone calls or simply stared at the screen in tears. 

When Hinojosa’s victory followed shortly thereafter, there were louder screams, heavier jumping. The two life-long Austinites next to me were stunned. People leaned against each other and sang. “The stars at night! Are big and bright! Deep in the heart! Of Texas…”

Neither Talarico nor Hinojosa support abolishing ICE, we reminded each other, but the defeat of Paxton and Abbott felt like the first of many flipped tables. Just after midnight, as promised, an article appeared in Rome’s Il manifesto, calling Talarico a “fenomeno.”

John Ashbery, Eleven Collages. From issue no. 188 (Spring 2009).

Today is Election Day in the United States, the second midterm referendum on the second Trump administration and, given that polls on the West Coast won’t close until eleven this evening, it’s certain to be a long night of scanning the news. If you, like us, have spent the past week, month, year, reading polls, articles, and tea leaves, gaming out the chances that one party may win this or that Senate or House seat, you may, like us, now find yourself in need of some way to kill the next twelve or so hours. Here’s some loosely midterms-adjacent reading from the archive to help you pass the time.

PROSE
A Town Like Kansas
Diane Vreuls

Last night I gave up sex, a political decision. Maria will not leave the convent for Baron von Trapp. She is up on the mountaintop singing. What is the highest point in Kansas?

From issue no. 72 (Winter 1977)

PROSE
Why Visit America
Matthew Baker

There wasn’t anything special about us. We were just an average town. Porch swings, wading pools, split rail fences, pump jacks bobbing for oil on the horizon. Meetings at town hall were well attended, sure, but we weren’t some hotbed of insurgents. We didn’t subscribe to any one brand of politics. We couldn’t even be plotted onto your basic left/right binary. Our town had everything: pro-lifers who supported gay marriage, pro-choicers who opposed gay marriage, climate change deniers who owned solar panels, universal health care campaigners who preferred private insurance, creationists with degrees in biology and geology, loyal conservatives, staunch liberals, moderates, radicals, and ornery retirees whose only real issue was guns. And yet that winter we found ourselves united by a common sentiment. We were fed up with our country. The executives were busy making donations that funded the campaigns of the politicians, the politicians were busy passing laws that protected the interests of the executives, and pretty much nothing else seemed to be getting done. We were antigovernment, we were anticorporate, but mostly we were normal people who couldn’t afford to buy an election and had come to understand that our votes didn’t mean shit. There were libertarians among us who had been pushing to secede for years now, but not until that winter, watching legal forms of graft being flaunted across the country like never before, did our town seriously begin to consider the proposition. The matter soon came to dominate our meetings. We knew that from a certain perspective seceding could be viewed as an act of treason, that it might mean arrest, might mean imprisonment, might even mean execution. And the debate at that final town hall meeting was appropriately heated. Most of us wavered, unsure which way we would vote until the very second those slips of paper got passed around. Several of us were so nervous that we felt faint. Ultimately, however, the decision was unanimous. We would rather face handcuffs, jail, even hanging, than spend another goddamned second living in that broke-down country. We voted to secede.

From issue 230 (Fall 2019)

INTERVIEW
The Art of Fiction No. 237
Dany Laferrière

INTERVIEWER

Your mother once compared you to your father by saying that you have a terrible appetite for life.

LAFERRIÈRE

Yes. My father was a politician and a political activist and a dandy. He would change shirts at least twice or three times a day. He was the youngest-ever mayor of Port-au-Prince.

From issue no. 222 (Fall 2017)

THE DAILY
For Our Cause Is Just
Lydia Moland

“I am not yet prepared to believe that the people of this republic are corrupt enough to choose by fair and honest votes, such a blot upon humanity as Andrew Jackson,” Lydia Maria Child wrote to her new mother-in-law in the early months after Jackson’s election in 1828 … She did not contest the election: the votes had been “fair and honest.” Why, then, did she call her fellow citizens “corrupt”?

From July 2017

John Ashbery, Eleven Collages. From issue. no 188 (Spring 2009).

