December 5, 2013 Bulletin Smut By Sadie Stein By now, you will have heard that Manil Suri has won the coveted twenty-first Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, for a passage from his novel The City of Devi. The award-winning purple prose includes: Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands—only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice. Our vote may have been for The Victoria System, but hearty congratulations all around!
December 4, 2013 Bulletin The News You Have Been Waiting For By Sadie Stein Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is being adapted for the screen. No word on who will get the plum role of Jenny in “The Green Ribbon.”
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.