October 9, 2024 Bulletin Anne Carson Will Receive Our 2025 Hadada Award By The Paris Review ANNE CARSON. PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER SMITH. Anne Carson fell in love with ancient Greek as a high school student, reading Sappho with a teacher during lunch hour. In The Art of Poetry No. 88, published in issue no. 171 (Fall 2004), she recalled, “It was stunning to me, a revelation. And it continues to be stunning, continues to be like a harbor always welcoming. Strange, but welcoming.” For decades, Carson’s own work—which has invented new forms to contain unbearable experiences—has appeared to readers and writers as a similar revelation. And so it gives us great pleasure to announce that Carson will receive the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement, at the Spring Revel on April 1, 2025. Carson’s first book, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), a work of scholarship that reinvigorated the tradition of the lyric essay, examined Sappho’s conception of eros as simultaneous pleasure and pain. Since then, Carson has ranged between poetry, prose, drama, opera, translation, and visual art, often merging these approaches to expand our sense of the possible. Autobiography of Red (1998), a bildungsroman in verse, transposes the story of Herakles and Geryon onto small-town Ontario, where Geryon, a queer teenager with “little red wings,” is destroyed and remade by desire. Each new work has found the form for its subject. The Beauty of the Husband (2001) bears the subtitle “A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos”; Decreation (2005) sets verse and brief philosophical essays alongside a screenplay and a three-part opera; Nox (2009), a meditation on translating Catullus and an elegy for Carson’s estranged brother, is a scrapbook printed on a single long, folded page. Read More
September 4, 2024 Bulletin Javier Fuentes Will Be the Paris Review Visiting Professor at the Bard Prison Initiative By The Paris Review Javier Fuentes in the offices of The Paris Review. Last year, The Paris Review joined forces with the Bard Prison Initiative, which for twenty-five years has provided a full-time, tuition-free, degree-granting liberal arts education to students in unconventional settings, including several Upstate New York prisons and BPI’s microcolleges in New York City, one of which is located at the Brooklyn Public Library. In March, we announced the Paris Review Visiting Professorship—a position for a creative writer to teach the literature that has inspired them to BPI students—and were heartened to receive a great number of nominations from the community. We are now delighted to announce that the inaugural Paris Review Visiting Professor is Javier Fuentes, who will be teaching three semester-long courses at NYSDOC Eastern Correctional Facility in Napanoch, New York. Fuentes, who was born in Madrid, is the author of Countries of Origin, a novel about an undocumented pastry chef who is forced to leave New York and start life over in Spain—and his love affair with a young man named Jacobo, whom he meets on the plane. Fuentes’s first course, called Physical and Psychological Spaces in Literature, will explore the way time and place structure narrative; his syllabus includes Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, E. M. Forster’s Howards End, and The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom. Also Kafka’s The Metamorphosis—“Not a book that you usually think of in terms of space,” Fuentes said. “But if you read it closely, the house that Gregor finds himself in and the objects around him really are the main characters.” Class starts on September 5 and will meet twice a week. We want to congratulate Javi, and to wish the best of luck to him and his students as they embark on the new semester!
February 20, 2024 Bulletin The Review Wins the 2024 National Magazine Award for Fiction By The Paris Review Illustration by Na Kim. We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won the 2024 ASME Award for Fiction, marking the second year in a row that the magazine has received the honor. The three prizewinning stories are Rivers Solomon’s “This Is Everything There Will Ever Be,” a disarmingly warm portrait of “just another late-forties dyke entirely too obsessed with basketball, dogs, and memes”; “My Good Friend,” Juliana Leite’s English-language debut, translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry, a story written in the form of an elderly widow’s Sunday-evening diary entry (“About the roof repair, I have nothing new to report”) that turns into a story of mostly unspoken, mutual decades-long love; and James Lasdun’s “Helen,” in which a man writing about his parents’ upper-class milieu in seventies London—the time of the IRA’s mainland campaign in Britain—stumbles upon the journals of a family friend, a woman who lives in what the narrator calls a “state of incandescent, almost spiritual horror.” All three stories will be unlocked from behind the paywall this week, and you can also listen to Rivers Solomon’s story on our podcast here. Enjoy!
October 11, 2023 Bulletin Tobias Wolff Will Receive Our 2024 Hadada Award By The Paris Review Photograph by Elena Seibert. In an interview published in The Paris Review no. 171 (Fall 2004), Tobias Wolff pinpointed the radical power of a well-written story. “Good stories slip past our defenses—we all want to know what happens next—and then slow time down, and compel our interest and belief in other lives than our own, so that we feel ourselves in another presence. It’s a kind of awakening, a deliverance, it cracks our shell and opens us up to the truth and singularity of others—to their very being.” The Paris Review has always sought out just this kind of writing, of which Wolff’s own body of work is an extraordinary example. We are thrilled to honor him with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature. Previous recipients include Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Lydia Davis, Jamaica Kincaid, and Vivian Gornick. Read More
October 3, 2023 Bulletin Correction By The Paris Review On October 3, 2023, The Paris Review published “Free Everything,” an essay by Miranda July, on the Daily. We were not aware that the essay had previously run in The New Yorker, and have removed it from our website. We regret the error. The original piece can be found here.
September 13, 2023 Bulletin The Paris Review Wins 2023 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize By The Paris Review We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won a 2023 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges wrote: For seventy years and counting, The Paris Review has remained wonderfully distinctive and sophisticated, never short on chic art direction, impeccable curation, or international flair. The interviews make you ache to have been in the room for the conversation. Readers will find exceptional work by feted writers in every issue, but The Paris Review does not rest on its legacy: it deftly employs its footing as the standard bearer for American literary magazines to uplift talent that hasn’t yet gotten its due. We are deeply grateful to the Whiting Foundation for providing the literary ecosystem with vital funding and support, and we congratulate our fellow 2023 winners: Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mizna, n+1, Orion, and Oxford American.