Photograph by Hilton Als.

In January 2002, Edward P. Jones was laid off from Tax Notes, a weekly trade magazine for tax professionals. He had been suffering from spells of depression, the latest one exacerbated by his upstairs neighbors, who created such a ruckus that, as Jones told Hilton Als in The Art of Fiction No. 222, “I almost fell to my knees at the corner of my street, because I just didn’t want to go back home to the noise.” The firing hurt, Jones recalled, “but I got up the next day, Wednesday, and went to work on the book. Probably five pages that day because I had a plan—not because I knew what I had. Not at all. I mean, I’m me, I’m living in northern Virginia, I don’t know what people want in New York, or wherever the publishing world is centered. … I just had to go on. I’m lucky, because I did things in that novel that I never learned you’re not supposed to do.”

The result, Jones’s magisterial novel, The Known World, published in 2003, won the Pulitzer Prize. Set in antebellum Virginia, the novel focuses on a formerly enslaved man, Henry Townsend, who has become an enslaver of others—and expands to take in the lives of several dozen interconnected characters, shuttling back and forth across decades and even centuries. Jones traces the limits of what we can know about the motivations of others with an immersive empathy recognizable to readers of his short stories—one of which was published in The Paris Review in 1992. We are thrilled to announce that Jones will receive the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement, at the Spring Revel on April 14, 2026.  Read More

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

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!