THE DAILY
Joan Quigley, Ronald Reagan’s Guide to the Stars
Jessica Weisberg

“Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with this woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise,” writes Don Regan, President Reagan’s chief of staff, in his memoir, For the Record. Regan kept a color-coded calendar on his desk, with “good” days highlighted in green and “bad” days highlighted in red. Here’s the calendar for the first few months of 1986:

Jan 16–23 very bad
Jan 20 nothing outside the WH—possible attempt
Feb 20–26 be careful
March 7–14 bad period
March 10–14 no outside activity
March 16 very bad
March 21 no
March 27 no
March 12–19 no trips exposure
March 19–25 no public exposure
April 1 careful
April 11 careful
April 17 careful
April 21–28 stay home

From June 2018

INTERVIEW
The Art of Fiction No. 7
Joyce Cary

INTERVIEWER

Are the political aspects of your work controlled by the same ideas?

CARY

Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul—politics does the same thing for the body. Of course they overlap—this is a very rough description. But the politician is responsible for law, for physical security, and in a world of tumult, of perpetual conflict, he has the alternatives, roughly again, of persuading people or shooting them. In the democracies, we persuade. And this gives great power to the spellbinder, the artist in words, the preacher, the demagogue, whatever you call him. Rousseau, Marx, Tolstoy, these were great spellbinders—as well as Lacordaire. My Nimmo is a typical spellbinder. Bonser was a spellbinder in business, the man of imagination. He was also a crook, but so are many spellbinders. Poets have started most of the revolutions, especially nationalist revolutions. On the other hand, life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders.

From issue no. 7 (Fall–Winter 1954–1955)

THE DAILY
A Number of Reasons I’ve Been Depressed Lately
David Sedaris

On Inauguration Day, I am in Seattle. Late in the afternoon, my old friend Lyn sends me a photo of an anti-Trump sticker someone found in Japan. It’s cleverly designed: three peaks that on second glance turn out to be Trump sandwiched between two Klansmen. I want to write back and say, Ha, but instead, as a joke, I respond, “Dear Lyn, I’m sorry you’re so opposed to change, or too small-minded to move past your narrow assumptions. In the future, I’d appreciate your keeping things like this to yourself. David”

A minute later, I send a follow-up email that says, “Just kidding.” And it bounces back, as do the next three emails I send. She’s blocked me! I realize. After thirty-eight years of friendship!

From June 2017

INTERVIEW
The Art of Poetry No. 102
Claudia Rankine

RANKINE

The relationship between public engagement and private thought are inseparable for me. I worked on Citizen on and off for almost ten years. I wrote the first piece in response to Hurricane Katrina. I was profoundly moved by the events in New Orleans as they unfolded. John and I taped the CNN coverage of the storm without any real sense of what we intended to do with the material. I didn’t think, obviously, that I was working on Citizen.

But for me, there is no push and pull. There’s no private world that doesn’t include the dynamics of my political and social world. When I am working privately, my process includes a sense of what is happening in the world. Today, for example, I feel incredibly drained. And probably you do, too.

From issue no. 219 (Winter 2016)

ART
Amazing But True
Joe Brainard

From issue no. 53 (Winter 1972)

POETRY
Bangor
Timothy Donnelly

Poor Aunt Midge, who: 1. refused to change
however times did; 2. spread a) expansive memories
through Maine and b) jarred orange marmalade on scones;
having lived: 3. equally for a) pearls and b) perms,
and 4. beside the phone, one longish life led out in Bangor,
one brain gone stale as loaves of store-bought bread,

has died. December twenty-four and “she is dead”

From issue no. 153 (Winter 1999)

INTERVIEW
The Art of Biography No. 5
Robert Caro

CARO

I thought, There’s one guy who’s with Lyndon Johnson most of the day, and it’s not his campaign manager, it’s his chauffeur! Because in the Texas Hill Country, a lot of anything is driving—that’s ninety percent of the time. His chauffeur was a guy named Carroll Keach. He lived in some place outside Corpus Christi, and it was hard to get to. It was, like, a 180-mile drive or something. But I kept going back to him. 

