Bulletin Archives – The Paris Review

May 10, 2019
Bulletin

The Winners of 92Y’s 2019 Discovery Poetry Contest

By The Paris Review

For nearly seven decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers—John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Larry Levis, Mary Jo Bang, and Solmaz Sharif, among many others—have gone on to become leading voices in their generations.

This year’s competition received close to twelve hundred submissions, which were read by preliminary judges Timothy Donnelly and Mai Der Vang. After much deliberation, final judges Daniel Borzutzky, Randall Mann, and Patricia Smith awarded this year’s prizes to Alfredo Aguilar, Bernard Ferguson, Omotara James, and Alycia Pirmohamed. The runners-up were Mia Kang, Henry Mills, and Jasmine Reid.

The four winners receive five hundred dollars, publication on The Paris Review Daily, a stay at the Ace Hotel, and a reading at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center on May 16. Congratulations to the winners! We’re pleased to present their work below. Read More

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April 1, 2019
Bulletin

Deborah Eisenberg’s Life in Comics

By Liana Finck

This year, The Paris Review honors Deborah Eisenberg with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. Eisenberg is a writing professor at Columbia University, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her first four collections of stories—Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006)—were reprinted as The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010). Her fifth collection, Your Duck Is My Duck, was published last year.

But if you really want to know about Deborah Eisenberg, please enjoy an abridged biography by the cartoonist Liana Finck: Read More

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March 6, 2019
Bulletin

Kelli Jo Ford Wins 2019 Plimpton Prize; Benjamin Nugent Wins Terry Southern Prize

By The Paris Review
The Paris Review’s Spring Revel is less than a month away—tickets are still available here—and the editorial committee of our board has chosen the winners of two annual prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine. It’s with great pleasure that we announce our 2019 honorees, Kelli Jo Ford and Benjamin Nugent.

Winners of the Plimpton Prize include Isabella Hammad, Alexia Arthurs, Emma Cline, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jesse Ball, and Yiyun Li; Southern Prize winners include David Sedaris, Vanessa Davis, Chris Bachelder, Mark Leyner, Ben Lerner, and Elif Batuman. The Review began awarding prizes to its contributors in 1956; here’s a full list of past recipients, including Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace, Christina Stead, Denis Johnson, Frank Bidart, and Annie Proulx. Read More
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September 25, 2018
Bulletin

Honoring Deborah Eisenberg

By The Paris Review
Deborah Eisenberg, ca. 2009. Photograph courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

We are proud to announce that The Paris Review will honor Deborah Eisenberg with the 2019 Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. Selected by the editorial committee and presented each year at our Spring Revel, the Hadada is given to “a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” This is a high bar, but Deborah sails over it.

A writing professor at Columbia University, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Eisenberg has published four collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). All four collections were reprinted as The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010). Her fifth collection, Your Duck Is My Duck, was published by Ecco today.

Eisenberg, who only began publishing work around the age of forty, quickly established herself as a virtuoso of the short story, her primary medium. She first appeared in The Paris Review, fully formed, as a subject in our Writers at Work interview series, and her story “Taj Mahal” was published in the Fall 2015 issue. In her interview with Catherine Steindler, she explains: “When I was in high school, all my friends said they were going to be writers. And I thought, How come you get to be a writer, and I don’t? I thought WRITER was written on their foreheads and they saw it when they looked in the mirror, and I sure didn’t see it when I looked in the mirror. I always thought of writing as holy. I still do. It’s not something I approach casually.” We are delighted to bestow upon Deborah this magazine’s highest and holiest award.

The Hadada has been awarded since 2003, when the Review gave the inaugural prize to the legendary publisher Barney Rosset. Since then, greats such as Joan Didion, John Ashbery, Lydia Davis, Robert Silvers, and Paula Fox have received the honor. Last year, The Paris Review presented the award to the incomparable Joy Williams.

The Hadada is one of three prizes presented at our annual gala, the Spring Revel. Known to some as “prom for intellectuals,” the Revel is an evening of merriment, frippery, and fine prose. All proceeds from the Revel support the magazine, which has been a nonprofit since 2004. Claim your seat for April 2, 2019, when you can join us to support the Review and celebrate Deborah Eisenberg.
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September 7, 2018
Bulletin

Five Young Women With Prize-Winning Book Collections

By The Paris Review
Winner Jessica Jordan’s collection

In 2017, Honey & Wax Booksellers established an annual prize for American women book collectors, aged 30 years and younger. The idea took shape when Heather O’Donnell and Rebecca Romney, the bookstore’s owners, observed that “the women who regularly buy books from us are less likely to call themselves “collectors” than the men, even when those women have spent years passionately collecting books.” By providing a financial incentive, and a forum in which to celebrate and share their collections, O’Donnell and Romney hope to encourage a new generation of women. As they say, “The act of collecting books is often a private and obsessive pursuit, and that’s part of its appeal, but collecting is also a way to connect with others: to inform those who share your interests, and to inspire those who don’t share them yet. And by rescuing and recontextualizing pieces of the historical record, collectors contribute to a larger conversation across generations.” This year, one contestant wrote to them, ““I already feel more like a real collector just by applying for this prize.”

We are pleased to unveil the winner of the 2018 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize, who will receive a thousand dollars, as well as four honorable mentions, who will each receive two hundred and fifty dollars.

