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.
September 23, 2021 Bulletin Announcing the Winners of the 2021 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize By The Paris Review In 2017, Honey & Wax Booksellers established an annual prize for American women book collectors, aged thirty years and younger. Our goal, at the time, was to expand the popular perception of who book collectors are (and can be) by highlighting original collections built by young women, often without the knowledge or help of the rare book trade. By celebrating their achievements, we hoped to inspire potential collectors to look at their shelves differently, to identify patterns and projects, to think critically about what aspects of the historical record they might be uniquely qualified to recognize and preserve. In this, our fifth year, it is especially gratifying to award the Honey & Wax Prize to a collector who has applied repeatedly, each time with a stronger and more focused collection. In 2017, as a graduate student at the University of Arizona, Margaret Landis submitted a general collection of books about women in science: a reading list that had inspired her in her scientific career. A well-chosen reading list is a valuable thing, but it is not a book collection: a collector pursues not just texts, but objects with material histories of their own. The 2017 submission did not place. Read More
July 1, 2021 Bulletin Announcing Our Summer Subscription Deal By The Paris Review You’ve been inside all year … need a conversation starter? Announcing our summer subscription deal: starting today and through the end of August, you’ll find plenty to talk about 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-eight years of The Paris Review and fifty-eight years of The New York Review of Books—for $50 off the regular subscription price. Since the beginning, when former Paris Review managing editor Robert Silvers cofounded The New York Review of Books with Barbara Epstein, the two publications have been closely aligned. With your subscription to both magazines, you’ll have access to fiction, poetry, interviews, criticism, and more from some of the most important writers of our time, from Joan Didion to James Baldwin, Susan Sontag to T. S. Eliot, Hilton Als to Elizabeth Hardwick. 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-eight years of The New York Review of Books and sixty-eight 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. PS: Canadian and international readers, this deal is available to you, too—for $109 and $129, respectively!
June 25, 2021 Bulletin The Winners of 92Y’s 2021 Discovery Poetry Contest By The Paris Review For close to 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, 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 a thousand submissions, which were read by preliminary judges Julia Guez and Timothy Donnelly. After much deliberating, final judges Rick Barot, Patricia Spears Jones, and Mónica de la Torre awarded this year’s prizes to Kenzie Allen, Ina Cariño, Mag Gabbert, and Alexandra Zukerman. The runners-up were Walter Ancarrow, Hannah Loeb, Dāshaun Washington, and JinJin Xu. 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 in the fall of 2021. We’re pleased to present their work below. Read More