He wasn’t a loquacious Texan, he was a laconic Texan. I would ask, What was Johnson doing between campaign stops? And he would say something like, Oh, he was just sitting there in the backseat. I just had to keep asking him questions. I mean, you’re driving, Carroll, and Lyndon Johnson is in the backseat? What was he doing in the backseat? Finally, he told me that Johnson often would be talking to himself. So I’d call and say, Carroll, when you said he was talking to himself, what was he saying? Finally, Carroll told me, It was like he was having discussions with himself about whether he had had a successful day, and if he had made a good impression on voters or not … Johnson would say, Boy, wasn’t that dumb! You know you just lost that ballot box. You lost it, and you need it. And he would talk out—rehearse, over and over, out loud, what he would say to the voters in that precinct the next time. 

From issue no. 2016 (Spring 2016)

THE DAILY
Texas Forever
Adam Wilson

I’m a Reagan baby, a product of recession, later reared in the economically secure Clinton nineties, in a McMansioned suburb of the Eastern Seaboard. Our athletes—statuesque Celtics and sinewy Red Sox—were billboarded, televised, and extra-life-sized for us to admire as we turned into populist fist-pumpers in the soft reflection of our screens.

From July 2011 

INTERVIEW
The Art of Theater No. 2
Arthur Miller

I always drew a lot of inspiration from politics, from one or another kind of national struggle. You live in the world even though you only vote once in a while. It determines the extensions of your personality. I lived through the McCarthy time, when one saw personalities shifting and changing before one’s eyes, as a direct, obvious result of a political situation. And had it gone on, we would have gotten a whole new American personality—which in part we have … Such a pall of fright was laid upon us that it truly deflected the American mind. It’s part of a paranoia which we haven’t escaped yet. Good God, people still give their lives for it; look what we’re doing in the Pacific.

From issue no. 38 (Summer 1966)

INTERVIEW
The Art of Fiction No. 236
Ali Smith

INTERVIEWER

Are you a nationalist?

SMITH

I’m not. 

From issue no. 221 (Summer 2017)

POETRY
Letter from Kitty Dukakis: Between the Election and the Breakdown
Rick Adang

They called it a landslide as though
everything shifted and the weak
and strong alike were buried alive.
Not true. We simply came home.

From issue no. 130 (Spring 1994)

]]> Campaign Literature https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/11/02/belgrade-diary-vucic-serbia-elections/ Mon, 02 Nov 2026 17:22:49 +0000 https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/?p=175915

All photographs courtesy of Lily Lynch.

October 25, 2026

6:30 A.M. 

On Election Day, all normal time stopped. From early in the morning, friends sent me footage of lines snaking around buildings, through parks, down city blocks. A friend back in California sent me photos of a party at a café near the Serbian consulate in Los Angeles, with music, dancing, barbecue. A few weeks earlier, the Serbian Republic Electoral Commission had announced that the country’s large diaspora would be allowed to vote only during Serbia’s domestic polling hours. This meant that Serbian voters in other countries and time zones would have to travel to their embassy or consulate at odd hours or in the middle of the night to cast their ballots. The last-minute rule change was widely interpreted as an attempt by the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) to undercut its insurgent rival, Student List (SL). The Serbian diaspora was known to favor the opposition.

One friend wanted to make a bet: “The turnout is going to be record-breaking,” he wrote. “And SL will win by a landslide.” I was cautiously optimistic, but not a true believer. Though not Serbian myself, I’d been reporting on the nation for more than a decade; I’ve covered countless Serbian elections over the past fourteen years and was in Serbia for the SNS’s ascent to power in 2012. The party’s leader, Aleksandar Vučić, also the country’s erstwhile president and premier, had always managed to outsmart us. Without fail, he had either won outright or massaged the vote to his liking when he hadn’t: a little ballot-stuffing here, a little Gogolian resurrection of dead voters there, along with some voter intimidation and paying the poor and marginalized for their votes. Why should this time be any different?

