Advertisement

  • The Paris Review
  • Subscribe
      • Sign In

        Forgot password?

      • Subscribe
      • The Daily
        • The Latest
        • Columns
      • The Quarterly
        • Issues
        • Interviews
        • Fiction
        • Poetry
        • Letters & Essays
        • Art & Photography
      • Authors
      • Podcast
      • About
        • History
        • Opportunities
        • Masthead
        • Prizes
        • Submissions
        • Media Kit
        • Bookstores
      • Events
      • Donate
        • Donate to The Paris Review
        • Institutional Support
      • Newsletters
      • Store
  • The Paris Review
      • The Latest
      • Columns
      • Issues
      • Interviews
      • Fiction
      • Poetry
      • Letters & Essays
      • Art & Photography
    • Authors
    • Podcast
      • History
      • Opportunities
      • Masthead
      • Prizes
      • Submissions
      • Media Kit
      • Bookstores
    • Events
      • Donate to The Paris Review
      • Institutional Support
    • Newsletters
    • Store
    • Sign In

      Forgot password?

    • Subscribe

Prose Purple

Leanne Shapton and Ben Schott

Issue 200, Spring 2012

Want to keep reading?
Subscribe and save 33%.

Subscribe Now

Already a subscriber? Sign in below.

Link your subscription

Forgot password?

Paris Review Stack 244

Last / Next
Article

Last / Next Article

Share

More from Issue 200, Spring 2012

Buy this issue!

  • Editor's Note

    • Lorin Stein

      Editor’s Note

  • Fiction

    • David Means

      The Chair

    • Lorrie Moore

      Wings

    • Matt Sumell

      Toast

  • Interview

    • Bret Easton Ellis

      The Art of Fiction No. 216

    • Terry Southern

      The Art of Screenwriting No. 3

  • Poetry

    • Susan Barbour

      Insomnia

    • Nicanor Parra

      Defense of Violeta Parra

    • Stephen Dunn

      Sea Level

    • Yusef Komunyakaa

      Blind Fish

    • Yusef Komunyakaa

      Night of the Armadillo

    • Maureen N. McLane

      Tell Us What Happened After We Left

    • Maureen N. McLane

      All Good

    • Rowan Ricardo Phillips

      Heralds of Delicioso Coco Helado

    • Adrienne Rich

      Itinerary

    • Frederick Seidel

      Cimetière du Montparnasse, 
12ème division

    • Frederick Seidel

      The Green Necklace

    • Frederick Seidel

      Night

    • Frederick Seidel

      Poems 1959–2009

    • Frederick Seidel

      Transport

  • Portfolio

    • Geoff Dyer

      Prabuddha Dasgupta

  • Essay

    • David Searcy

      El Camino Doloroso

    • John Jeremiah Sullivan

      The Princes: A Reconstruction

  • Document

    • Leanne Shapton and Ben Schott

      Prose Purple

  • Web Exclusive

    • John Jeremiah Sullivan

      Sources for “The Princes”

You Might Also Like
James Lasdun, Jessica Laser, and Leopoldine Core Recommend

James Lasdun, Jessica Laser, and Leopoldine Core Recommend

By The Paris Review
June 9, 2023
Molly

Molly

By Blake Butler
June 8, 2023
The Action of Love: A Conversation with Charif Shanahan

The Action of Love: A Conversation with Charif Shanahan

By Morgan Parker
June 7, 2023
The Green and the Gold

The Green and the Gold

By Helen Longstreth
June 6, 2023
Columns
Home Improvements

Home Improvements

By Ottessa Moshfegh and others
Overheard

Overheard

By Tarpley Hitt and others
Diaries

Diaries

By The Paris Review Contributors
The Review’s Review

The Review’s Review

By The Staff of The Paris Review

Advertisement

The Paris Review 244
Revel

Suggested Reading

James Lasdun, Jessica Laser, and Leopoldine Core Recommend

James Lasdun, Jessica Laser, and Leopoldine Core Recommend

By The Paris Review
June 9, 2023

On a novel about a vacuum-cleaner salesman, demo tapes, and the music of Tyler Childers.

The Daily Rower

The Daily

The Review’s Review

The Art of Poetry No. 114

By Sharon Olds
 

undefined

From left, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass, Olds, and Brenda Hillman in the Oakley house at the Community of Writers, Olympic Valley, California, 1989. Courtesy of Sharon Olds and the Community of Writers.

Sharon Olds published her first book, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven. The book is organized into four sections, “Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother,” and “Journey,” and it begins with its title poem, whose speaker is locked in a box she can open only by repeating after Satan: “Say shit, say death, say fuck the father.” At the time, Olds—who was born in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford, and received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia—was married to a psychiatrist, and she spent her days on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, caring for their two young children. Not long after the book’s publication, she told me last year, someone who had invited her to give a reading picked her up at the airport and said, “I thought you would look angrier.”

Fiction

From the Archive, Issue 244

Interview

Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”

, November 2021
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.

Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.

Subscribe for free: Stitcher | Apple Podcasts | Google Play

 

The Daily Rower
    • Subscribe
    • Support
    • Contact Us
    • Events
    • Media Kit
    • Submissions
    • Masthead
    • Prizes
    • Bookstores
    • Opportunities
    • Video
handdrawn Paris scene by du Bois

©2023 The Paris Review. All rights reserved

Privacy Policy Terms & Conditions