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

Sketches for Thy Neighbor’s Wife

Gay Talese

Issue 189, Summer 2009




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 189, Summer 2009

Buy this issue!

  • Fiction

    • Kenneth Calhoun

      Nightblooming

    • Damon Galgut

      The Guardian

    • Boualem Sansal

      After Rach’el

  • Interview

    • Gay Talese

      The Art of Nonfiction No. 2

  • Poetry

    • Craig Arnold

      Two Poems

    • Star Black

      Twilit

    • John Casteen

      Nocturne: Redaction

    • Billy Collins

      Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

    • Dana Levin

      Three Poems

    • John Poch

      Well into Winter

    • Michael Waters

      White Stork

  • Memoir

    • Tad Friend

      You Give No Inspire to the Wounded Woman in Your First Aid

  • Photographs

    • Larry Sultan

      Homeland

  • Document

    • Gay Talese

      Sketches for Thy Neighbor’s Wife

  • Journal

    • Liao Yiwu

      Nineteen Days

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