The Maris Review, vol 108

This week's theme is mighty triumvirates and/or friend throuples

What I read this week

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction by Deborah Levy

No one does it like Deborah Levy on a sentence level, whether she's writing a novel or a memoir or some crafty combination of both fiction and nonfiction, as she does here. Here, Levy turns her attention to Gertrude Stein, a writer who broke all of the rules – who didn't use question marks or commas because she found them unnecessary, who wrote weird shit and used language differently than other writers. It's so fitting that the cover art for her latest book features a painting by Leonora Carrington, a surrealist artist and writer who regularly defied conventions.

The book features an unnamed British narrator who is intent on studying Stein in all of her subversive splendor. We know very little about the narrator's past, and that's okay. The present action concerns the narrator and two female friends she met in Paris, and the conversations that the three of them have.

The books contains a lot of biographical information about Stein (I'm so sorry because Woody is dead to me but I still picture Midnight in Paris when I think of Stein and her remarkable intellectual circle as an ex-pat) but as she moves through life in this new present age of destruction, the narrator is mostly concerned with how Stein saw the world, how Stein broke rules, and how Stein and others like her transformed art over time. Here's the narrator on Stein's work: "To travel a long way from the realism of any century is a perilous journey. The streets will be lined with people mocking the new and the strange – educated, uneducated, it doesn't matter, they will be righteous and wrathful in the cause of realism in every century."

This is one of those books that I'm gonna keep on hand for a long time when I need a reminder that art and beauty are enemies of fascism and that the act of creation is profound.

Social Animals by Camille Perri

I'm gonna give you a moment to compose yourself after seeing this cover. It's so good. As we all know, dog people are a special kind of weirdo, and I'm proud to be one of them.

Camille Perri, author of two other excellent novels is also a dog person and she has written the ultimate Dog Person novel. It's about a woman named June who is the dog mom of a delightful Golden Retriever named Willow but who is also married to a real (spoiler alert) asshole. Said asshole has hired Val, a tough-talking private detective from Queens, to investigate his wife. Val adopts a Brussels Griffon named Cash in order to blend in better at the dog park, where she hopes to make contact with June. Val is not really a dog person, of course. Can Cash win her over? C'mon, this is a dog person novel. Watching Val come to love Cash is the true romance in the book. At the dog park they also meet Alex, who is also stalking June, but for entirely different reasons than Val. June convinces Alex to adopt a beagle named Bruce. Do the women have adventures? Of course. Do the dogs have adventures? You bet your ass. It's a delight from start to finish.

There is literally no greater book to listen to while on a walk with your own special someone who constantly has to be reminded that they're not allowed to pee on the flowers.

I'm going to be interviewing Camille (and the cover model!) at McNally Jackson Seaport on Thursday night. DOGS ARE WELCOME. I REPEAT: DOGS ARE WELCOME.

Maggie needed to physically block the cover of Camille's book because she doesn't like other dogs

This ad makes me want to murder

Scrolling through the New York Times app to see what new horrors abound, and I come across this ad that would only make sense if it was actually an ad for a new Cronenberg film. Let's break this down.

Speechify is an AI text-to-speech platform that charges a pretty big monthly fee for users to be able to upload a PDF or document and have a robot voice read the text. Or, for a premium subscription, you can choose voices like Snoop Dogg or Gwyneth Paltrow (of course she's involved with this) to say the words for you. It also purports to be a maker of audiobooks. You just upload a book and a robot reads it to you. This is a boon for the visually impaired, undeniably, but still.

Here is where I'll briefly remind you that audiobook narration is an art that takes very human skill and emotion to do well. There are very talented people whose jobs are being taken by this stuff and it's infuriating.

BUT ANYWAY. Why would you use AI to design your ad? WHY? No one wants to see a guy with ears for eyes, and also ears where the ears should be. New rule: listening to audiobooks does, in fact, count as reading, but not if you have three ears or more. The stuff of body horror nightmares. Your company seems real cool Speechify.

Paperback Launch!!

I cannot wait for my paperback launch event for I Want to Burn This Place Down on July 15th at The Strand. I've enlisted two friends, both sensational journalists, who both had books come out around the same time as mine, and I can't wait to talk to them about what the world is like approximately 1 year later. Megan Greenwell wrote Bad Company a deeply reported look into how exactly private equity is fucking over America. Amanda Hess wrote Second Life, a very smart and very funny reported memoir about the chaos of raising a child in the digital age. We collectively have a whole lot we wanna burn down.

Please come on out?