The staff from Vanity Fair recommends 7 books they can't stop talking about—including The Paris Review Interviews, IV featuring an interview with John Ashbery talking about what Auden thought of him.
7 Books We Can’t Stop Talking About This Month
A perfect subway read, advice for writers, picks for poetry month, and more recommendations from the VF staff.
BY KEZIAH WEIR
MARCH 29, 2023
Another month, another fistful of great reads. But before we look back on recent books we couldn’t put down—one even passed the rigorous Subway Test—a quick look forward to April, National Poetry Month, in which one might gather their rosebuds by cavorting in vast fields of verse. A few contemporary suggestions: Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz, The Tradition by Jericho Brown, (both winners of the Pulitzer Prize), or Ocean Vuong’s bestselling 2022 collection Time is a Mother. One might also make some preorders—a treat for future you! The coming month has a happy onslaught in store: South Korean poet Kim Haengsook’s Human Time: Selected Poems (Moon Country), Ursula K. Le Guin’s collected poetry, or Henri Cole’s Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022. Or if you’d like to sprinkle in some prose, turn to the intimate, evocative memoirs coming from poets Eileen Myles, Matthew Zapruder, and Maggie Smith. As always, happy reading.
“The Paris Review Interviews, IV”
In the age of the internet, the interview is a much-bandied form, from online Q&As, to quick-to-publish podcasts. The Paris Review interview is a beast of its own, often conducted over a span of months or years, and edited in collaboration with the subject. The first Art of Fiction appeared in the first issue, Spring 1953 (E.M. Forster) and since then the Review’s interviewers have conducted hundreds, many of which have been collected into brilliant, varied compendiums of big thoughts and writerly temperaments. “They don’t just entertain you,” Salman Rushdie writes in his forward to this edition, which puts Philip Roth beside Maya Angelou and Paul Auster alongside Haruki Murakami, “they make you think, and they even make you rethink what you know.” In this volume a reader will find: Marianne Moore on first reading Ezra Pound; Roth on “premature feminist rage” (worth noting: of the sixteen writers in this collection, a scant three are women); Jack Kerouac’s wife, Stella, trying to throw the interviewer out of her house, and also Kerouac utilizing the magnificent expression “Up your ass with Mobil gas!”; John Ashbery talking about what Auden thought of him; Marilynne Robinson on creating Housekeeping’s Ruthie and Sylvie’ and so much more. (Picador, 2009)