April 18, 2016 Bulletin Win Free Tickets: Nathaniel Mackey and Cathy Park Hong By Dan Piepenbring Nathaniel Mackey. This Wednesday, April 20, join us at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, where Cathy Park Hong will interview Nathaniel Mackey. Their talk will appear in a future issue of The Paris Review, but you can hear it here first. Read More
April 4, 2016 Bulletin Together at Last: The Paris Review & Lucky Peach By The Paris Review Here’s a fact about serious readers: all of them eat. Every last one. And many of them eat multiple times a day. With this in mind, our shrewd Department of Cross-Promotions is bringing you the perfect deal: a dual subscription to The Paris Review and Lucky Peach, our favorite food journal. That’s one year of the best in literature and the best in food writing for only $50. We’ve long admired Lucky Peach, which combines some of our favorite ingredients: bold writing, fresh new voices, and an irreverent interest in what and how we eat. We never miss an issue. And we’re proud to say they read us, too, for the best in contemporary fiction, poetry, and interviews. We’ve even shared some writers over the years, like John Jeremiah Sullivan, our Southern editor, whose Lucky Peach essay “I Placed a Jar in Tennessee” won the James Beard Foundation’s MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. Or Ottessa Moshfegh, our 2014 Plimpton Prize winner, who took to Lucky Peach to remember the mayonnaise (or lack thereof) of her youth. Or Alison Kinney, who wrote about the history of Icelandic sagas for the Daily and the history of chocolate eggs for Lucky Peach. Now, after years of mutual eating and reading, we’ve finally formalized the arrangement. Start your joint subscription now and get two great magazines for one low price. Hurry—this deal is only available through April 30.
April 1, 2016 Bulletin Ahoy! All Aboard the Paris Review Cruise By The Paris Review Join us for the inaugural Paris Review cruise! We’re thrilled to announce a new chapter for The Paris Review’s subscribers—an exciting opportunity to meet your fellow readers, enhance your writing skills, and relax in the sun while you support your favorite literary magazine. This August, join us aboard the SS Plimpton for four days of fun, food, and fiction as we set sail for scenic Rehoboth Beach, Delaware! For only $375*, you can make memories and friendships you’ll treasure for the rest of your life. Want to learn more? Read on! Read More
March 25, 2016 Bulletin Poignant Comic Magic By Lorin Stein All illustrations by Jason Novak. As Paris Review subscribers know, every once in a while we serialize a novel. That is, we publish it in sections, usually over the course of a year, with recaps to bring new readers up to date. And we hire the best illustrators we can find—a stable that has included Tom Keogh, Leanne Shapton, Samantha Hahn, and a young “Andrew” Warhol. Over the past five years, we’ve brought you a lost work by Roberto Bolaño, a breakout novel by Rachel Cusk, and, most recently, the winner of this year’s Terry Southern Prize for Humor—a football novel for people who don’t know the rules—The Throwback Special, by Chris Bachelder, with illustrations by Jason Novak. This month, The Throwback Special came out in hardcover—and the crowd, as they say, went wild. The Minneapolis Star Tribune calls it “2016’s first Great Book … A wise, patient examination of American culture.” The Los Angeles Times praises its “poignant comic magic … powerful, intelligent, and entertaining.” And now the New York Times Book Review has weighed in: “Wistful and elegantly written … The Throwback Special conjures the rewarding melancholy of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels.” Don’t miss the next great book of 2016, or years to come—subscribe now!
March 18, 2016 Bulletin Paul Beatty Wins National Book Critics Circle’s Fiction Award By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Hannah Assouline Our congratulations to Paul Beatty, whose novel The Sellout won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction yesterday. The New York Times calls The Sellout “a scorching satire that wrenches humor out of painful subjects like slavery, police violence, and segregation”—it was one of our favorite novels of 2015. Last May, the Daily published a conversation between Beatty and Chris Jackson. “I’m surprised that everybody keeps calling this a comic novel,” Beatty said of The Sellout: I mean, I get it. But it’s an easy way not to talk about anything else. I would better understand it if they talked about it in a hyphenated way, to talk about it as a tragicomic novel, even. There’s comedy in the book, but there’s a bunch of other stuff in there, too. It’s easy just to hide behind the humor, and then you don’t have to talk about anything else. But I definitely don’t think of myself as a satirist. I mean, what is satire? Do you remember that New Yorker cover that everyone was saying was satire? Barack and Michelle fist-bumping? That’s not satire to me. It was just a commentary. Just poking fun at somebody doesn’t make something satire. It’s a word everyone throws around a lot. I’m not sure how I define it … I was talking to a friend and she said, Your audience is just a bunch of weirdos. But she meant it in a very positive way. There’s a special kind of weirdo who’s going to appreciate it. At least, I think that’s what she was saying. Read the whole interview here. Congratulations to Paul Beatty and all the NBCC award winners from all of us at the Review.
March 14, 2016 Bulletin The Paris Review in Paris By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of our Summer 1968 issue—now, for a limited time only, not misleading. The Paris Review hasn’t been headquartered in Paris since 1973—a cause of immeasurable confusion over the years. But this week, for once, our name makes sense: our editor, Lorin Stein, is in the City of Light. Though he’s not, to my knowledge, reviewing anything there, he’s speaking at two free events, and we invite our Parisian readers to attend. On Tuesday, March 15, Lorin joins Russell Williams and Nelly Kaprièlian at the American University of Paris for a panel called “Translating Houellebecq.” They’ll discuss the global reception, significance, and challenges of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, which Lorin translated into English last year. The talk will be held in Room C-104, located in the AUP Combes building, at six P.M.; those looking to attend should write [email protected] to register. On Thursday, March 17, Lorin and David Szalay appear in conversation at Shakespeare and Company. Szalay is the winner of this year’s Plimpton Prize, awarded for his novellas Youth, from issue 213, and Lascia Amor e siegui Marte, from issue 215. Their talk begins at seven. We urge our French readership to join Lorin before he returns to New York and The Paris Review resumes its life as a misnomer.