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Articles by EJ Levy
A Reflection On Reflection: An Interview With Katherine Indermaur
A reflection on reflection: An interview with Katherine Indermaur There’s a pun at the heart of Katherine Indermaur’s wonderful and illuminating book, I|I, an extended lyric-essay that is at once a reflection on reflection, a memoir in mirrors, and an excavation of that defining object of our daily lives—the looking glass.
"The Cape Doctor" recounts unlikely caesarean success
SunLit In EJ Levy's Colorado Book Award winner, the doctor based on a real-life figure encounters a woman dying in childbirth in 19th-century South Africa Author’s Note: “The Cape Doctor” was inspired by the life of a brilliant, irascible, 19th-century Irish army surgeon, Dr. James Miranda Barry, who practiced medicine in the British colonies in the first half of the 19th century.
5 Tips for Breathing Life Into Fictionalized "Real-Life" Characters
My debut novel The Cape Doctor began with a voice in my head, commenting on the sites I toured in Cape Town, while accompanying my partner to a conference there.
I want my daughter to live unapologetically in a world free of gender expectations, including mine
My classmate shrieked with glee: “You’re a boy!” she shouted. “Am not,” I said, dropping my hand. “Are, too,” she said, that irrefutable childhood argument. Girls, she explained, held their hands out at a distance, fingers splayed like a fan, to look at their nails. Only boys curled their hands into a fist, as I had done. It was a gender test, my first, and I had failed. I was embarrassed, but I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t what I’d call a tomboy. I was more like a lanky mobile blur of anxiety.
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Simon Renard de Saint-André, Vanitas, c. 1660. 2. Adriaen van Utrecht, Vanitas Still Life with Flowers and Skull, 1642. 3. Aelbert Jansz. van der Schoor, Vanitas Still Life, c. 1640–1672.* 4. Hendrick Andriessen, Vanitas Still Life, c. 1650. 5. Follower of Jacques Linard, A vanitas still life with a skull, an hour-glass, a tulip in a glass vase, a shell and butterfly, all resting on a stone ledge, c. 1600–1645. Elif Batuman is the author of The Possessed and The Idiot.
Portrait of a Friendship
Portrait of Simon Akam, by Moussa David Saleh. When we had to make things right, we went to the French House. The pub stands on Dean Street, in Soho, in central London, near the Algerian Coffee Stores, where the windows are stocked with Hazer Baba Turkish delight, and the sex shop whose window flashes LEATHER RUBBER NEOPRENE. Inside the pub, there are framed cartoons by Michael Heath. They served cidre long before international booze conglomerate Anheuser-Busch InBev ventured into that spelling.
Twelve Illustrated Dust Jackets
From the collection of Martin Salisbury. Photograph: Simon Pask We’ve all been told told not to judge a book by its cover, but what about judging a decade, an artistic moment, or a society? In his latest collection, The Illustrated Dust Jacket: 1920–1970, illustration professor Martin Salisbury traces the history of the book jacket from its origins as a simple dust guard for expensive bound books to its evolution as a promotional tool meant to catch the eye.
Every Poem Is a Love Poem to Something: An Interview with Nicole Sealey
Nicole Sealey’s debut collection, Ordinary Beast, is a stunning compendium of poems in which she reveals herself to be a poet who can move from the deeply personal to the mythic and historic without losing the impact of either. Her poetry belies passionate dedication, executed with grace and a quiet, simmering power. Sealey was born in Saint Thomas, of the United States Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida.
Paris Review - Slumming
Half a dozen years had passed since that first summer in Alna, and almost nothing had changed. The town was still full of young people crashing junk cars, dirty diapers littering the parking lots. There were x-ed–out smiley faces spray-painted over street signs, on the soaped-up windows of empty storefronts, all over the boarded-up Dairy Queen long since blackened by fire and warped by rain. And the zombies, of course, still inhabited Alna’s shadowy, empty hilltop downtown.
The Star-Crossed
A few weeks ago, I went to the local art-house cinema in Royal Oak, Michigan, to see Gus Van Sant’s Restless, starring Dennis Hopper’s son, Henry Hopper, and the sensitive indie-girl du jour Mia Wasikowska.
Adaptation: An Interview with Ramona Ausubel
My conversation with Ramona Ausubel took place in the ether between upstate New York and California, from a small desk in my bedroom to her home in Santa Barbara. I wore something slobbishly inappropriate and kept one eye on my three kids as I typed. A tired Ausubel was herself caring for her newborn infant. So I cannot tell you about her curly red hair, her slippers, or the tone of her voice. I cannot tell whether you can smell the Pacific from her house.
The Night in My Hair: Henna, Syria, and the Muslim Ban
The night the United States launches fifty Tomahawk missiles on the Syrian Shayrat airbase near Homs, I am washing henna and indigo out of my hair. The tub is splashed with tourmaline blue, speckled like the delicate markings on a sparrow’s egg, and from the living room I can hear the newscasters referring to margin of error, airpower, and the “perils of the region.” The water runs down the drain.
The Night in My Hair: Henna, Syria, and the Travel Ban
The night the United States launches fifty Tomahawk missiles on the Syrian Shayrat airbase near Homs, I am washing henna and indigo out of my hair. The tub is splashed with tourmaline blue, speckled like the delicate markings on a sparrow’s egg, and from the living room I can hear the newscasters referring to margin of error, airpower, and the “perils of the region.” The water runs down the drain.
