Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual wine tasting on Friday, December 18, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, visit our events page, or scroll down to the bottom of the article. Baldwin’s characters haunted French bistros, where oysters with mignonette are a staple. Photo: Erica MacLean. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” So read the inspirational quote in the front window of my Brooklyn gourmet market the day I shopped for a meal celebrating the work and life of James Baldwin (1924–1987). These words, coincidentally but not surprisingly, are from Baldwin, who is the man of the moment again thanks...
In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The Kolyma Stories and my extended time indoors offered me the opportunity to use up some obscure items that have been languishing in my pantry. The complete stories of Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982), published by NYRB Classics in two newly translated volumes, contain some of the bleakest and most powerful writing we have about the Soviet gulag. They’re also terrifyingly and indelibly about food—that is, about starving to death. Shalamov was first arrested in the twenties, when he was a student at Moscow University, and then again in 1937 for Trotskyist activity. He spent the next seventeen years in labor camps, including on the far...
