March 26, 2013 Bulletin Ottessa Moshfegh Wins Plimpton Prize; J. D. Daniels Wins Terry Southern Prize for Humor By The Paris Review Each year, at our annual Spring Revel, the board of The Paris Review awards two prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine. It is with great pleasure that we announce our 2013 honorees. The Plimpton Prize for Fiction is a $10,000 award given to a new voice from our last four issues. Named after our longtime editor George Plimpton, it commemorates his zeal for discovering new writers. This year’s Plimpton Prize will be presented by Jeffrey Eugenides to Ottessa Moshfegh for “Disgust” and “Bettering Myself,” from issues 202 and 204. The Terry Southern Prize is a $5,000 award honoring work from either The Paris Review or the Daily that embodies the qualities of humor, wit, and sprezzatura. The prize is given in memory of our loyal (and very funny) contributor Terry Southern. The 2013 Terry Southern Prize will be presented by John Hodgman to J. D. Daniels for his “Letter from Majorca” and “Letter from Kentucky” (issues 201 and 203) and his frequent contributions to the Daily. From all of us on staff, a heartfelt chapeau! (And if you haven’t bought your ticket to attend the Revel—supporting the magazine and writers you love—isn’t this the time?)
March 25, 2013 Bulletin There and Back Again By Sadie Stein Since 2003, the Tolkien Society has celebrated Tolkien Reading Day on March 25. Why today, which is neither Tolkien’s birthday, nor Bilbo’s, nor Frodo’s? The answer will be obvious to regular observers of the holiday: March 25 marks the downfall of Sauron.
March 18, 2013 Bulletin On the Road iPad By Stephen Hiltner In 1955, The Paris Review paid a struggling Jack Kerouac fifty dollars for an excerpt from a then unpublished manuscript. The excerpt appeared as a short story titled “The Mexican Girl” and, after much acclaim, was picked up a year later by Martha Foley’s The Best American Short Stories. Due in large part to the success of “The Mexican Girl,” On the Road was soon accepted by Viking Press; the full novel was published in 1957. The issue containing Kerouac’s excerpt—The Paris Review no. 11 (Winter 1955)—has long since sold out, but we’re happy to announce that it’s now available in digital form via the Paris Review app. For those interested in our hard-to-find archival issues, we’ve also digitized issues 1, 18, and 20, and many more are on the way. In fact, for the next two weeks, readers who purchase a digital subscription via the Paris Review app will receive free digital access to the issue containing Kerouac’s excerpt. Alongside “The Mexican Girl” are stories by Gerard Reve and Marjorie Housepian, an interview with Nelson Algren, portfolios by Antoni Clavé and Oskar Kokoschka, and poetry by Louis Simpson, John Hollander, W. S. Merwin, Rolf Fjelde, Christopher Logue, and John Haislip. And all of that, of course, accompanies a year-long digital subscription to The Paris Review, beginning with issue 204. There’s good reason for print subscribers to download the app, too—we’ve granted free digital access to any issue covered by your print subscription. (If you’re a print subscriber and haven’t yet set up your app account, send an e-mail to support [at] theparisreview [dot] org.) There’s also lots of free content, including our complete interview archive—now fully bundled for offline viewing—and The Paris Review Daily. That’s really all to say: there’s no good reason not to have us on your iPad or iPhone! (To those with Android devices: we hope to have a version for you soon!)
March 5, 2013 Bulletin All A-Twitter By Sadie Stein One-hundred-forty-character poets, channel you inner Bashō, O’Hara, and Williams and listen up! Immortality can be yours: the New York Public Library is sponsoring a Twitter poetry contest for National Poetry Month! Here’s the (slightly Byzantine) deal: Be American and over thirteen. Register. Follow @NYPL. “Submit three poetic tweets in English as public posts on your Twitter stream between March 1 and 10, 2013. Three poetic tweets constitute one entry and each poem must contain the @NYPL Twitter handle.” “Two of the poems can cover any topic you choose, but at least one of the three poems needs to be about libraries, books, reading, or New York City.” The panel of distinguished judges will be looking for “originality, creativity, and artistic quality.” Winners will be highlighted on all the NYPL social networks and stand to claim a passel of truly excellent poetry books. (Plus the aforementioned glory.)