If anything, this time would be worse, perhaps far worse. Vučić finally had a real competitor in SL, a new outfit that had emerged out of two years of student protests, and which, according to at least some polls, enjoyed more popular support than SNS. None of the names on SL’s slate were those of students, but nor were they professional politicians. All of them—professors, doctors, actors, engineers, athletes—had been selected via plenum. The group therefore represented an entirely novel approach to national politics. If it managed to pull off a win, an age-old status quo would come to an end.

I had barely slept. In the run-up to Election Day, pro-Vučić media outlets said that violence or even civil war would break out. Many were expecting at least some bloodshed. A worried friend bought me a neon-yellow high-vis reflector vest that he hoped would identify me as press, though I was later reminded that this could just as easily make me a target. There were other foreboding signs going into the day: a Red Star Belgrade football match was scheduled for four that afternoon, meaning that the cantankerous and marauding sports fans and for-hire brutes known as Delije, with whom Vučić had close ties, would be out on the streets. An eleventh-hour change to legal procedures at the Belgrade Higher Court seemed to portend mass arrests.

I dressed, trying to recall the last time I’d had anything to eat. It had been the previous afternoon. I still had no appetite.

8 A.M.

I decided to walk thirty minutes to meet my friend Sonja at her polling station in Dorćol, the city’s oldest neighborhood. In Belgrade, the previous day had been immaculate: autumnal, sunny, and crisp. Now it was gray.

There were more people out on the streets than usual, but not by much. When I walked past the nearest polling station and saw just a few people out front, my faith wavered. Perhaps all the jubilant reports I’d received from friends of long lines were nothing more than their wishful thinking, people only seeing what they wanted to see. Most likely, this time would be just like all the rest. It was foolish to have gotten my hopes up.

I made my way down to Slavija, a large traffic roundabout surrounding a public fountain. A jumbo campaign ad of Vučić stared down at me from the facade of a tall building. The ubiquity of his face—on buildings, on the cover of every lurid tabloid, on state television—seemed almost cartoonishly authoritarian.

As I approached Novi Dvor, the president’s office, I saw that the police had erected barricades, preventing passage by foot or car. A smattering of officers was milling around. Mustering my most confident Serbian, I asked one if I could pass through. “I live a few blocks up,” I told him, “off of Terazije.” Wordlessly, with an air of exhaustion, he made make an opening in the barriers and waved me along. I allowed myself to wonder whether state power would fold with so little resistance later that night.

9 A.M.

Sonja met me in front of her polling station, the commerce school on Hilandarska Street. Inside, there was a flurry of activity but, dishearteningly, no voting queue.

After Sonja cast her vote, we walked to Palilula Market, where we had heard there was going to be an informal election party. Despite the hour, some around us were drinking shots of rakija, a popular kind of brandy. My phone lit up with notifications detailing a record early-voter turnout. By nine, the numbers were twice those of the previous election, in 2023. We considered whether the showing could somehow be explained by the end of daylight savings at three that same morning.

11 A.M.

I took one of the city’s antiquated red trams down Bulevar kralja Aleksandra to Zvezdara, a neighborhood just south of downtown Belgrade, where I met a mobile election-monitoring team for SL. To guard against electoral subterfuge, SL had dispatched them to the general vicinity of specific polling sites. They were trained to identify expected forms of interference, from garden-variety intimidation to the so-called Bulgarian Train, a method of rigging votes. By the time I arrived, they had just diffused a tense situation with a local SNS-backed thug.

Unaccountably, the mobile team’s spirits seemed high, as though the incident had hardly bothered them. I received a text saying that by noon, turnout was 34.4%.

1:30 P.M.

The mobile team dropped me off on Bulevar kralja Aleksandra, and I decided to walk its length back toward downtown. At some point, my appetite returned, so I stopped off at an Italian restaurant that I had patronized countless times in my more than fifteen years of coming to Serbia. Unsure what to do after lunch, I returned to my apartment. The long wait for the initial results was unbearable, so I thought I’d try to sleep through part of it.

