The Paris Review is thrilled to unveil the first episode of Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast, an audio odyssey through our past and present, crafted in partnership with Stitcher. The five episodes of Season 2 are packed with the very best writing, new and old, from our archives, alongside literary ephemera, music, and sound design you won’t find anywhere else. Writers, actors, and musicians bring seven decades of the magazine to life. Beautifully edited to mirror the experience of our print issues, each episode mingles poetry, prose, and conversation. We’re confident it’s the best literature you can put in your ears.

Today we’re thrilled to share the first episode of the second season, “Before the Light.” It opens with a treasure—a recording of Toni Morrison being interviewed on the art of fiction. She explains why beauty is “an absolute necessity.” Molly Ringwald’s reading of Mary Terrier’s story “Guests” will break your heart, and the episode ends with poet Alex Dimitrov reading his poem “Impermanence.”

In the coming weeks, you’ll hear Jason Alexander perform Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” like a one-man theater troupe; Alexandra Kleeman read her haunting story “Fairy Tale”; Charlotte Rampling re-enact Simone de Beauvoir’s Art of Fiction interview; Jenny Slate read a poem by Anne Sexton; and J. M. Holmes read his Pushcart Prize–winning story “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?” Musicians Devendra Banhart and Bill Callahan perform pieces from The Paris Review’s sixty-six-year archive, and Sharon Olds, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Danez Smith share poems. We can’t wait for the world’s greatest writers to serenade you. Read More

In 2017, Honey & Wax Booksellers established an annual prize for American women book collectors, aged thirty 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 to them, and a forum in which to celebrate and share their collections, O’Donnell and Romney hope to encourage a new generation of women. This year, they write, “We were impressed by the many contestants whose initial collecting interests put them in pursuit of unusual material not available for Prime delivery: vintage, underground, out-of-print, annotated, foreign, small press, or self-published finds.”

We are pleased to unveil the winner of the 2019 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize, who will receive $1,000, as well as five honorable mentions, who will each receive $250.

WINNER

Emily Forster: Fan-Made Comics and Dōjinshi

Emily Forster, twenty-eight, is a cartoonist in New York City. She has amassed a collection of almost five hundred original fan-made comics, from photocopied zines to hardcover anthologies, primarily the self-published comics known in Japan as dōjinshi.

“Most of the modern-day distinctions between official and derivative art—and the assumptions of quality attached to each—were based on concerns of property, not an evaluation of the art itself. There was something incredibly alluring to me about comics art created at a professional standard of quality without the expectation of professional reward,” Forster writes in an essay about the collection.

Forster’s essay offers a series of insights about the fan-made books she collects, gradually revealing the narrative conventions, circumstances of production, and readership of the material. Honey & Wax says, “We admired her observations on the power structures ‘fanfic’ subverts, her attraction to ‘the ultra-niche within the niche,’ and her insistence on ‘what is beautiful about the illegitimate, the indulgent, and the disposable.’ ” Read More

Vijay Seshadri.

The Paris Review is thrilled to announce Vijay Seshadri as the twelfth poetry editor in the magazine’s sixty-six-year history.

Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954 and moved to the U.S. at the age of five. He is the author of the poetry books Wild Kingdom, The Long Meadow, and 3 Sections, as well as many essays, reviews, and memoir fragments. Over the course of his career, his work has been widely published, anthologized, and recognized with many honors, most recently the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for 3 Sections and a 2015 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was educated at Oberlin College and Columbia University, and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

“It is a wonderful and unique privilege to join the distinguished line of Paris Review poetry editors,” Seshadri said. “It is also an exciting privilege. All the questions that can be asked about poetry—about its form, purpose, scope—are more bristling and pressing now in America than they have been since the sixties. Anyone who loves the art should love the opportunity that the Paris Review poetry editorship offers to mediate the conversations between individual poets and the culture at large, especially in this watershed historical moment.” Read More

Criag Morgan Teicher. Photo: Spencer Quong.

Attentive readers of the magazine may recognize a new name on our masthead: on May 28, Craig Morgan Teicher joined the staff as our digital director. Craig has been a regular contributor to The Paris Review, with that rare trifecta of bylines in poetry, fiction, and essays, spanning from 2004 to last fall. Meanwhile, he’s had a daytime career at Publisher’s Weekly. Over the last dozen years at that magazine, he’s worn many hats, including director of digital operations and, most recently, director of special editorial projects. We were impressed by his pragmatic and broad set of technical skills, his track record of bolstering digital platforms at organizations much like our own, and his literary acumen. He arrives with a sensibility that manifests as a robust understanding of TPR as a magazine, web presence, and resource, which will be central to any new initiatives we undertake on the site.

We wear a lot of hats here, too. We’re eager for Craig to flex his multifaceted muscles and help guide a great many projects on the web. Stay tuned to this space to see improved site navigation, new features to enhance our sixty-six-year archive, even better newsletters, and a more user-friendly way to get your TPR swag. And the podcast! We’re heading back into the studio—season 2 will be coming this fall.

We asked Craig for a favorite piece from the archive (all of which is digitized and available here), and he replied with a piece from issue no. 215. He writes, “I carry Henri Cole’s books with me everywhere I go, literally—I have all the e-books downloaded on my phone. I feel like he speaks for and out of the dark in my heart, and reaches toward a narrow kind of joy, a pinprick of light, that I’m also drawn to. So I picked this poem, ‘At the Grave of Robert Lowell,’ because, in it, Cole is looking back at another poet who is desperately important to me, complicated for me, as he is for so many others.”

Welcome, Craig!

For nearly seven decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers—John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Larry Levis, Mary Jo Bang, and Solmaz Sharif, among many others—have gone on to become leading voices in their generations.

This year’s competition received close to twelve hundred submissions, which were read by preliminary judges Timothy Donnelly and Mai Der Vang. After much deliberation, final judges Daniel Borzutzky, Randall Mann, and Patricia Smith awarded this year’s prizes to Alfredo Aguilar, Bernard Ferguson, Omotara James, and Alycia Pirmohamed. The runners-up were Mia Kang, Henry Mills, and Jasmine Reid.

The four winners receive five hundred dollars, publication on The Paris Review Daily, a stay at the Ace Hotel, and a reading at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center on May 16. Congratulations to the winners! We’re pleased to present their work below. Read More

This year, The Paris Review honors Deborah Eisenberg with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. Eisenberg is a writing professor at Columbia University, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her first four collections of stories—Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006)—were reprinted as The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010). Her fifth collection, Your Duck Is My Duck, was published last year.

But if you really want to know about Deborah Eisenberg, please enjoy an abridged biography by the cartoonist Liana Finck: Read More