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!
February 20, 2013 Bulletin See a Paris Review Interview: Live! By Sadie Stein Called “one of the finest prose stylists at work in the language, an Emerson of our time,” the psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips joins Paul Holdengräber for a live Writers-at-Work interview on Monday, February 25, at the New York Public Library. In the tradition of Paris Review interviews, Phillips will discuss writing, life, and his most recent work, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. See program details here. To receive a $10 discount off general admission, click here and enter code FRUSTRATION at checkout.
February 8, 2013 Bulletin A Bookish Wedding By Sadie Stein “The library has always been a sanctuary for me. I always felt validated as a child when the librarian went to, what I believed at the time, great lengths to attend to my inquisitiveness,” says Barbara Morrow, who on Friday married David Kurland in the Northwest History Room at Washington’s Everett Public Library. “Today, when I walk into a library, I feel calm. I look around at the stacks and know I can find out about anything. There before me, shelf after shelf, are ideas and knowledge.” Added the groom, “Libraries are full of ideas. A person needs lots of ideas. And we both love words … We are the ultimate nerds.” The two, who met on Match.com after he decided he “just wanted to have lunch with the woman who could write like that,” and who enjoy reading aloud to each other, were married by children’s librarian Theresa Gemmer. Librarian Joan Blacker acted as a de facto wedding planner. The bride sported book-shaped earrings; the groom a bookshelf-patterned tie. Following cake with the staff, the bride renewed her library card. Hearty congratulations from everyone at 62 White Street!
January 9, 2013 Bulletin The Hatchet Falls By Sadie Stein The Omnivore brings us the Hatchet Job of the Year Awards 2013. In their words, this pan-centric prize rewards “the writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months” and “aims to raise the profile of professional critics and to promote integrity and wit in literary journalism.” View the shortlist here: few will be surprised to find Zoë Heller’s NYRB evisceration of Salman Rushdie’s Josef Anton, or that Naomi Woolf’s Vagina rated a few screeds. But who will win the year’s supply of potted shrimp? And has Adam Mars-Jones, 2012 winner for his Observer takedown of Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall, done justice to his prize?
January 7, 2013 Bulletin Save the Date: The Paris Review Revel By The Paris Review Variously described as “the best party in town” and “prom for New York intellectuals,” the legendary Spring Revel is legendary for a reason. Tuesday, April 9, Paris Review readers, supporters, and writers will gather at Cipriani 42nd Street for an always unforgettable evening of cocktails, dinner, and revelry. This year we celebrate our sixtieth year in print and honor Paula Fox with the Hadada Award.