When it was announced that the legendary bookshop Le Pont Traversé would definitely close down on the 31st of December in Paris, many French TV stations put in phone calls and tried to convince Josée Comte-Béalu to do a filmed interview. She refused every single one of them.
“They are like vultures,” she said on a recent afternoon, while Paris was paralyzed by an unrelenting general strike and suspended public transportation. Her carefully cluttered bookshop was unusually calm, and Josée took advantage of the quiet moment to attach a price tag to her opaline glass chandelier—a rare early 20th century piece, now for sale along with the rest of her 11,000 books.
Writing is often considered a solitary act, but some writers have figured out a way to make the process more collaborative even before editors, agents and other publishing professionals get involved. Zhang’s group, which includes Alice Sola Kim, Karan Mahajan and Tony Tulathimutte, has been meeting about every month since most of them were undergraduate students at Stanford University. Their sessions are highly structured, with deadlines for submitting drafts and detailed manuscript notes, while other groups gather more informally to talk about their careers, commiserate over deadlines or gossip about the publishing industry.
It’s hard not to throw everything I’ve written so far out the fucking window right now because I don’t want you to know this, because I don’t want you to hate me for being so sad and not normal, but then I think, What if you know exactly what I mean? What if you, like me, would at times throw your whole life out the window and walk away, in hopes there was somewhere you could go and buy an entirely new life with new problems, new people, new everything, as if you were replacing a shitty sweater you’d worn through? Except you get only one sweater for your whole life, and anything can happen—theft, weather, cars that splash you with dirt stains that do and don’t come out—but you can’t trade it in or take it off. It’s just yours and it’s you, forever and ever and ever.
It’s probably happened to you: You’re strolling through the produce section at the supermarket, perhaps underwhelmed with the flavor of the Fuji apples you’ve been getting lately, or finding that the kids aren’t as into the Flame Seedless grapes as they used to be.
Suddenly you come upon a display of a fruit that’s new to you: Cotton Candy® grapes, Cosmic Crisp® apples, mandarins branded as Cuties®. Into the cart they go — a simple choice — though it’s hard to imagine the complex corporate machinery that brought the glossy displays and colorful bags to you, and how they signal a fundamental change in how fruit today is being grown and sold.
L’Heureux’s own expertise is in our sites of afflictive potential. Even in his weaker stories, he lands, with gleeful precision, on death, sex, regret and then death again.
As writers, Lowell and Hardwick were to some degree public figures; their pain was destined not to remain private. And Lowell exacerbated the degree of exposure, and the pain that attached to it, by incorporating their ordeals and his adventures into his poetry.