July 1, 2022 Bulletin The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review: Announcing Our Summer Subscription Deal By The Paris Review Love to read but hate to choose? Announcing our summer subscription deal: starting today and through the end of August, you really can have it all when you subscribe to both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for a combined price of $99. That’s one year of issues from both publications, as well as their entire archives—sixty-nine years of The Paris Review and fifty-nine years of The New York Review of Books—for $50 off the regular subscription price. Ever since former Paris Review managing editor Robert Silvers cofounded The New York Review of Books with Barbara Epstein, the two magazines have been closely aligned. With your subscription to both, you’ll have access to fiction, poetry, interviews, criticism, and more from some of the most important writers of our time, from T. S. Eliot to Sigrid Nunez, James Baldwin to Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion to Jamaica Kincaid. Subscribe today and you’ll receive: One year of The Paris Review (4 issues) One year of The New York Review of Books (20 issues) Full access to both the New York Review and Paris Review digital archives—that’s fifty-nine years of The New York Review of Books and sixty-nine years of The Paris Review. If you already subscribe to The Paris Review, we’ve got good news: this deal will extend your current subscription, while your new subscription to The New York Review of Books will begin immediately.
December 2, 2021 Bulletin Jamaica Kincaid Will Receive Our 2022 Hadada Award By The Paris Review Jamaica Kincaid. Photo: Kenneth Noland Save the date: on April 12, 2022, The Paris Review will present the Hadada, our annual lifetime achievement award, to Jamaica Kincaid at our Spring Revel. In our Winter 1981 issue (no. 82), the Review published a short story by Kincaid, then thirty-two, titled “What I Have Been Doing Lately.” The story follows the narrator’s recursive, dreamlike journey in search of home, and was later included in Kincaid’s debut collection, At the Bottom of the River (1983), which drew from her early life in Antigua and marked her as a singular voice in American letters. The book won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Also in the collection is the indelible “Girl,” a 650-word sentence of practical instructions uttered by a mother to her daughter on how to avoid becoming “the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread.” Read More
November 23, 2021 Bulletin The Paris Review Podcast, Episode 23 By The Paris Review Episode 23, our Season 3 finale, opens with “The Trick Is to Pretend,” a poem by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, read by the singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers: “I climb knowing the only way down / is by falling.” The actor Jessica Hecht plays Joan Didion in a reenactment of her classic Art of Fiction interview with Linda Kuehl. Jericho Brown reads his poem “Hero”: “my brothers and I grew up fighting / Over our mother’s mind.” The actor, comedian, and podcaster Connor Ratliff reads Bud Smith’s story “Violets,” about a couple who makes a suicide pact but then turns to arson instead. The episode closes with Bridgers performing “Garden Song.” To celebrate this last episode of the season, we asked Bud Smith if there’s a passage from a book that he returns to more than any other. He chose the first chapter of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: Early on, the narrator describes the late-night, drunken phone calls he makes to old friends. He asks the operator to connect him to a long lost sweetheart, but the operator cannot find the right listing and the call never goes through. It’s as if he has to settle for us instead. He has something very painful to talk about that he can’t get to directly. He gives us all these diversions: limericks about Yon Yonson from Wisconsin, anecdotes about taxi drivers, an elevator fatality in Chicago. And there’s that brief recounting of a journey with his young daughter, Nanny, and her friend, Allison Mitchell; they stop at the Hudson River and look at carp as big as “atomic submarines.” The plot of the novel still hasn’t started, we don’t know the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, or his dilemma, that he has come unstuck in time. The first time I read the book, I didn’t get that the narrator was showing us his search for a way to write about the atrocities of the Second World War, that he was adopting this casual, digressive style for his protection, and ours. What attracts me most is Vonnegut’s willingness, as an artist, to let the air out of the tires of what he had good reason to believe would be his masterpiece. On page two, the narrator calls the novel his “lousy little book.” Who is this guy? I thought. Why is he trashing his own book before I’ve even read it? Is this an author’s note I could have skipped? No, it says right here, it’s Chapter One. “I would hate to tell you,” he writes, “what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time.” These are my favorite twenty-something pages written in our language. The man, “an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown,” saying that he is a failure, and his greatest accomplishment is a failure. Vonnegut had to open his masterpiece with a bit of self-sabotage. I can understand that. Linda Kuehl’s 1978 Art of Fiction interview with Joan Didion, also featured in this episode, begins as follows: INTERVIEWER You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why. JOAN DIDION It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream. INTERVIEWER Are you conscious of the reader as you write? Do you write listening to the reader listening to you? DIDION Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself. Listen now at theparisreview.org/podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All five episodes of Season 3 are now available for your listening pleasure. We hope you’ll download all three seasons before your holiday travels. The Paris Review Podcast is produced in partnership with Stitcher.
