Aisha Sabatini Sloan. Photo courtesy of Sabatini Sloan.

The Paris Review is pleased to announce that Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s column for the Daily, Detroit Archives, has received the 2021 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. Sabatini Sloan is the author of the essay collections The Fluency of Light and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit as well as the forthcoming book-length essay Borealis and the father-daughter collaboration Captioning the Archives. She is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. A sampling of the three essays recognized by the award appears below.

From “Ladies of the Good Dead,” May 22, 2020:

My great aunt Cora Mae can’t hear well. She is ninety-eight years old. When the global pandemic reached Michigan, the rehabilitation center where she was staying stopped accepting visitors. There were attempts at FaceTime, but her silence made it clear that for her, we had dwindled into pixelated ghosts. She contracted COVID-19 and has been moved again and again. When my mother calls to check on her every day, she makes sure to explain to hospital staff that my great aunt is almost deaf, that they have to shout in her left ear if they want to be heard.

From “On Immolation,” July 9, 2020:

For a period of time in 2014, I couldn’t stop watching the surveillance video of a person setting fire to the Heidelberg Project, a world-renowned art installation by Tyree Guyton in a residential area of Detroit. The recorded arson struck me as a performance piece in itself. In what appears to be the very early hours of the morning, a figure approaches the threshold of a structure called “Taxi House,” a home adorned by boards of wood that have been painted with yellow, pink, green, and white vehicles labeled “taxi.” There is a painted clock, real tires, and toy cars. A meandering, peach-colored line has been painted along a sagging corner of the roof, then it comes down onto the siding, where it moves geometrically, like Pac-Man.

From “On Doulas,” September 15, 2020:

In 2016, Erykah Badu performed at Chene Park, now called the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre, a beautiful, outdoor waterfront venue in Detroit overlooking Canada. Badu donated proceeds from that concert to the African American 490 Challenge, an organization trying to raise money to process 11,341 untested rape kits that had been abandoned for years at a Detroit police department storage facility. The initiative was named 490 after the dollar amount needed to test a single kit, each of which represents, the organization’s president Kim Trent emphasized, “a living, breathing victim.” Four years later, thanks to their work, 11,137 kits have been tested, and there have been 210 convictions. Eighty-one percent of the victims were Black women. You could call this an archive of negligence.

The Review also was named a finalist for the 2021 National Magazine Award for Fiction, recognizing Senaa Ahmad’s “Let’s Play Dead” (Spring 2020), Eloghosa Osunde’s “Good Boy” (Fall 2020), and Bud Smith’s “Violets” (Summer 2020).

Congratulations to all! And for more great stories, essays, poems, interviews, and more, don’t forget to subscribe to The Paris Review today.

Issue no. 237 of The Paris Review is here for your summer reading! The Summer 2021 issue, online today, features interviews with Arundhati Roy and Roz Chast; fiction by Adania Shibli and five emerging writers; the first English translation of a monologue by Vladimir Nabokov; poetry by Kaveh Akbar, George Bradley, and Ada Limón; an essay on tennis by Joy Katz; and art by Elizabeth Ibarra paired with an essay by Aimee Nezhukumatathil—and, of course, much more!

“I’m grateful for the lessons one learns from great writers, but also from imperialists, sexists, friends, lovers, oppressors, revolutionaries—everybody. Everybody has something to teach a writer,” Arundhati Roy tells managing editor and interviewer Hasan Altaf in the Art of Fiction No. 249. Roy, the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction—including the 1997 Booker-winning novel The God of Small Things, 2017’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and the 2019 essay collection My Seditious Heart—describes the singular pleasure of losing herself in novel writing, with detours along the way to discuss her architecture-school days in New Delhi and her time spent reporting in the forests of Bastar. “I love immersing myself in the universe of a novel for years,” she says. “There is never a time when I am more alive … Being in that universe, that imperfect universe, is like being in prayer.”

“I don’t think a cartoon is just an illustration of a funny idea. The drawing style has to go along with the words, and be funny also,” Roz Chast tells Liana Finck in the Art of Comics No. 3. Chast, a longtime contributor to The New Yorker and the author of works such as 2014’s National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, considers how words and pictures “are conjoined twins. They’re interconnected in a primary way. When I was at art school, and a painter, I missed the words, and when I write, I miss drawing.”

Also in this issue: fiction by Anuk Arudpragasam, Camille Bordas, Lydia Conklin, Kenan Orhan, and Christina Wood, and poetry by Jennifer Barber, Charles Baudelaire, Marianne Boruch, Daisy Fried, Ishion Hutchinson, John Kinsella, Michael Klein, Jim Moore, Jesse Nathan, Barbara Tran, and Matthew Zapruder.

Enjoy! And don’t forget to subscribe for full access to both the Summer 2021 issue and our complete sixty-eight-year archive.

Emily Stokes. Photo: Taryn Simon.

The board of The Paris Review Foundation, which publishes the literary quarterly The Paris Review, is pleased to announce the appointment of Emily Stokes as the next editor of The Paris Review. She will be the sixth editor in the sixty-eight-year history of the magazine.

Ms. Stokes joins from The New Yorker, where she has been a senior editor since 2018. Ms. Stokes was also an editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and the Financial Times. She is a graduate of Cambridge University and was a Kennedy Memorial Trust scholar at Harvard.

“Emily will honor the Review’s tradition of discovery,” says Mona Simpson, the publisher of The Paris Review. “I believe she’ll publish distinctive work in a distinctive way, with courage, subtlety, and style.”

“Like many readers, I came to The Paris Review through its interviews, which show writing to be the hard, inspiring work that it is,” Ms. Stokes says. “Over the years the Review has introduced me to new and established writers who have provided the most pleasurable kind of company. After a year in which we have been alone and driven mad by the news, the Review’s mandate, to publish ‘the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and the non-axe-grinders,’ is a timely calling, and I am tremendously excited and grateful for this opportunity.” Read More

The Paris Review, a literary quarterly based in New York, announced that its editor, Emily Nemens, has resigned to pursue work on her second novel.

In her statement, published today on The Paris Review’s website, Nemens said, “The Paris Review’s mission has always been a dual one: to provide a platform for great literature, and to inspire readers with ambitious new writing. I’m proud that we’ve been able to accomplish both during my time at the Review, and I would like to thank the writers, readers, and colleagues on staff and the board who have collaborated with me toward these objectives.”

The Paris Review, founded in 1953, features original fiction and nonfiction, art, and in-depth interviews with notable writers about their creative processes. Under Nemens’s leadership, the quarterly won awards and attained a record number of subscribers. The Review also has an active digital presence with a large following, and has recently produced two seasons of podcasts featuring readings, interviews, and archival material.

At the time of Nemens’s departure, issue no. 236 has just appeared, and Nemens’s editorial work on the Summer 2021 issue, no. 237, has been completed. The Paris Review is undertaking an active search for her successor. “While we will miss Emily,” said co-presidents Matt Holt and Akash Shah, “we have a wonderful staff, and the magazine has never been in better shape financially. We are all very excited about the next chapter.”

“We are grateful for Emily Nemens’s editorial stewardship of The Paris Review during the past three years,” said publisher Mona Simpson. “In particular, we thank Emily for her leadership guiding the staff through the anxieties and sorrows of the pandemic. We are excited for her new work and wish her every happiness.”

Read a letter from Emily Nemens.