3 P.M.

I couldn’t sleep. My mood had turned, the cautious optimism of the morning fading to let dread creep back in. The high turnout of the morning had leveled off, one friend wrote. It was still much higher than in elections past, but would it be enough? For SL to win, it would need greater voter participation than this. A friend texted to reassure me: “Things were just slowing down for lunch, which is as expected. Just wait.”

4 P.M.

I walked to the headquarters of the Center for Research, Transparency, and Accountability (CRTA), an election watchdog, to attend a press conference. Raša Nedeljkov, the center’s director, told us that the morning turnout was indeed historic. But by afternoon, he confirmed, things had petered out somewhat. He read off a litany of irregularities: there were widespread problems with the ultraviolet lamps and ultraviolet spray used to guard against repeat voting, and at least two locations, election observers had been attacked. After the press conference, I paced around the office, drinking perhaps too much instant coffee.

6 P.M.

I left CRTA shortly after dark. I wanted to see what was happening at Pionirski Park, which sits adjacent to the Republic Electoral Commission. What I saw there made my stomach turn: riot police in full gear were amassing in the park, already pitch black with the streetlights turned off. This, I thought, was the clearest signal yet that Vučić planned to declare victory no matter the polling figures—and that he was prepared to use force.

7:30 P.M.

With a sense of restlessness, I returned to CRTA, where I accepted the offer of a British journalist from the Times to accompany him and his fixer to the SL headquarters. For security reasons, or so the story went, SL was based all the way out in New Belgrade, on the opposite side of the Sava River. New Belgrade was built entirely after the Second World War, a showcase of Yugoslav socialist brutalism. The SL base of operations was located somewhere amid its imposing concrete blocks.

As we left CRTA in a taxi, we saw a large group of men in black walking toward Pionirski Park. “Those don’t look like students,” the Times journalist offered. There was no mistaking who they were. These were thugs in the employ of the state authorities, their henchmen for carrying out dirty work. Our car sped away before we saw exactly what their business was, but it was almost certainly something violent.

In New Belgrade, the SL offices were in a state of pandemonium. Journalists from all over the world had descended on the scene, jostling for an electrical outlet for their equipment or just a place to sit. People were piled on top of one another. It seemed we had all had the same idea. It wouldn’t be long—just thirty minutes—before the polls closed; the first batch of results would come in just a little after that. I doubted whether it was worthwhile to wait things out from SL, where the frenzy and commotion were distracting. And I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to ring in the victory, no matter whose it would be, among so many members of the media.

8:46 P.M.

Back at my apartment, I got a word from a well-connected contact, who informed me that the U.S. embassy had congratulated SL on its victory in the parliamentary elections. I wasn’t sure whether to believe it; there were no major sources claiming triumph for SL, and it seemed unwise to place much too stock in one informant. Better to be agnostic about the results until the polls were in.

9:23 P.M.

I received another message from the same source: the U.S. embassy had reportedly congratulated SL’s representatives, but had told them to hold off on announcing victory until Vučić held his own press conference. That press conference, said my source, would begin in the next five minutes.

Meanwhile, pro-Vučić television stations began announcing their preliminary election “results,” projecting that SNS would win by a landslide, securing 54.21% of the vote to Student List’s 36.85%.

9:30 P.M.

I heard hollers from outside, coming from many voices all at once. Seconds later, I received a message from a friend: Vučić had conceded defeat.

Instinctively, I tore my door open and ran outside. Everyone else had apparently done the same. I saw a group of women sobbing in the street; when they caught sight of me, they came over to fold me into their embrace. For years, Western diplomats had justified their support for Vučić by saying that Serbs love a strongman, as though it were a recognized aspect of the national character. Now, as if to contradict the old brocard, the country had elected a leaderless movement to power.

I ambled down to Slavija Square, where people were just starting to gather. We walked into traffic. Drivers left their cars in the street to join the celebration. Young men set off a deafening round of fireworks. My ears ringing, I bumped into a teenager with a shaved head. Instead of apologizing and moving on, we hugged and jumped up and down, screaming. One of Belgrade’s red trams had been stopped in its tracks and was now being taken over by the people, who hung out of its windows screaming pobeda!—“victory!”