November 22, 2021 Bulletin Nancy with the Laughing Face By The Paris Review Lauren Williams, Amanda Gersten, Olivia Kan-Sperling, and Lauren Kane, members of the Review’s editorial staff, on the office fire escape. Photos: Elias Altman The writer and artist Joe Brainard, who once put together an exhibition of 1,500 tiny collages, knew the importance of the little things in life: seashells, matches, expensive sweaters that are, as he put it in “The Outer Banks,” a poem first published in the Review in 1981, “the kind of plain you pay for.” His relationship with the magazine began in 1966, when he and his partner, the New York School poet and editor Kenward Elmslie, coauthored the comic “The Power Plant Sestina,” published in issue no. 38. Brainard’s contributions to the Review also include the cover art, “Pansy,” for issue no. 61 (Spring 1975) and the portfolio “Amazing But True,” in issue no. 53. In one of our most beloved house ads, he dressed Ernie Bushmiller’s comics character Nancy—who graced more than a hundred of Brainard’s works between 1963 and 1978—in a Paris Review tee. Read More
November 3, 2021 Bulletin The Paris Review Podcast, Episode 20 By The Paris Review George Saunders photo by Chloe Aftel, courtesy of the author. Season 3 of our acclaimed podcast continues today with the release of episode 20, “A Gift for Burning.” We open with an excerpt from George Saunders’s Art of Fiction interview with Benjamin Nugent in which they discuss how Saunders’s teenage job delivering fast food prepared him to write fiction. Then poet Monica Youn reads her poem “Goldacre,” a disquisition on the Twinkie. Next, Molly McCully Brown reads her essay “If You Are Permanently Lost,” about spatial cognition and the power of not knowing where you are. We end with “Fam,” Venita Blackburn’s very short story about self-love and social media. Listen now and subscribe at theparisreview.org/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will arrive every Wednesday in November. And don’t forget to catch up on Season 1 and Season 2. <span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" data-mce-type="bookmark" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span> The Paris Review Podcast is produced in partnership with Stitcher.
October 27, 2021 Bulletin The Paris Review Podcast Returns By The Paris Review With our acclaimed podcast, The Paris Review gives voice to the sixty-eight years of our archives. Season 3 launches today, with the release of episode 19, “A Memory of the Species.” We open with a recording of the literary critic Richard Poirier in conversation with Robert Frost for the poet’s 1960 Art of Poetry interview, from issue no. 24. Next, the Italian poet Antonella Anedda and her translator Susan Stewart discuss Anedda’s poem “Historiae 2,” published in issue no. 231. The American vocal ensemble Tenores de Aterúe then reimagines the poem as a song in the folk tradition of Anedda’s native Sardinia. And Yohanca Delgado reads her story “The Little Widow from the Capital,” from issue no. 236, in which a chorus of Dominican women living in a New York apartment building gossip about their new neighbor’s talents for embroidery and witchcraft. Listen now at theparisreview.org/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will arrive every Wednesday in November. And don’t forget to catch up on Season 1 and Season 2. The Paris Review Podcast is produced in partnership with Stitcher.