WINNER

Jessica Jordan: The work of American illustrators Leo and Diane Dillon

Jessica Jordan, 27, is a former bookseller and current graduate student in English at Stanford. She has collected books designed by prolific American illustrators Leo and Diane Dillon. The Dillons’ experience as interracial partners (in life and work) informed their approach to graphic design over five decades. “We decided early in our career that we wanted to represent all races and show people that were rarely seen,” they wrote. Famously versatile and productive, the Dillons collaborated on an untold number of commercial book projects, from pulp science fiction (winning the Hugo Award for Best Artist) to children’s stories (winning the Caldecott Medal, twice) to iconic paperback editions of James Baldwin, Madeleine L’Engle, Chinua Achebe, and Isabel Allende. Jordan notes that “the Dillons’ work is unsigned on many of their early book covers – meaning that the burden of identification is left solely to my own abilities . . . as I have grown my collection, I have also been training my eye to see what others don’t, and nothing else puts a spring in a book collector’s step quite like that feeling.”

Honey & Wax says, “We admired the depth of Jordan’s collection, and the sense of discovery that animates it, especially as it relates to previously uncredited Dillon titles, and to the afterlife of the Dillons’ imagery in the Black Power movement.”

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Margaret Landis: Women in STEM

Margaret Landis, 27, is a research scientist with the Planetary Science Institute, stationed in Albuquerque, NM. She has collected books by and about pioneering women in science, technology, engineering, and math. While the history of women in STEM is a newly popular genre in the wake of the 2016 film Hidden Figures, Landis “started looking back in publishing history to see if similar eras of popularity of women-in-science biographies had occurred.” That search drew her back to the early twentieth century, when Eve Curie’s 1937 biography of Marie Curie won the National Book Award, and Rebecca Joslin’s 1929 Chasing Eclipses showcased an amateur astronomer’s travels.

Honey & Wax says, “We admired Landis’s creation of a working library for students historically underrepresented in STEM fields, revealing that “people like them have been contributing since the beginning.” We were also impressed by the way that Landis refined her focus in the year since her first submission to the Honey & Wax Prize in 2017.”

Miranda Marraccini: Barbara Pym

Miranda Marraccini, 28, is a graduate student in English at Princeton. Her collection is devoted to English comic novelist Barbara Pym (1913-1980), including not only copies of Pym’s own books, but the works of dozens of writers that Pym quotes in her fiction, ideally in the midcentury British editions Pym herself would have read: “For Pym, books offer a kind of shorthand for character: often, she lists the titles on a character’s bedside table, or has a protagonist repeat the same quotation at different points in the novel . . . in her novels, we are what we read.”

Honey & Wax says, “We appreciated the originality of Marraccini’s intertextual approach to a single author, reflected in her bibliography annotated with Pym’s allusions, a lively portrait of the literary tradition that shaped a particular kind of English wit.”

Michelle Porter: The Golden Age of the American musical

Michelle Porter, 30, is a library technician in Rapid City, SD. She collects first edition libretti from the Golden Age of the American musical, 1930-1970. Porter’s focus is on the cultural history captured at the moment of performance: “Broadway, at that time, could be more risqué than Hollywood because the entertainment was limited to a fixed geographic location rather than being simultaneously screened nationwide. Whether subversive scripts indirectly mocked the status quo or waged outright war, reading them today gives a true impression of the mores of those times better than any sociology intensive.”

Honey & Wax says, “We admired Porter’s attention to these libretti as historical documents, and her account of how her project spurred her to develop the scouting and negotiating skills of a seasoned book collector.”

Marielle Stockton: The writings of Ella Rhoads Higginson

Marielle Stockton, 20, a college student in Everett, WA, for her collection of the writings of Ella Rhoads Higginson (1862-1940), a bestselling early chronicler of the Pacific Northwest. Focusing on “Higginson’s unusual position as a prolific female author in a sparsely-populated corner of the country,” Stockton collects Higginson’s now out-of-print books, as well as postcards and sheet music featuring her work, and books by her contemporaries and influences. “The collection currently paints a picture of the Pacific Northwest that Higginson lived in and wrote about, as well as the literary culture she was writing to and within.”

Honey & Wax says, “We enjoyed following Stockton’s energetic online pursuit of overlooked Higginson ephemera and signed material, inspired by an ongoing recovery project at Western Washington University.”

Honey & Wax would like to thank the sponsors of the 2018 Honey & Wax Prize, AbeBooks and The Rosenbach. They’d also like to thank the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, Fine Books & Collections, the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, the Brooklyn Antiquarian Book Fair, and all the others who helped spread the word about this year’s prize. Now on to next year.
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August 30, 2018
Bulletin

Announcing Our New Editors

By Emily Nemens
My first few months as editor have flown by, and I’m excited to share the fruits of this busy summer soon—the Fall issue will go online just after Labor Day.

Much of this summer has also been spent getting to know colleagues up and down the masthead. There are a few people I’ve yet to track down for a meal or a Skype date, but talking shop with the staff, city editors, advisory editors, and the board has been lovely and informative. Through those conversations, I’ve also identified several opportunities for growth, as well as several key editors to help us with that growing. Prime among them is Hasan Altaf, who will start as our managing editor in September. Hasan and I are both excited about his editorial expertise and his commitment to bring new voices to the magazine.

We’ve also appointed novelist Christian Keifer to fill the newly added role of West Coast Editor. Christian’s inveterate energy, good taste, and large network have already proven valuable to my first issue, and we should all be thankful that he connected us with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose Art of Poetry interview is now underway.

The ranks of Advisory Editors have expanded. Some of the new additions, like Poetry Editor alum Robyn Creswell, have been contributing to the magazine for years. Others, like new advisory editor Saskia Hamilton, brought us content—unpublished Elizabeth Bishop!—that will appear in my first issue. Christopher Merrill is already working to expand our international reach, so stay tuned.

As a means of introduction, I asked each editor for a bio and a favorite piece from the archive. —Emily Nemens Read More
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