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Category Archives: Bulletin

September 7, 2018
Bulletin

Five Young Women With Prize-Winning Book Collections

By The Paris Review

Winner Jessica Jordan’s collection

In 2017, Honey & Wax Booksellers established an annual prize for American women book collectors, aged 30 years and younger. The idea took shape when Heather O’Donnell and Rebecca Romney, the bookstore’s owners, observed that “the women who regularly buy books from us are less likely to call themselves “collectors” than the men, even when those women have spent years passionately collecting books.” By providing a financial incentive, and a forum in which to celebrate and share their collections, O’Donnell and Romney hope to encourage a new generation of women. As they say, “The act of collecting books is often a private and obsessive pursuit, and that’s part of its appeal, but collecting is also a way to connect with others: to inform those who share your interests, and to inspire those who don’t share them yet. And by rescuing and recontextualizing pieces of the historical record, collectors contribute to a larger conversation across generations.” This year, one contestant wrote to them, ““I already feel more like a real collector just by applying for this prize.”

We are pleased to unveil the winner of the 2018 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize, who will receive a thousand dollars, as well as four honorable mentions, who will each receive two hundred and fifty dollars.

WINNER

Jessica Jordan: The work of American illustrators Leo and Diane Dillon

Jessica Jordan, 27, is a former bookseller and current graduate student in English at Stanford. She has collected books designed by prolific American illustrators Leo and Diane Dillon. The Dillons’ experience as interracial partners (in life and work) informed their approach to graphic design over five decades. “We decided early in our career that we wanted to represent all races and show people that were rarely seen,” they wrote. Famously versatile and productive, the Dillons collaborated on an untold number of commercial book projects, from pulp science fiction (winning the Hugo Award for Best Artist) to children’s stories (winning the Caldecott Medal, twice) to iconic paperback editions of James Baldwin, Madeleine L’Engle, Chinua Achebe, and Isabel Allende. Jordan notes that “the Dillons’ work is unsigned on many of their early book covers – meaning that the burden of identification is left solely to my own abilities . . . as I have grown my collection, I have also been training my eye to see what others don’t, and nothing else puts a spring in a book collector’s step quite like that feeling.”

Honey & Wax says, “We admired the depth of Jordan’s collection, and the sense of discovery that animates it, especially as it relates to previously uncredited Dillon titles, and to the afterlife of the Dillons’ imagery in the Black Power movement.” Read More
August 30, 2018
Bulletin

Announcing Our New Editors

By Emily Nemens

My first few months as editor have flown by, and I’m excited to share the fruits of this busy summer soon—the Fall issue will go online just after Labor Day.

Much of this summer has also been spent getting to know colleagues up and down the masthead. There are a few people I’ve yet to track down for a meal or a Skype date, but talking shop with the staff, city editors, advisory editors, and the board has been lovely and informative. Through those conversations, I’ve also identified several opportunities for growth, as well as several key editors to help us with that growing. Prime among them is Hasan Altaf, who will start as our managing editor in September. Hasan and I are both excited about his editorial expertise and his commitment to bring new voices to the magazine.

We’ve also appointed novelist Christian Keifer to fill the newly added role of West Coast Editor. Christian’s inveterate energy, good taste, and large network have already proven valuable to my first issue, and we should all be thankful that he connected us with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose Art of Poetry interview is now underway.

The ranks of Advisory Editors have expanded. Some of the new additions, like Poetry Editor alum Robyn Creswell, have been contributing to the magazine for years. Others, like new advisory editor Saskia Hamilton, brought us content—unpublished Elizabeth Bishop!—that will appear in my first issue. Christopher Merrill is already working to expand our international reach, so stay tuned.

As a means of introduction, I asked each editor for a bio and a favorite piece from the archive. —Emily Nemens Read More
August 15, 2018
Bulletin

Where Is Poetry Now?

By The Paris Review

This year, The Paris Review will engage in an exciting mission to expand its reaches through the world of poetry. For each of our next four issues, our editor, Emily Nemens, will work in tandem with four quite different, highly esteemed poets to find and select poems that define the forefront of literature. We are delighted to announce our guest poetry editors below. By way of introduction, we have asked each to provide a short response to the following prompt: Where is poetry now?

Fall 2018, issue no. 226: Henri Cole

Henri Cole.

