February 13, 2017 Bulletin This Wednesday: Morgan Parker at BAM By The Paris Review Morgan Parker. This Wednesday, February 15, Morgan Parker will appear at BAM to launch her new poetry collection, There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé. (One may be tempted to object, after Beyoncé’s stunningly baroque performance at the Grammys last night.) Parker will join the Brooklyn Museum’s Rujeko Hockley to discuss black American womanhood, politics, art, and pop culture. Tickets are available here. Parker’s poem “Hottentot Venus” appeared in our Spring 2016 issue. (“I wish my pussy could live / in a different shape and get / some goddamn respect,” it begins.) Last summer, she told the Daily, One thing that interests me about Beyoncé is who her predecessors are, and how she’s a kind of symbol for all the different ways that black women are revered but also surveilled in a really intense way, put on display. That happens to me just walking down the street. It happens in another way for black women who are celebrities. The whole legacy of Hottentot Venus is one of dehumanization and display. I was interested in that line between awe or reverence—and also exploitation. Where is that line? What does it mean to be at once upheld and at the same time continually made to feel less than? All these questions belonged in the manuscript, which I think of as kind of a tome of black womanhood.
January 31, 2017 Bulletin Now Online: Our Interviews with Ishmael Reed and J. H. Prynne By The Paris Review Ishmael Reed, 2015. The two Writers at Work interviews from our Fall 2016 issue are now online, in full, free to read for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike. In the Art of Poetry No. 100, Ishmael Reed is interviewed by Chris Jackson; Reed discusses growing up in Buffalo, the search for “new mythologies” that led him to write Mumbo Jumbo, and his concerns for young writers of color: Combative writing has always been our tradition, even when we try to avoid it. I recently saw an article in the New York Times about Cave Canem, the group of black poets, and one of them described the trend in black literature as a “shift out of the ‘I’m a black man in America and it’s hard’ mode into the idea of ‘you are who you are, so that’s always going to be part of the poem.’ ” As if the tradition of writing about black suffering—I’ve been ’buked and scorned and all that—was dead. But why can’t you write about the hardships that black men and women face in everyday life? It was certainly hard for Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland. Read More
December 6, 2016 Bulletin Now Online: Our Interviews with Dag Solstad, Jay McInerney By The Paris Review The interviews from our Summer issue are now online in their entirety, freely available for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike. In the Art of Fiction No. 231, Jay McInerney discusses the circumstances that led to his first published short story—which appeared in The Paris Review: Read More
December 5, 2016 Bulletin Our Winter Issue: Rankine, Gray, Murray, and More By Dan Piepenbring The interviews in our new Winter issue feature three writers who have defied received wisdom—writers who have expanded art’s role in the national conversation. The first is one of the most politically engaged poets of our time; the second is a novelist whose experimental forms have made him a hero in his native Scotland, though he remains underread in the U.S.; and the third is with a critic who devoted his career to asserting and celebrating the centrality of the black experience to American culture. First, there’s Claudia Rankine on the art of poetry, finding the lyric in nontraditional spaces, and reaching as wide an American audience as possible: Read More
November 28, 2016 Bulletin New Paris Review Look, Same Great Paris Review Taste! By Dan Piepenbring Do not adjust your sets: theparisreview.org has been fully redesigned and beautified. If you fear change, you’ll be horrified to learn that this new site is more than just a cosmetic improvement: it also marks the debut of our complete digital archive, making available each and every piece from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away; you can also try a free ten-day trial period. Now you can read every short story and poem, every portfolio, every hastily doodled authorial self-portrait, and every introductory notice from the unassailable George Plimpton, who used to use the front of the magazine to brag about its ever-longer masthead. (“It is extremely difficult to extricate oneself—rather like being stuck in a bramble bush.”) As always, our full Writers at Work interview series, which dates back to 1953, is freely available. This week, watch this space to get a sample of some of our favorite writing from the magazine’s past. We’ll start today with “The Paris Review Sketchbook,” an illuminating history of the magazine by George Plimpton and Norman Mailer from our seventy-ninth issue, published in 1981: Read More
November 25, 2016 Bulletin Save 30 Percent on Our Favorite Classics By The Paris Review For the holidays, we’re offering 30 percent off the subscription to our monthly book club with New York Review Books, the imprint known for “rescuing and reviving all kinds of ignored or forgotten works … by writers renowned and obscure” (the New York Times). Sign up and you’ll get a one-year subscription to The Paris Review plus one new book from NYRB Classics every month. That’s four issues of the best new fiction, poetry, and interviews, plus twelve books, bringing you the best new and rediscovered classics: a $260 value, for just $140. It makes a great gift, yes—but take it from us, these are books you’ll want to read yourself, too. Subscribe now and give yourself a year of great reading.