September 19, 2013 Bulletin A Demand for Love By Justin Alvarez For the first time in its sixty-three-year history, the National Book Foundation has published longlists for each of its four award categories. The fiction longlist was announced this morning, and it features a range of celebrated and debut authors, including Thomas Pynchon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anthony Marra, and Paris Review contributor Rachel Kushner, for her latest novel, The Flamethrowers. Congratulations to all! On The Flamethrowers, Kushner writes in her essay from our Winter 2012 issue: As I wrote, events from my time, my life, began to echo those in the book, as if I were inside a game of call and response. While I wrote about ultraleft subversives, The Coming Insurrection, a book written by an anonymous French collective, was published in the United States, and its authors were arrested in France. As I wrote about riots, they were exploding in Greece. As I wrote about looting, it was rampant in London. The Occupy movement was born on the University of California campuses, and then reborn as a worldwide phenomenon, and by the time I needed to describe the effects of tear gas for a novel about the 1970s, all I had to do was watch live feeds from Oakland, California. … An appeal to images is a demand for love. We want something more than just their mute glory. We want them to give up a clue, a key, a way to cut open a space, cut into a register, locate a tone, without which the novelist is lost. It was with images that I began The Flamethrowers. By the time I finished, I found myself with a large stash. You can read an excerpt from The Flamethrowers here.
September 16, 2013 Bulletin Tonight! By Sadie Stein Tonight at the Powerhouse Arena: Lawrence Block, Chip McGrath, and Lorin Stein on John O’Hara, moderated by Steven Goldleaf. See you there!
September 11, 2013 Bulletin The Best of Everything By Sadie Stein Every year, the Rona Jaffe Awards recognize the contributions of women writers. This year’s honorees are Tiffany Briere, Ashlee Crews, Margaree Little, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Jill Sisson Quinn, and Paris Review contributor Kristin Dombek. Hearty congratulations to all! Read Dombek’s “Letter from Williamsburg,” from issue 205, here.
September 9, 2013 Bulletin Have Questions About The Paris Review? Ask Our Editors on Reddit! By The Paris Review Pictured [l-r]: associate editor Stephen Hiltner, deputy editor Sadie Stein, digital director Justin Alvarez, assistant editor Clare Fentress, and editor Lorin Stein. Have a question about The Paris Review? How do the interviews work? What’s our pitch process? Are we a CIA front? Paris Review editors will be hosting a Reddit AMA (short for “Ask Me Anything”) tomorrow, September 10, at 3 P.M. EDT. You can read the full thread here. See you then!
September 3, 2013 Bulletin Introducing Our Fall Issue! By The Paris Review Since 1953, a central mission of The Paris Review has been the discovery of new voices. Why? It’s not just a matter of wanting to lead the pack or provide publishers with fresh blood. In “The Poet” Emerson wrote, “the experience of each new age requires a new confession.” That’s our idea, too. Even by TPR standards, our Fall issue is full of new confessions. Readers will remember Ottessa Moshfegh, the winner of this year’s Plimpton Prize. We think our other fiction contributors—and most of our poets—will be new to you. They certainly caught us off guard. We also have new kinds of work from writers you do know—a photography portfolio curated by Lydia Davis, and a project more than twenty years in the works: Jonathan Franzen’s translation of Karl Kraus, including some of the most passionate footnotes we’ve encountered since Pale Fire. Find an interview with groundbreaking writer Ursula K. Le Guin: A lot of twentieth-century— and twenty-first-century—American readers think that that’s all they want. They want nonfiction. They’ll say, I don’t read fiction because it isn’t real. This is incredibly naive. Fiction is something that only human beings do, and only in certain circumstances. We don’t know exactly for what purposes. But one of the things it does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before. The Art of Nonfiction with Emmanuel Carrère: Your first impulse is to be terribly embarrassed by the other’s suffering, and you don’t know what to do, and then there’s the moment when you stop asking yourself questions and you just do what you have to do. All this plus new poems by former Paris Review editors Dan Chiasson, Charles Simic, and Frederick Seidel. Subscribe now!
August 26, 2013 Bulletin Radio Days By Sadie Stein Photo courtesy of Flickr. Friends! We are thrilled to announce that this fall, when you pledge to support WNYC, you can get a subscription to The Paris Review! That’s right: keep public radio going strong, and while you’re at it receive four issues a year of poetry, fiction, interviews, and more. Just choose The Paris Review as your thank-you gift at the $100 pledge level. As always, you can pledge at a monthly level, or all at once. And yes, you can re-up an existing subscription, too!