I think American poetry is much as I found it forty years ago as a student. The poets I loved are gone, but their poems have imprinted me with their depictions of bliss, loss, trembling, compulsion, desire, and disease.

I think being a poet in the world opposes the very nature of it, which is driven by profit. In a poem, we have only a little snapshot of the soul in a moment of being. Still, though there is no monetary gain, there is profit. Something enters the brain that wasn’t there before—an illumination, an aliveness, a triumphing over shame. Read More
July 6, 2018
Bulletin

A Send-Off to Nicole Rudick

By The Paris Review

After eight years as managing editor, and editing the last two issues as interim editor, Nicole Rudick has decided to leave The Paris Review. Our staff is small, and Nicole’s role, like so many of ours, extended far beyond that which is simply captured by job titles: she promoted new writers and artists, curated portfolios and conducted interviews for the magazine, edited and wrote pieces for the Daily, produced special projects—like our reinvigorated Paris Review Editions imprint and the Big, Bent Ears series—and so much more. We’ll miss her dry humor, strongly held opinions, hard-earned praise, and surprisingly colorful dress shoes. She has been equal parts tough and nurturing, a mentor to many who have passed through these doors. The day after the 2016 election, when many of us were crying quietly at our desks, Nicole gathered everyone around the pool table for a meeting. Then she turned on the music and encouraged us to dance. Read More
June 5, 2018
Bulletin

Announcing Our Summer Issue

By The Paris Review

Our Summer issue opens with a selection from Jan Morris’s diary, begun in 2016, and each time I read it, I am struck anew by the capaciousness of her thoughts. In seventeen entries, she revisits ancient history and wonders about the near future; pulls in a constellation of people (Browning, Eliot, Wordsworth, Pepys) and places (Romania, India, Egypt); muses on her late cat, her cherished car, her beloved Elizabeth, and her advancing age. In the first entry, she dilates on the miracle of her garden: tucked away in a quiet corner of Llanystumdwy, Wales, and yet teeming with a rich assortment of life.

My hope is that this issue is a version of Morris’s garden: a microcosm of the larger literary ecology, gathered (perhaps not too unassumingly) between two covers. We owe our sunny front cover to Edie Fake, the Review’s first trans cover artist. His paintings in the issue’s portfolio imagine queer spaces and invent “impossible” architectures as a metaphor for trans bodies. In the portfolio’s essay, Renee Gladman optimistically envisions in these spaces a speculative future—cities occupied by people “like new shapes arriving to some Euclidean page, wanting opposites and sames and inverses and transverses.”

There are a number of firsts in this issue, not least a story by Ursula K. Le Guin. And not just any story, but a final Earthsea tale, written a year before her death. We also have work by two newcomers: Shruti Swamy’s atmospheric story in which a woman, distracted by her young daughter’s illness and another, vague distress, prepares to flee a wildfire; and Wayétu Moore’s portrait of a Vai girl cursed by village superstition and made to hide herself away. This issue’s fiction also includes stories by Ben Marcus, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Benjamin Nugent as well as the finale of Katharine Kilalea’s serialized novel OK, Mr. Field.

Our interviews are with the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, known for his epically long sentences and narrative intensity, and the American essayist and Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Hilton Als, whose omnivorous writing merges and dissolves categories (he is only our third entry in the Art of the Essay; the second is Jan Morris, in issue no. 143).

Rebelliousness and experimentation make their way into Kiese Laymon’s essay on the difficulty of pledging allegiance to self, family, and country, and into our glimpse into the personal library of the late feminist punk writer Kathy Acker.

The issue’s selection of poetry is a spectrum of time and place: Iman Mersal (Egypt), Szilárd Borbély (Hungary), and Hilda Hilst (Brazil), plus the pre-Islamic warrior-poet ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, whose five declarative poems describe the arc of war. Sylvie Baumgartel composes a song of intense female desire, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips thinks of a world “on fire,” in which “A man hauls crate after crate of rifles / Into a hotel. A child is shot dead / On the spot … And where did / It all go so, so wrong?” We also have poems by Maureen N. McLane, Michael Robbins, and Jana Prikryl.

After her peripatetic earlier life, Jan Morris finds in her garden a kind of exile she doesn’t mind living out. Whether you are wandering or anchored this summer, I hope this issue takes you places.

