inSerial: part fifteen
The Mysteries of Paris

By Eugène Sue, translated from French by Robert Bononno

MAR 2020 | Fiction

Baron de Graün continued: “About 18 months ago, a young man by the name of François Germain arrived in Paris from Nantes, where he had been employed by the banking firm of Noël & Company. Based on statements made by the Schoolmaster and several letters found on him, it appears that the scoundrel to whom he had entrusted his son for the sole purpose of corrupting him, so he might one day be of use to his criminal activities, revealed the terrible plot to the young man when he suggested that he assist them in an attempted robbery and forgery at the firm of Noël & Company, where François Germain worked.

Roderic O’Conor and the Moderns. Between Paris and Pont-Aven

By William Davie

OCT 2018 | ArtSeen

If curators Jonathan Benington and Brendan Rooney are right and it is time for a re-evaluation of Roderic O’Conor’s oeuvre, then the case they put forward in Roderic O’Conor and the Moderns: Between Paris and Pont-Aven, on view at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, is certainly a captivating one–but not entirely without its pitfalls.

John Ashbery: The Construction of Fiction

By Phillip Griffith

NOV 2018 | ArtSeen

After the death of the artist and poet Joe Brainard in 1994, his friend, the poet John Ashbery, recovered an envelope of paper cuttings Brainard had collected for use in collages. The envelope was a posthumous message for Ashbery and reminded him of the collages he had made while spending time with Brainard and the poet James Schuyler in the 1970s. For Ashbery, who died in September 2017, the envelope was a fond reminder of his friend and signaled a return to his work as a collagist.

inSerial: part one
The Mysteries of Paris

by Eugène Sue, translated from the French by Robert Bonnono

SEPT 2018 | Fiction

Eugène Sue owed his immense popularity to the series of sensational novels of Parisian low life, which he began in 1842 with Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris). The book appeared as a serial novel, or feuilleton, in the conservative newspaper Le Journal des Débats. The Mysteries of Paris provided its readers with an examination of working-class and criminal Paris that no novel had until then portrayed. Sue’s book, with its portraits of prostitutes, criminals, and villains of all stripes, who speak in their own language and move about in their own milieu, caused a scandal upon its release. Unlike his contemporaries, in The Mysteries of Paris Sue abandoned the drawing rooms of the beau monde for the dive bars and cabarets of central Paris, Ile de la Cité, where the story is set.