May 8, 2017 Bulletin Now Online: Our Interviews with Claudia Rankine and Alasdair Gray By The Paris Review Claudia Rankine, 2016. The two Writers at Work interviews from our Winter 2016 issue are now online, in full, free to read for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike. In the Art of Poetry No. 102, Claudia Rankine talks to David L. Ulin about finding the lyric in nontraditional spaces, reaching as wide an American audience as possible, and having a breakthrough with her collection Citizen: It felt like the first time I could actively be involved in a public discussion about race, in a discussion that, to me, is essential to our well-being as a country. It wasn’t simply about publicizing the book, it was about having a conversation. It was also an opportunity for me to learn what others really thought and felt. The responses were various. One man said he was moved by a reading I gave and wanted to do something to help me. I said I personally had a privileged life, which I do, and that I didn’t need his help. What I needed was for him—this was a white gentleman—to understand the urgency of the situation for him and to help himself in an America that was so racially divided. It wasn’t about him coming from his own position of privilege—of white privilege—to take black people on as a burden, but rather to understand that we are all part of the same broken structures. He said, I can take what you’re saying, but you’re going to shut down everybody else in this audience. And all of a sudden I was like, What? I thought you wanted to help me! To remove him from the role of “white savior” was to attack him in his own imagination. A white woman, a professor, told me that what I was calling racism was really bias against overweight black women. You might think they were just a defensive man and a crazy professor, but again and again I was coming up against what was being framed as understanding and realizing that it was not that. Read More
April 10, 2017 Bulletin Hilton Als Wins Pulitzer Prize for Criticism By The Paris Review Als in 2005. Photo: Dominique Nabokov, via The New York Review of Books. Congratulations to our advisory editor Hilton Als on his Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In today’s announcement, the committee cited the strength of his work for The New Yorker, where he’s written “bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality, and race.” You can—and must—read those essays here. But say you have hankering for more Hilton… Read More
March 16, 2017 Bulletin Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah Selected for Inaugural One Book, One New York Program By The Paris Review https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/obony-winner_1-minute.mp4 We’re delighted to announce that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah is the winner of the first-ever One Book, One New York program. This February, the mayor’s office invited New Yorkers to pick a book they’d like the city to read together: the other finalists were Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Online and at kiosks in the subway, readers throughout the city cast some fifty thousand votes. In the months to come, Americanah will feature in a series of free events throughout the city. As part of these proceedings, on May 11, The Paris Review will open our doors for a salon in Adichie’s honor at our loft. Watch this space; we’ll share more details about the event as soon as they’re available. In the meantime, we congratulate Adichie, and look forward to seeing Americanah on the subway and buses and park benches, on rooftops and fire escapes, in libraries and bars and coffee shops and the DMV—and everywhere else New Yorkers read. Read more about One Book, One New York here.
March 8, 2017 Bulletin Our Spring Issue: Walter Mosley, Elias Khoury, Janet Malcolm, and More By The Paris Review Our new Spring issue features an interview with Walter Mosley, best known for his Easy Rawlins crime series, who talks about detective fiction, black male heroes, and the literary fixation on legacy: At one point, there were very few writers—now there are so many of them. Those earlier writers were thinking about the future, and some of them even survived into the future, like Faulkner. But so what? It’s not like you’re a better writer than someone who is forgotten. Melville was completely forgotten, and then rediscovered in the twenties. What difference did that make to Melville? That idea, of trying to set yourself up for importance and legacy, to say, I’m the voice that speaks for this generation—who cares? Read More
March 6, 2017 Bulletin Alexia Arthurs Wins Plimpton Prize; Vanessa Davis Wins Terry Southern Prize By The Paris Review The Paris Review’s Spring Revel is coming up—tickets are available here—and 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 2017 honorees, Alexia Arthurs and Vanessa Davis. Read More
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.