Paris Review - Virgin
Jake hadn’t meant to stare at her breasts, but there they were, absurdly beautiful, almost glowing above the plunging neck-line of the faded blue dress. He’d read the press releases, of course. He recalled, from an article, her description of nursing her last child only six months before her first radiation treatment. Then he noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra. What did they have inside them: saline or silicone? And how did these feel, respectively? He probably stared too long.
Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry No. 88
Anne Carson and I first met in 1988 at a writers’ workshop in Canada, and have been reading each other’s work ever since. The interview that follows is a mix of our usual conversation and discussion about topics that preoccupy Carson’s work—mysticism, antiquity, obsession, desire. Carson was born on June 21, 1950, in Toronto, the second and final child of Margaret and Robert Carson. Her mother was a housewife; her father worked for the Toronto Dominion Bank.
Through the Panama
This is the ship’s endless song. This is the engine of the Diderot: the canon repeated endlessly... We arrive at dusk, in a drizzle. Everything wet, dark, slippery. Dock building huge, dimly ht by tiny yellow bulbs at far intervals. Black geometry angled against dark sky. Cluster lamps glowing—they are loading cardboard cartons labelled Product of Canada. Primrose and myself are the sole passengers aboard the freighter. The crew are all Bretons: the ship, French: its build, American.
Hunter S. Thompson, The Art of Journalism No. 1
In an October 1957 letter to a friend who had recommended he read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “Although I don’t feel that it’s at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it one way or another, and I think that I’ll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in sudden outbursts of frustrated violence. . .
The Real Scandal in Academia
Collage of 1950’s pulp fiction covers My first tenure-track job out of grad school was in Washington, DC, a dozen years ago, when it was common for Washingtonians to claim that DC was Hollywood for ugly people (both towns being focused on power, prestige, social ascendance, and its attendant glamour—basically, high school for grownups). So, I wasn’t surprised to see that the sexual-harassment allegations sweeping Hollywood are also common to DC.
Redux: Hunter S. Thompson, Amie Barrodale, Pablo Neruda
Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, we bring you our first-ever Art of Journalism interview, with Hunter S.
The Real Scandal in Academia
Collage of pulp-fiction covers. My first tenure-track job out of grad school was in Washington, D.C., a dozen years ago, when it was common for Washingtonians to claim that D.C. was Hollywood for ugly people (both towns being focused on power, prestige, social ascendance, and its attendant glamour—basically, high school for grown-ups).
When Women Aren't Angels
Detail from the poster for Der Blaue Engel Not long ago, I watched, on the Internet, footage of myself being interviewed by Charlie Rose. It was May, 2000, and the subject of our interview was Blue Angel, my then-recent novel about—of all things—sexual harassment. Or at least, that’s what Charlie thought the novel was about. Early in the course of our conversation, it became clear to me that he hadn’t read my book, but that someone at the other end of his earpiece had.
Staff Picks: Rachel Lyon, Radiohead, and Richard Pryor
Karin Tidbeck. Karin Tidbeck’s collection Jagannath strings together a chain of eerie vignettes where the fantastic creeps in from a place just outside your peripheral vision, subtly seeping into a reality you thought you recognized. Tidbeck translated these herself from her native Swedish, and the end result is a clear, succinct prose style that makes for a crisp blank canvas so that the strangeness of her plots and ideas stand out against a clean background.
Paris Review - Director’s Cut
At first, the TV light is silver. Then it goes to black and white. A moment passes and we see the Columbia Pictures lady. She’s a figure in Adrienne Kennedy’s 1976 play, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, where she speaks the author’s thoughts, but at present I don’t know Kennedy’s play. My own fan notes about the Columbia Pictures lady and the movies she introduces us to start now, in 1968 or 1969, when I’m eight or nine, somewhere in there.
Kayaking on the Charles
I don’t really like the ferries that make the water a scary vortex, or the blurry white sun that blinds me, or the adorable small families of distressed ducklings that swim in a panic when a speedboat cuts through, spewing a miasma into the river, but I love the Longfellow Bridge’s towers that resemble the silver salt and pepper canisters on my kitchen table. They belonged to Mother. The Department of Conservation is restoring the bridge masonry now.
Evaluating My Interest in "Escapist" Literature
Once I became a historian, I began to regret my teenage obsession with fantasy novels. When the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore and the avuncular “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush ascended to the presidency, I didn’t bat an eyelash.
I'm a lesbian marrying a man
(Kristina Stasiuliene via iStock/Salon) Friends don't understand: My sexual orientation never changed. I simply fell in love with a very unexpected person EJ Levy July 30, 2014 3:00AM (UTC) I was in a bar in Chicago when I told a close friend of 20 years that, despite being a lesbian, I was marrying a man. My friend and I hadn’t seen each other in a while, but we fell back quickly into our old intimacy -- those long, rambling conversations we used to have in coffee shops all over Minneapolis.
On Living Apart Together
On Living Apart Together When my friend Cleo’s relationship ended recently—the second ending in as many years—she said, “I just want to fall in love and settle down, so I can ignore my relationship.” I laughed, but her comment hit home: it spoke to the dilemma my partner and I confront as we make plans for a life together and furnish separate homes 1,660 miles apart. Can we make a lasting love that won’t offer the luxury of ignoring one another, as cohabitating couples can?
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