Felix by Proxy
Hi, I said, glistening from the running;
You must be J.’s friend. Shall we fuck?
Adrienne Raphel
Poetry
Daily
The ABCs of Gardening
"Familiar faces emerge while reading: the book cross-pollinates images and etymologies."
The Life and Times of The Paris Metro
“The Metro had its finger on the pulse of Parisian life—or, at least, the life that expats mythologized.”
“The Dead Silence of Goods”: Annie Ernaux and the Superstore
“Floating through the aisles in Iowa Walmart, I couldn’t stop listing things—camo baseball cap, Dustbuster, toilet brush—muttering a late-capitalist rosary: hail Big Mouth Billy Bass full of grace.”
Morrison’s Infinity Knots: Sites of Memory at Princeton
Visiting Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, on exhibit at Princeton University’s Firestone Library, is like going to a sauna.
Nightmares of a Shopaholic
“I’ve never been married, and I’ve bought my wedding dress.”
Shopping Diary
“I have a $10 bill, and buying things in cash these days makes me feel like I’m getting it for free.”
Barneys Fantasia
“Isabel, Chloé, Alaïa, Rejina. I could be anyone.”
The Fourth Rhyme: On Stephen Sondheim
When Sondheim, to my astonishment, wrote back, he said that although he no longer had a regular solving practice, he counted introducing American readers to cryptic crosswords among the great achievements of his life.
A Brief History of Word Games
Ever since we’ve had language, we’ve played games with words.
Ramona Forever
I returned to Ramona Quimby for nostalgia. What I found was even better: a mystery.
The Paris Review’s Poetry Crossword
Here’s an absolutely free, no-shipping-required, Paris Review crossword puzzle.
A Brief History of Word Games
Ever since we’ve had language, we’ve played games with words.
The Paris Review Crossword
Take your mind off all the ambient anxiety with a ‘Paris Review’–themed crossword.
My Harper Lee SparkNotes
Writing the SparkNotes for Go Set a Watchman.
ContextThe summer when I was eight, I read two books: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and To Kill a Mockingbird. My copy of Mockingbird was a cheap lilac paperback. Its cover featured the knot of a tree with a …
The Font of Poetry, the Poetry of Font
Adventures in typography.I was a teenage font addict. On Microsoft Word I’d lovingly scroll through the drop-down font menu: Avenir Book, Baskerville, Goudy, Goudy Old Style. For every story or poem I started to write, I first spent hours choosing …
Losing Count
“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of counting-out rhymes.Eeny, meeny, miny, mo
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers, let him go
Eeny meeny miny mo
“Eeny meeny miny mo” is one of those rhymes that’s ingrained in our cultural l…