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
March 5, 2015 Bulletin Writing from the Winners of the 2015 Whiting Awards By Dan Piepenbring Congratulations to the ten winners of this year’s Whiting Awards: Anthony Carelli, poetry Leopoldine Core, fiction Aracelis Girmay, poetry Lucas Hnath, drama Jenny Johnson, poetry Dan Josefson, fiction Elena Passarello, nonfiction Roger Reeves, poetry Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, fiction Anne Washburn, drama The Daily is delighted to have selections from work by all the 2015 honorees. Click each name above to read on and learn more about them. Read More
March 2, 2015 Bulletin A Room of One’s Own (With Someone to Make the Bed) By The Paris Review For the past two years, we’ve partnered with the Standard, East Village, in downtown Manhattan, to find a Writer-in-Residence—someone with a book under contract who could use three weeks in a hotel room. Last summer’s winner, the poet Ansel Elkins, from Greensboro, North Carolina, was profiled by The New Yorker during her stay. “I come down here with a book until I feel awake,” she said in the hotel restaurant, “and I watch the parade of fine-looking men in suits. You don’t get that in Greensboro.” Today through April 8, we’re accepting applications for our next residency. No dishes, no distractions, just a quiet room in the center of everything. The residency will last the first three weeks in July; once again, applicants must have a book under contract. Applications will be judged by the editors of The Paris Review and Standard Culture. You can find all the details here. (We’ll answer your most burning question in advance: yes, the room includes free breakfast and free coffee.)
March 2, 2015 Bulletin Now in Bloom: Our Spring Issue By The Paris Review The cherry blossoms on the cover of our new Spring issue augur the end of winter—even if they’re made of paper. They’re part of a portfolio by Thomas Demand, accompanied by poems from Ben Lerner. We also have the first-ever in-person interview with Elena Ferrante, on the art of fiction: As a girl—twelve, thirteen years old—I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me … At fifteen I began to write stories about brave girls who were in serious trouble. But the idea remained—indeed, it grew stronger—that the greatest narrators were men and that one had to learn to narrate like them … Even when I wrote stories about girls, I wanted to give the heroine a wealth of experiences, a freedom, a determination that I tried to imitate from the great novels written by men. And Lydia Davis, on her approach to the short story, to translation, and to naming: I’ve always felt that naming was artificial. I’ve done it. I wrote about one woman and called her Mrs. Orlando, because the woman I based her on lived in Florida. Recently I wrote a story called “The Two Davises and the Rug” because I have a neighbor named Davis and he and I were trying to decide which one should end up with a certain rug, and I was very fond of using that name, even though it wouldn’t make much difference to anybody if I called it “The Two Harrises and the Rug.” Plus, Hilary Mantel discusses her Cromwell books and the difference between historians and novelists: Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn’t any necessary conflict between good history and good drama. I know that history is not shapely, and I know the truth is often inconvenient and incoherent. It contains all sorts of superfluities. You could cut a much better shape if you were God, but as it is, I think the whole fascination and the skill is in working with those incoherencies. There’s new fiction by Angela Flournoy, Ken Kalfus, and Mark Leyner, the winner of this year’s Terry Southern Prize; a novella by James Lasdun; and poems from Charles Simic, Peter Gizzi, Major Jackson, Stephen Dunn, Susan Stewart, Shuzo Takiguchi, Craig Morgan Teicher, and Sarah Trudgeon. Mel Bochner, who designed a cover for the magazine back in 1973, is back with a portfolio of thesaurus paintings. And last, there’s “Letter from the Primal Horde,” an essay by J. D. Daniels about a fateful experience at a group-relations conference. Subscribe now!