March 1, 2013 Bulletin Story Time! By Sadie Stein We are delighted to report that our contributors are racking up all kinds of well-deserved honors! First, David Means’s story “The Chair” (issue 200) has been chosen for this year’s Best American Short Stories anthology. We also have seven nominees for this year’s Pushcart Prize: Sarah Frisch, “Housebreaking,” issue 203 David Gordon, “Man-Boob Summer,” issue 202 Lorrie Moore, “Wings,” issue 200 Davy Rothbart, “Human Snowball,” issue 201 Sam Savage, “The Meininger Nude,” issue 202 David Searcy, “El Camino Doloroso,” issue 200 John Jeremiah Sullivan, “The Princes: A Reconstruction,” issue 200Congratulations, everyone!
February 27, 2013 Bulletin Introducing Our Sixtieth-Anniversary Issue! By The Paris Review If you happened to be in Paris this past month, and walked past the public toilets at the corner of rue Alexandre Dumas and boulevard de Charonne, you may have noticed a giant picture of George Plimpton’s face gazing out over the 11th arrondissement with great benignancy and just the slightest possible suggestion of a gueule de bois. This illegal memorial to our founding editor, by the poster artist JR, celebrates the sixtieth birthday of The Paris Review in the city of her birth. It happens also to be the cover of our special anniversary issue. In which: Deborah Eisenberg talks failure and perseverance with Catherine Steindler— You write something and there’s no reality to it. You can’t inject it with any kind of reality. You have to be patient and keep going, and then, one day, you can feel something signaling to you from the innermost recesses. Like a little person trapped under the rubble of an earthquake. And very, very, very slowly you find your way toward the little bit of living impulse. Mark Leyner talks process with Sam Lipsyte— When I was at Brandeis, I met this girl named Rachel Horowitz, and we really loved reggae music. This was in 1970. We decided, Why don’t we go to Jamaica? So we went and we got some really nifty little bungalow place in Montego Bay—very cheap, because we couldn’t afford much then. And it had a little pool for the couple of bungalows and a little kitchen. And I’d never really stayed in place like this on my own, with a girlfriend. I mean, nothing quite like that. I had been away the year before with another girl, took a trip to Israel and in Europe and things, but I’d never been in a groovy tropical place like this. And we had a car, so one day we drove into town and got some stuff, because we had a refrigerator and a pantry. We also got some Red Stripe. And this guy at Brandeis had given me some acid to bring to Jamaica. This guy was like the Johnny Appleseed of acid. He would take a load of acid and explain an album cover to you for just hours. He would take a Hot Tuna album that you had seen a trillion times and he would begin to examine it with these long lectures that were like Fidel Castro giving a lecture at the Sorbonne. He also once set his hand on fire and watched it for quite a while because he was so high. That really impressed me. Anyway, this guy had given me some acid and one night, when Rachel and I were just hanging out in the hotel, I said, You wanna take some? She said no. I said, Okay, I think I’m going to. So I took it, and it comes on, and then I want a beer and I go into the little kitchen, and by now the acid’s full on and this guy, this big flying cockroach, like a palmetto bug—you know those things?—it crawls out of the six-pack, and to me, at the time, it was like a pterodactyl, in some Raquel Welch movie set in prehistoric times. According to Rachel, I batted this thing in the little kitchen for, like, five hours. She heard pans and things breaking and she said I emerged with a torn shirt, sweaty—and victorious. That’s what my experience of writing The Sugar Frosted Nutsack was like. Battling this pterodactyl in the closet with a pan. At a certain point, of course, the book attained a mind of its own, a subjectivity or an autocatalytic, machinelike quality. And Willa Kim shows us her store of Paris Review erotica. Plus, fiction by Adelaide Docx, David Gates, Mark Leyner, Ottessa Moshfegh, Adam O’Fallon Price, and Tess Wheelwright. Poetry by Sylvie Baumgartel, Peter Cole, Stephen Dunn, John Freeman, Tony Hoagland, Melcion Mateu, Ange Mlinko, Frederick Seidel, and Kevin Young. Essays by Vivian Gornick and David Searcy. On newsstands March 15. Subscribe now!