The first story in Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute is one of my favorites. “Wants” is about a woman who gets into a fight with her ex-husband at the library. It has a tone of gentility, an idleness that I equate with people who don’t believe they’ll ever be objects of tragedy. The ex-husband’s complaints are met with reserved confusion, if not an explicit shrug, and their coinciding middle-class drama (“I attribute the dissolution of our marriage […]
Remembering Things How They Want to Remember Them: A Conversation with Yael Kohen about Comedy
Yael Kohen’s dad, a sixty-something Israeli guy who watched Rita Rudner with his kids, probably is to blame for how unaware Kohen was of the time-worn trope of women not being funny. Recently he pointed to a magazine she had in her house and asked, “Who’s that?” It was Chelsea Handler. “Oh! I love her,” he said. “She’s the only one that I’ll watch. Letterman? I hate him! She’s the only one who’s funny.” “First of all,” Kohen recalls thinking, […]
John le Carré on Both Sides of the Pond
I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy around this time last year, at the end of September. Not the Alec Guinness miniseries, which I have yet to watch, but the Tomas Alfredson film, the Gary Oldman one. I saw it in England. My aunt and uncle were driving my boyfriend and me back to their house in North London, from a day in Kent with my grandmother and my cousins who were several feet taller than when I last saw them. […]
Elizabeth Bishop and the Poetry of Losing Your Shit
I’ve been using an excuse to put off a lot of things: “No, I can’t—I’m moving.” Buying boxes and tape, making the right appointments, and clearing my schedule took a week and a half, somehow, and I had suspected that I was planning too much until suddenly I was in the middle of the move, running up city blocks, following a truck in a car through red lights on the West Side Highway. I was thinking about which street was […]
Happy Birthday, Philip Larkin
Hey, hey, it’s Philip Larkin’s birthday. The old jerk, he’s my favorite. Not just because he coyly asks “Who is Jorge Luis Borges?” in his Paris Review interview, and not just because he was the inspiration for Lucky Jim, a book I’ve already fawned over on this site. No, I think he’s my favorite because he perfectly captures a Merrie English stereotype of tragic restraint. I’m a sucker for that kind of narrative—I wept at the end of Remains of […]
Today is Wuthering Heights Day
How did we not know until today that Kate Bush and Emily Brontë share a birthday? This calls for a national holiday.
An Evening With Grass Widow
Plenty think-pieces have sprouted from the prolific theorizing of rapper Lil B, a twenty-two year old Berkeley boy who is now an Internet content farm and once was in The Pack (of “Vans” fame, widely, and of “In My Car” fame, personally). Among the descriptions of his oeuvre, analysis of Lil B’s heralding of “based” life often, if not always, ends with a shrug. As an idea it resists definition. Like “chill” or “cool,” the word “based” requires some empirical […]
Nerd Porn: Behold, The Marriage Plot’s Paperback Edition
It’s not like we hated the hardcover design or anything, but this cover for the paperback edition of The Marriage Plot is really quite lovely. It was designed by Picador’s own Henry Sene Yee. That font and watercolor is very Metropolitan, no? Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google + and our Tumblr.