May 20, 2015 Bulletin New on the Masthead: Susannah Hunnewell and Adam Thirlwell By Lorin Stein Susannah Hunnewell. Photo: Stephen Andrew Hiltner Adam Thirlwell. Photo: Eamon McCabe Starting with our Summer Issue, the novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell will join The Paris Review as London editor—our first in ten years. In that time, we’ve been admiring Adam’s fiction and criticism, as well as his editorial work for McSweeney’s. (In 2010, we sent him to interview Václav Havel, alas too late.) We’re not the only ones, of course. Granta chose him as one of its best young British novelists—twice—and he was recently chosen by Salman Rushdie and Colm Tóibín for the E. M. Forster Award, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters to a young British writer. Despite his much-belaureled youth, Adam is the author of three novels and a study of cross-cultural influence in fiction, The Delighted States.* It seems particularly fitting, therefore, to launch his tenure with our special issue on the art of translation, featuring new work from half a dozen languages. In the same issue, careful readers will notice another change to our masthead. Susannah Hunnewell, our longtime Paris editor, has been named publisher of the Review. As Paris editor, Susannah interviewed Kazuo Ishiguro, Harry Mathews, Michel Houellebecq, and Emmanuel Carrère; in our new issue, she interviews the translating duo Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. A former editor at George and Marie Claire, Susannah began her career as a Paris Review intern, a fact she shares in common with our departing publisher, her husband, Antonio Weiss, who left the Review earlier this year to become Counselor to the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. (We won’t think of it as losing a beloved publisher or a brilliant foreign correspondent, but as gaining one of each.) We congratulate Adam and Susannah—and wish them joy in their new hats! *Full subtitle: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by Maps, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes
May 12, 2015 Bulletin Our Latest Pushcart Prize Winners By Dan Piepenbring We’re delighted to announce that three of our contributors have won Pushcart Prizes this year: Zadie Smith, for “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets,” a story from issue 208; Dorothea Lasky, for her poem “Porn,” also from issue 208; and Jane Hirshfield, for “A Cottony Fate,” a poem from issue 209. All three pieces will appear this November in Pushcart Prize XL: Best of the Small Presses, an anthology of this year’s winning writing. The book’s XL means “forty,” not “extra large,” though at 650 pages it could mean that, too. Congratulations to Zadie, Dorothea, and Jane!
May 5, 2015 Bulletin Available Now: The Paris Review Commencement Gift Box By The Paris Review “There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life,” David Foster Wallace said, “that nobody talks about in commencement speeches”—but too many graduation gifts hint at these parts. Real Simple, for instance, recommends a leather mousepad (succumb to carpal tunnel syndrome in style!); Esquire recommends booze. The best gifts are practical and inspirational. That’s why we’ve put together The Paris Review Commencement Gift Box, including a one-year subscription, a limited-edition Paris Review tote, and a trusty no. 2 Paris Review pencil. It also features two of the most inspiring issues from our archive—156 and 158—in which Hunter S. Thompson, Lorrie Moore, Rick Moody, George Saunders, and Dave Eggers discuss graduation, writing, and life beyond the classroom. The boxes are available from now through the end of June. They make a great present for aspiring writers, who should, in the words of William Kennedy, “read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.” You’ll find all the details here—order now.
May 4, 2015 Bulletin The Paris Review of the Air, Land, and Sea By The Paris Review Samantha Hahn’s illustration of a flight attendant from the cover of our Winter 2013 issue. For its front-cabin passengers, United Airlines is turning Rhapsody into the Paris Review of the air, attracting authors like Joyce Carol Oates and Anthony Doerr.—New York Times, May 3, 2015 Fly first class on United Airlines and you’ll get a complimentary literary magazine called Rhapsody. We’re flattered that the Times has seen fit to compare this lavish bit of swag to the Review. But what to read if you’re stuck in economy with the rest of us? Don’t despair—the “other” Paris Review travels everywhere, and it comes with some perks of its own. Stories about the misery that is actual air travel. Rhapsody avoids writing about “plane crashes or woeful tales of lost luggage or rude flight attendants.” But we’ve explored the dark side of the skies since 1978: “The stewardess who smells like a dead dog has already rolled me over so that I won’t aspirate if I vomit” (Dallas Wiebe, “Night Flight to Stockholm,” issue 73). Writing about sex. “We’re not going to have someone write about joining the mile-high club,” proclaims the editor in chief of Rhapsody. We make no such promise. As publishers of grown-up stories about grown-up life, we believe in frank depictions of eros—at cruising altitude or any other. One one-hundred-seventy-fifth of the cost. First-class flights from New York to Paris start at about seven thousand dollars. You can get a year of The Paris Review for forty bucks. Subscribe now. You’re first class to us.
April 20, 2015 Bulletin This Tuesday: Chris Ware and Lorin Stein at BAM By Dan Piepenbring Tomorrow evening (Tuesday, April 21), join us in Brooklyn at the BAMcafé, where our editor, Lorin Stein, will talk to Chris Ware as part of BAM’s Eat, Drink, and Be Literary series. Zadie Smith has said, “There’s no writer alive whose work I love more than Chris Ware.” His latest book, Building Stories (2012), pushes the boundaries of the comic format—it’s a series of books, broadsheets, scraps, and pamphlets focusing on the inhabitants of a single building in Chicago. The Paris Review’s interview with Ware ran in our Fall 2014 issue, for which he also designed the cover. “The quote marks that fine art put around picture making in the mid to late twentieth century just seemed a dead end to me,” he says, speaking of what led him to pursue comics: Sarcasm can only go so far. I just figured there must still be various ways to make art “about” something without making it bad or sentimental. Comics basically seemed a way toward this goal for me, especially since they are a language meant to be read, not seen—which is a frighteningly interesting and very human way of perceiving the world, and one that’s generally given short shrift, especially in art schools. Tickets for tomorrow’s event are available here. Lorin will also moderate BAM events with Jane Smiley, on June 2, and Rachel Kushner, on June 10.
April 1, 2015 Bulletin Introducing The Paris Review for Young Readers By The Paris Review This piece was published as part of a series of April Fool’s posts in 2015, intended purely as a parody. It is not intended to communicate any true or factual information, and is for entertainment purposes only. “Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time,” E. B. White told this magazine in 1969. “Children are … the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly.” We couldn’t agree more. That’s why we’re proud to announce The Paris Review for Young Readers, the first magazine that writes up to children. (No offense to Cricket or Highlights.) Imagine a space for children’s literature that doesn’t condescend, cosset, or coarsen; that’s free of easy jokes and derivative fantasy; that invites open discussion and abundant imagination. A space, in other words, that offers the same caliber of fiction, poetry, art, and interviews you expect from The Paris Review, for readers age eight to twelve. Today marks the release of TPRFYR’s first issue, and we think the table of contents below speaks for itself. Among its poetry and fiction, you’ll find old classics and new favorites—plus some puzzles, quizzes, and advice columns inspired by literature. There’s a portfolio of drawings from Richard Scarry’s lost years, and, at the center of it all, an interview with Eric Carle, the author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. “A child is an almost platonic reader,” Carle says. “His imagination remains unbounded.” Read More