“American women are like beautiful manor houses with lavish artwork and spacious rooms. But the lights are always out. Americans are not born; they are manufactured. Ford-ersatz, Chrysler-ersatz, Buick-ersatz. All exactly alike. I always know what they’ll say next, because they think alike, speak alike, fuck alike.”

- Monsieur Kalashnikov, André Aciman

Sometimes when I have nothing better to do, I drive down to Barnes and Noble and read magazines. Well, actually I was really trying to do some work in their air-conditioned cafe. But I end up reading magazines, and I don’t mean Cosmopolitan — there is a lot of interesting stuff out there, and it’s not all about hair products and diet tips. Being an art major, I get sucked into all the shiny photographs, but there’s a lot of seemingly-irrelevant information that can be really fascinating. I think that magazines are kind of like an ongoing documentation of specific cultures. Like, maybe eons in the future after everything we know is gone, someone will find an old freeze-dried issue of Maxim and come to some really bizarre and perhaps insightful conclusions about living in the 21st century.

Anyway, the reason that I bring all of this up is because I love The Paris Review. It’s probably the most well-established fiction magazine out there, and for a reason. The quote above is from a short story by Andre Aciman called Monsieur Kalashnikov and it’s the best short that I’ve read in a long time. What’s even better about The Paris Review is that you can access a lot of their content online (voila), although personally I prefer to physically hold what I’m reading. It’s a relatively long short story, and starts slow but the build-up is partly what’s so great and the ending just kills me.

I’m not really going to bother summarizing it for you (I almost never do that, and besides there’s something great about starting to read something without knowing what you’re getting into at all), but I will just say that it touches on a certain kind of pretension and an “academic’s crisis.” It’s a little bit of the bizarre, a little of the familiar, and just a great read. It made me read Aciman’s novel, Call Me By Your Name, which was…different. I really enjoyed it, but for some reason I don’t know if it made the impact on me that the short story did. Call Me By Your Name is about youth, and love (gay love actually), and it really is a beautiful, nostalgia-inducing short novel. I would recommend it. I wonder if it would’ve been better as a short story.

So in the latest Paris Review there is an interview with Kazuo Ishiguro. I think I’m still in shock that I’ve never read his work before, especially since I’ve been working my way around a lot of contemporary Japanese lit. I’ve read everything that Haruki Murakami has published (for better or for worse, even if After Dark was sold at Urban Outfitters), a sprinkling of Ryu Murakami, even though Almost Transparent Blue was, in the words of a friend, “absolutely disgusting after a while,” and even started on Kenzaburo Oe. I really hated Natsuo Kirino though, despite all the attention that she’s gotten lately. I gave up on Out halfway through, and I almost never do that. Where was I? Oh yes, Kazuo Ishiguro. This summer.

I almost always read before bed. My favorite books are like dreams - it’s hard to remember exactly what they’re about, but you keep that feeling with you, and maybe it has changed you in some immeasurable way. And I dream a lot. Recently I dreamed that I was riding a flying motorcycle and that I was about to go over the Forbidden City. I woke up before I did, but aren’t dreams always like that? Anyway, there are magazines worth reading, if some only for their visual language.

And Monsieur Kalashnikov. It’s worth a re-reading, and I almost never do that.