February 6, 2015 Bulletin Visit Our Valentine’s Day Pop-up Shop on Thursday By Dan Piepenbring Our gift boxes—and plenty of issues from our archive—will be available on Thursday. You may have heard about our special Valentine’s Day gift box—choose any three issues from our archive, and at no extra charge, we’ll bundle them in the lovely package you see above, including a card featuring William Pène du Bois’s 1953 sketch of the Place de la Concorde. If you’re downtown this Thursday, February 12, and you need a last-minute gift, you can pick up a Valentine Day’s set from us in person. We’re hosting a pop-up shop at the Standard Hotel’s Shop at the High Line: 848 Washington Street at Thirteenth Street. We’ll be there all afternoon with a wide array of vintage issues, discounted subscriptions, T-shirts, and more. Stop by and say hello! We’ll update this space with more details as we have them.
January 23, 2015 Bulletin Show Your Affection with Vintage Issues of The Paris Review By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Stephen Andrew Hiltner It’s not easy to describe matters of the heart. Even Shakespeare sometimes got it wrong: “Love is a smoke,” he wrote in Romeo and Juliet, as if we’re all human cigarettes, burning ourselves down with romance. But Valentine’s Day is mere weeks away, and if we want to make a good impression, it behooves us to use our words—our best words. Fortunately, The Paris Review’s archive is full of writers, more than sixty years’ worth, who know all the right things to say. That’s why we’re offering a special Valentine’s Day box set: choose any three issues from our archive, and at no extra charge, we’ll package them in the lovely gift box you see above, including a card featuring William Pène du Bois’s 1953 sketch of the Place de la Concorde. (You may have seen it on the title page of the quarterly, or in the footer of our Web site.) Then they go straight to the home of your significant other. You’ll find all the details here—orders begin shipping next week, and delivery before Valentine’s Day is guaranteed if you order by February 10.
January 14, 2015 Bulletin Say “I Love You” with Vintage Issues of The Paris Review By Dan Piepenbring It’s hard to put love into words. That’s why so many of us express our emotions with small, high-pitched noises, like woodland creatures. But Valentine’s Day is only a month off, and we must rise to the occasion with language. Luckily, The Paris Review’s archive is full of writers—more than sixty years’ worth—who know all the right things to say. That’s why we’re offering a special Valentine’s Day box set: you choose any three issues from our archive, and at no extra charge, we’ll package them in a beautiful gift box, including a card featuring William Pène du Bois’s 1953 sketch of the Place de la Concorde. (You may have seen it on the title page of the quarterly, or in the footer of our Web site.) Then they go straight to the home of your significant other. Unless you’d rather send them to yourself, so you can memorize, say, the entirety of our Art of Poetry interview with Pablo Neruda and impress your valentine by quoting it at length. Either way, you look very thoughtful. You’ll find all the details here—orders begin shipping the last week of January.
January 13, 2015 Bulletin Dear Critics: You Heard It Here First By Lorin Stein Illustration: Samantha Hahn Although Rachel Cusk’s Outline has not been available in hardcover until today, it’s already enjoyed a wild succès d’estime with some of our favorite critics. Last Wednesday, in the New York Times, Dwight Garner called it “transfixing … You find yourself pulling the novel closer to your face, as if it were a thriller and the hero were dangling over a snake pit.” In The New Yorker, Elaine Blair used Outline as the occasion for a trenchant essay on fiction and autobiography: The novel is mesmerizing; it marks a sharp break from the conventional style of Cusk’s previous work … Cusk’s insight in Outline is that, instead of trying to show two sides of a marriage, she might do the opposite: focus on the inevitable, treacherous one-sidedness of any single account [which] surely has something to do with why marriages themselves come apart. In the Guardian, Hilary Mantel described Outline as “fascinating, both on the surface and in its depths.” Bookforum’s Hannah Tennant-Moore called it “lovely … smart, ascetic”; and in the most recent New York Times Book Review Heidi Julavits raved: “Spend much time with this novel and you’ll become convinced [Cusk] is one of the smartest writers alive.” None of this will come as news to readers of The Paris Review—because, starting with our Winter 2013 issue, we published Outline in its entirety, with exclusive illustrations by Samantha Hahn. Here’s a slide show to celebrate the U.S. hardcover publication, and to remind our colleagues in the reviewing business where they can find the most transfixing, mesmerizing, fascinating, lovely fiction of 2016. Read More
December 18, 2014 Bulletin Happy Haneke By Dan Piepenbring A still from Haneke’s The White Ribbon, lovingly altered by Luisa Zielinski. Three simple facts: 1. It’s the third night of Hanukkah. 2. Our new issue features the Art of Screenwriting No. 5, an interview with Michael Haneke. 3. Haneke and Hanukkah are pronounced in very nearly the same fashion. A disinterested observer might chalk this up to mere coincidence. That observer would be correct. Still, you may consider, during these eight nights of gift-giving, capitalizing on the Haneke/Hanukkah near-homonym and presenting your loved one with a subscription to The Paris Review, starting with our Haneke issue—just forty dollars for a year’s supply of fiction, poetry, interviews, and art, including a postcard announcing your gift with a personal message. 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.” And our thanks to our interviewer, Luisa Zielinski, for sending along the highly appropriate greeting above.
December 16, 2014 Bulletin Happy Haneke By Dan Piepenbring “My students, meanwhile, pitch only the gravest of topics. For them it’s always got to be the Holocaust. I usually tell them, Back off. You have no idea what you’re talking about. You can only reproduce what you read or heard elsewhere. Others who actually lived through it have said it much better than you ever could. Try to create something that springs organically from your own experience. For only then does it stand the slightest chance of being genuinely interesting.” —Michael Haneke, the Art of Screenwriting No. 5 I felt enormously clever writing that pun up there. Then I remembered that it’s already been used—it’s the title of Anthony Lane’s excellent 2009 profile of Haneke in The New Yorker. Tant pis! Even so, my point stands: tonight marks the first night of Hanukkah, and our new issue features the Art of Screenwriting No. 5, an interview with Michael Haneke, whose name is pronounced in very nearly the same fashion. Coincidence? Yes, absolutely, nothing more. And yet. You may consider, during these eight nights of gift-giving, capitalizing on the Haneke/Hanukkah near-homonym and presenting your loved one with a subscription to The Paris Review, starting with our Haneke issue—just forty dollars for a year’s supply of fiction, poetry, interviews, and art, including a postcard announcing your gift with a personal message. 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.”