December 3, 2013 Bulletin Give the Gift of The Paris Review! By The Paris Review This holiday season, why not give your loved ones a full year—or even two, or three!—of the best in prose, poetry, interviews, and art? Subscribe now! And don’t forget to treat yourself, too!
December 3, 2013 Bulletin Fasten Your Seatbelts, It’s Our Winter Issue By Sadie Stein The flight attendant on the cover of 207 does not deceive you: this issue is a ride and a half. For your reading enjoyment we offer: Geoff Dyer on the art of nonfiction—and why he hates that rubric: I don’t think a reasonable assessment of what I’ve been up to in the last however many years is possible if one accepts segregation. That refusal is part of what the books are about. I think of all them as, um, what’s the word? … Ah, yes, books! I haven’t subjected it to scientific analysis, but if you look at the proportion of made-up stuff in the so-called novels versus the proportion of made-up stuff in the others I would expect they’re pretty much the same Edward P. Jones on the art of fiction: People say, Did you grow up thinking of yourself as this or that, blah blah blah. These middle-class or upper-class kids, maybe three or four times a week they’d have a doctor over, they’d have an engineer over, they’d have a writer over, and they’d get into a conversation with the writer and all of a sudden realize, Oh, I think I want to be a writer. That didn’t happen to me. That doesn’t happen to the rest of us. Plus! The first installment of a novel by Rachel Cusk. New fiction from J. D. Daniels, Jenny Offill, Nell Freudenberger, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Lydia Davis, and the winner of the NPR Three-Minute Fiction Contest. Plus, poems by Kevin Prufer, Susan Stewart, Hilda Hilst, Charlie Smith, Monica Youn, Sylvie Baumgartel, Emily Moore, and Linda Pastan. And did we mention a portfolio of nudes by Chuck Close? We realize you have choices when it comes to quarterly reading, and we thank you for choosing The Paris Review. Subscribe now!
November 27, 2013 Bulletin Instead of the Cross, the Albatross By Sadie Stein We love the Poetry Foundation’s Record-a-Poem project, in which users are encouraged to read aloud their favorite verses using SoundCloud. Now, in conjunction with its upcoming performance of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, BAM is partnering with the program, collecting recorded interpretations of a segment of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem; they will ultimately edit and compile the audio into a crowd-sourced animated video featuring as many voices as possible. The deadline is December 1, so take a few moments out of your holiday weekend to be part of something cool! Find the excerpt below, and see full details here. From Part II of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge All in a hot and copper sky,The bloody Sun, at noon,Right up above the mast did stand,No bigger than the Moon. Day after day, day after day,We stuck, nor breath nor motion;As idle as a painted shipUpon a painted ocean. Water, water, everywhere,And all the boards did shrink;Water, water, everywhere,Nor any drop to drink. The very deep did rot: O Christ!That ever this should be!Yea, slimy things did crawl with legsUpon the slimy sea. About, about, in reel and routThe death-fires danced at night;The water, like a witch’s oils,Burnt green, and blue, and white. And some in dreams assured wereOf the Spirit that plagued us so;Nine fathom deep he had followed usFrom the land of mist and snow. And every tongue, through utter drought,Was wither’d at the root;We could not speak, no more than ifWe had been choked with soot. Ah! well a-day! what evil looksHad I from old and young!Instead of the cross, the AlbatrossAbout my neck was hung. Read the whole poem here.
November 25, 2013 Bulletin What We’re Doing By Sadie Stein New Yorkers! Tomorrow night, head to McNally Jackson Booksellers to see Geoff Dyer and Ben Lerner discuss how to write about looking (among other things). Moderated by our very own EIC, Lorin Stein.
November 25, 2013 Bulletin See You There: St. Mark’s Fundraiser By Sadie Stein Image via Blogcitylights. Over the past months, we have closely followed the efforts of our friends at St. Mark’s Bookshop to find a permanent, affordable home in Manhattan’s East Village. Now, the owners have announced plans for a December 5 fundraiser to help them move to a smaller home a few blocks east of their current Third Avenue location. Both in-store and online, you will be able to bid on signed first editions by the likes of Anne Carson, Lydia Davis, and Paul Auster.
November 22, 2013 Bulletin Have You Seen This Desk? By Sadie Stein Today, George Eliot’s birthday, let us pay tribute to the sad chapter in our collective history when, in 2012, someone stole the author’s portable writing desk from the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery in Warwickshire. Having seen no updates in the ensuing year, we are left to assume that both thief and papier-mâché secretaire are still at large, and that some greedy literary mogul is gazing upon it as we speak. But as Miss Evans herself might have said, “It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.” May it bring inspiration.