You’ve been inside all year … need a conversation starter? Announcing our summer subscription deal: starting today and through the end of August, you’ll find plenty to talk about when you subscribe to both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for a combined price of $99. That’s one year of issues from both publications, as well as their entire archives—sixty-eight years of The Paris Review and fifty-eight years of The New York Review of Books—for $50 off the regular subscription price.

Since the beginning, when former Paris Review managing editor Robert Silvers cofounded The New York Review of Books with Barbara Epstein, the two publications have been closely aligned. With your subscription to both magazines, you’ll have access to fiction, poetry, interviews, criticism, and more from some of the most important writers of our time, from Joan Didion to James Baldwin, Susan Sontag to T. S. Eliot, Hilton Als to Elizabeth Hardwick.

Subscribe today and you’ll receive:

• One year of The Paris Review (4 issues)
• One year of The New York Review of Books (20 issues)
• Full access to both the New York Review and Paris Review digital archives—that’s fifty-eight years of The New York Review of Books and sixty-eight years of The Paris Review.

If you already subscribe to The Paris Review, we’ve got good news: this deal will extend your current subscription, while your new subscription to The New York Review of Books will begin immediately.

PS: Canadian and international readers, this deal is available to you, too—for $109 and $129, respectively!

This past week, the extended Paris Review family gathered online to celebrate the launch of the Summer 2021 issue. If you weren’t able to tune in, you can watch a recording of the event below. You’ll see Kenan Orhan reading from his story “The Beyoğlu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra,” Ada Limón reading her poem “Power Lines,” and Kaveh Akbar reading his poems “An Oversight” and “Famous Americans and Why They Were Wrong.”

There’s more where that came from: check out the rest of the Summer 2021 issue now. And if you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives.

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.