—Nicole Rudick
April 11, 2018
Bulletin

Photos from Our 2018 Spring Revel

By Julia Berick

Nicole Zajdman, Josh Zajdman, Joy Williams, Don DeLillo, Dana Spiotta (Photo: Matteo Mobilio)

April isn’t all cruelty and taxes. Every year, during the first week of the month, we celebrate The Paris Review at the Spring Revel. This year, we gathered friends, fans, and family to honor Joy Williams and sixty-five years of the magazine. John Waters, the legendary mustachioed auteur, was the self-described “monster of ceremonies,” escorting guests through an evening that recognized the emerging and established writers who have found a home at The Paris Review.

The stars at Cipriani rivaled those across the street on Grand Central’s ceiling, as Don DeLillo, Radhika Jones, John Waters, David Sedaris, Patricia Marx, Tina Brown, Sir Harry Evans, Michael Cunningham, Lesley Stahl, Morgan Entrekin, Lewis Lapham, Hailey Gates, Ellie Goulding, Amor Towles, Dana Spiotta, Joanna Coles, Henry Finder, Emma Cline, and Kwame Anthony Appiah toasted with Review readers old and new.

Guests hushed to the sound of George Plimpton interviewing Eudora Welty, a snippet from the first season of our podcast. As the crickets of Jackson, Mississippi, faded away, our publisher, Susannah Hunnewell, toasted Paris Review comrades who had died this year, including Drue Heinz, Bokara Legendre, and John Ashbery.

The first award of the evening bridged the Review’s past and present. Named for our founding editor George Plimpton, the Plimpton Prize is presented each year to a new voice in fiction. The novelist David Gates presented Isabella Hammad the prize for “Mr. Can’aan,” from our Fall 2017 issue. Her story, which begins on the banks of the Jordan River a week after the Six-Day War, immerses the reader in the inheritance of loss passed through generations of Palestinians. In her speech, Hammad noted that the prize had brought her more than one kind of encouragement:

Over the last few years since I’ve been living in New York, the conversations in this country surrounding the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and lives have definitely been changing … This should not distract us from the reality that the situation there has not improved. In fact, it has become palpably worse. Nevertheless, at a time when it is often difficult to feel hopeful about the future, that a story about Palestinians should win a prize like this does help me to feel a bit of hope.

David Sedaris, known for spinning his own sadness into impossibly funny yarns, was awarded the Terry Southern Prize for Humor by the incomparable Patricia Marx, who threatened to upstage her honoree on the microphone as she explained her love for his work:

There are plenty of writers whose work I like, but with those writers—let’s just say I didn’t read Crime and Punishment and wish I could visit the prison in Siberia and sleep on the bed of nails with Dostoyevsky. Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath—depressed. It’s different with David Sedaris. You read a story about his family or his boyfriend, Hugh, or even a line of his like, “As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character,” and you know you need to meet this writer immediately.

As Cipriani’s legion of waiters noiselessly disappeared dinner, John Waters praised Joy Williams for her lifetime of characteristically uncompromising writing:

Ms. Williams is a desert rat, and I mean that as a compliment. She calls wild animal trophy hunters psychopaths, and I agree with her. And wishes Earth First would rise again, though she realizes they were branded terrorists and anarchists by the FBI. You could say the same for her writing. It confuses our values and destroys moral superiority. “She’s probably not for everybody,” the New York Times once warned. But who are these “everybody” she’s not for? The literary deplorables, that’s who. If you can’t appreciate Joy Williams’s writing, you have no business being a reader. Get outta here, go to a movie or something!

For all the hard edges and vacant horizons in her work, Williams warmly accepted the award and turned her appreciation to the magazine, extolling,

The Paris Review appears to me a strong, glittering chain of continuity, a continuity of artistic excellence and discovery and verve, bridging the years, harboring all manner of marvels and singularities. I’m so happy to be honored here at this literary revel of revels, on the list, a very special list. I will tell you, I feel a churchy exultation and joy right now. Hadada, hadada, hadada.

Our interim editor, Nicole Rudick, brought the evening to a close and the guests close to tears as she expressed her pride in the magazine’s potential and encouraged the audience to imagine that every Revel could be the best one yet. May April always bring renewed Review merriment—next year with you!

Take a look at the photos below, by the photographer Matteo Mobilio, plus more from Vanity Fair and Avenue magazine—and we hope to see you next year! Read More