Mona Simpson. Photo: Gaspar Tringale.

The Paris Review Foundation is delighted to announce the appointment of Mona Simpson as the magazine’s new publisher. Simpson succeeds Susannah Hunnewell, who passed away in June 2019. Previous publishers include founding publisher Sadruddin Aga Khan, Drue Heinz, Deborah Pease, and Antonio Weiss.

Simpson began her involvement with The Paris Review as a work-study student in Columbia’s M.F.A. program, eventually joining the staff as a senior editor, serving in that capacity for five years. During her tenure, Simpson convinced George Plimpton to provide the staff with health insurance for the first time, and she discovered several unknown authors in the magazine’s slush pile, a number of whom have gone on to become significant voices in contemporary literature.

During her time as an editor, Simpson completed her first novel, Anywhere but Here. She left the magazine for Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship. She held the Samuelson Levy Chair in Languages and Literature at Bard College, where she is now a visiting writer, while on the faculty at UCLA. She has been a member of the board of directors and the editorial committee of The Paris Review since 2014.

Simpson is the author of six acclaimed novels, which have been widely translated. A film was adapted from one of them. She’s received many awards for her fiction, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA award, the Whiting Award, the Lila Acheson Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award, the Heartland Prize, the Mary McCarthy Prize, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This year, her short story “Wrong Object,” first published in Harper’s, is included in the Best American Short Stories anthology. Her seventh novel, The Humble House, will be published next year.

We welcome Mona into her expanded role with The Paris Review!

The second season of our celebrated podcast is here to carry you away from all the troublesome sounds of Thanksgiving squabbles. And if you’d like to know how something so excruciatingly exquisite gets made, read on for a behind-the-scenes interview with executive producer John DeLore. He is a senior editor and tenured audio engineer at Stitcher’s NYC studio. In addition to The Paris Review Podcast, he has worked on Stranglers, Beautiful/Anonymous, The Longest Shortest Time, Couric, Clear + Vivid with Alan Alda, Fake the Nation, The Sporkful, and Household Name. He answered some questions from our engagement editor, Rhian Sasseen, about his preferred microphones, the differences between Season 1 and Season 2, and how to respect both the language and the listener.

INTERVIEWER

In the spirit of the many times “pencil versus pen?” has been asked in The Paris Review’s Writers at Work interviews, what’s your preferred setup for recording?

JOHN DELORE

Most of the process is not a solitary craft. And while a lot of recording happens in our studio where we’ve got our preferred tools and our studio vibe, a lot of it is happening out in the world, or “in the field,” as they say.

And for me, I’m sort of always “in the field.” I’ve had the same silver Zoom H2 portable recorder for almost ten years, and I carry it just about everywhere I go. And these days I’ve been using the iPhone VoiceMemo app. It’s like a butterfly net. I hear something in the world, like a train on an elevated track, or a nice bird, or a thunderstorm, and I capture it. I label it and throw it in this massive folder of random sounds.

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Richard Ford. Photo: Kristina Ford.

Each April, The Paris Review’s Spring Revel is an occasion for literary celebration. Over the course of the evening, several prizes are bestowed; the most august is the Hadada, the magazine’s lifetime achievement award. This year, the Paris Review board of directors’ editorial committee has selected Richard Ford to receive the Hadada. The award will be presented by Bruce Springsteen.

The Hadada will be the latest of many accolades for Ford. His fourth novel, Independence Day (1995), was the first book to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Also in 1995, he was honored with the Rea Award for the Short Story; in 2019, he was recognized with the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Ford’s celebrated novels include The Sportswriter (1986), which introduced readers to the unforgettable Frank Bascombe; Wildlife (1990), which was adapted into an acclaimed film in 2018; and Canada (2012). Ford is also a prolific author of short stories, with collections spanning 1987’s Rock Springs to the forthcoming Sorry for Your Trouble. A memoir, Between Them: Remembering My Parents, was published in 2017. His writing has been commended for its “linguistic mastery … rivaled by few, if any” and for the “terse poetry” he brings to his prose.

Ford’s ties to The Paris Review date back to 1975, when the story “Shooting the Rest Area” appeared in issue no. 62. Forty-four years later, his short fiction appeared again in the magazine; the artful story “Nothing to Declare” was published in issue no. 229. In 1996, he was interviewed for the Review’s Writers at Work series. His description then of “the exhilaration of writing” remains a powerful encapsulation of the purpose and magic of fiction: “The chance to make something new, which might be good and beautiful, and which somebody else could use… Put more succinctly, to write for readers.” We are delighted to have Bruce Springsteen, another American icon who once described Ford’s work as “poignant and hilarious,” present the Hadada.

The Hadada has been awarded since 2003, when the Review gave the inaugural prize to the legendary publisher Barney Rosset. Since then, literary greats such as Joan Didion, John Ashbery, Lydia Davis, Robert Silvers, and Paula Fox have received the honor. Last year, The Paris Review presented the award to the singular story writer Deborah Eisenberg.

At the Revel, glasses are raised and memories made. Buy a ticket today to join The Paris Review in April in honoring Richard Ford and sixty-seven years of this leading literary quarterly.

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