Everyone I met kept repeating the length of Vučić’s reign—“fourteen years!”—in disbelief. I thought about all that had transpired in that time: the relationships that had ended, the people who had died, the activists whose idealism had collapsed into cynicism and despair, the many people who had left the country, vowing never to return.

I stumbled around for an hour or two—time had long since stopped making sense—and decided to go back to my apartment. I still had to report on these developments, produce an account of things that would keep me tethered to the outside world.

When I got home, I read the messages in my email inbox. My friend Tara had written, “Honestly, genuinely, in the back of my mind I think Vučić is pulling a fast one on us somehow.” Every third person I talked to expressed similar misgivings: that somehow, he wasn’t really finished, that he would find a way to sabotage the moment and seize power again, that it was all an elaborate Machiavellian stunt, that it wasn’t really over. I could understand why. For those who’d lived with his omnipresence for so long, it was hard to believe that he was gone.

Lily Lynch is a foreign-affairs writer and the co-founder and editor-in-chief of  Balkanist Magazine.

Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017. Photograph by Frankie Fouganthin, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, we’ve unlocked Kazuo Ishiguro’s Art of Fiction interview, selected from the archive by Angie Sijun Lou, whose story “Bubble” appears in our recent Fall issue.

The first book I tried to read by Kazuo Ishiguro was The Remains of the Day. I was disturbed by how convincingly Ishiguro adopts the voice of a midcentury English butler: politely deferential, with tediously long descriptions of his pleasant, unremarkable days. Stevens’s curated inner life made him feel like a mirage of a person.

Years later, a friend lent me his copy of The Unconsoled, a five-hundred-page anxiety dream about a pianist, Ryder, who travels to a quasi-mystical town to play a career-defining concert only to be stymied by a web of endless errands. Ryder is asked to mediate feuds between people he barely knows and gets lost every time he leaves his hotel, perpetually failing to rehearse for his recital as he navigates an elusive and shifting schedule of appointments. Many critics panned the book as among the worst they’d ever read, but I was obsessed with its sense of refusal. “It’s never my intention to be willfully obscure,” Ishiguro tells Susannah Hunnewell in his Art of Fiction interview. “The novel was as clear as I could make it.”

What I couldn’t stand in The Remains of the Day was exactly what I loved about The Unconsoled: too often a writer creates a character who is a tepid translation of themselves, but Kazuo Ishiguro inhabits his characters as if there were no true Kazuo Ishiguro to be known. It comes as no surprise, reading the interview, that he has lived several lives. After he failed to become a musician, he hitchhiked up the Pacific Coast Highway and train-hopped from Washington to Montana, living on a dollar a day. He has worked as a baby-food packager and a grouse beater for the Queen Mother, a job in which he marched through the moorlands at Balmoral Castle, flushing birds from the heather to be shot.

His work shifts chameleonically across genre, time, and space. Klara and the Sun takes place in an undefined future, and The Buried Giant in post-Arthurian Britain. His settings might be elastic, but his characters fall prey to the same flimsy and enduring fiction: that we have agency over our fates. “In so many of your novels, the main character seems tragically to miss his or her chance at love by seconds,” Hunnewell says. “I don’t know if they miss it by seconds,” Ishiguro responds. “In a way they’ve missed it by miles.”

INTERVIEW
The Art of Fiction No. 196
Kazuo Ishiguro

INTERVIEWER

How did the English setting come about for The Remains of the Day?

ISHIGURO

It started with a joke that my wife made. There was a journalist coming to interview me for my first novel. And my wife said, Wouldn’t it be funny if this person came in to ask you these serious, solemn questions about your novel and you pretended that you were my butler? We thought this was a very amusing idea. From then on I became obsessed with the butler as a metaphor.

From issue no. 184 (Spring 2008)

Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces in your inbox every Sunday morning.

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

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.