Left, Jonathan Escoffery (Photo: Colwill Brown); Right, Leigh Newman (Photo: Christopher Gabello)

The Paris Review’s Spring Revel is coming up on April 7. At the Revel, we present annual prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine, and it is with great pleasure that we announce our honorees for the 2020 Plimpton Prize and the 2020 Southern Prize.

This year’s Plimpton Prize is awarded to Jonathan Escoffery for his story “Under the Ackee Tree,” from our Summer 2019 issue. Escoffery’s “Under the Ackee Tree” follows three generations of a family split between Jamaica and Florida. Escoffery tracks the ways in which fathers and sons misunderstand each other, and the nuanced loss and pain endured by immigrant families, with a keen eye to language and pathos. How do you make things right? As he writes:

If you’re a man who utterly failed his child, you can either lie down to join him in death, or you can do more for those remaining.

The Plimpton Prize for Fiction, presented annually since 1993, is a $10,000 award given to a new voice in fiction. Named after our longtime editor George Plimpton, it commemorates The Paris Review’s zeal for discovering new writers and celebrates an outstanding story written by an emerging writer published by The Paris Review in the previous calendar year.

Upon hearing the news that he had won the Plimpton Prize for Fiction, Jonathan shared, “I don’t know that you can plan to win a prize, but you can dream about it, and I’ve dreamed of winning the Plimpton Prize for Fiction for a very long time.”

At the Spring Revel, the Plimpton Prize will be presented by the novelist Alice McDermott.

This year’s Southern Prize will be presented to Leigh Newman for “Howl Palace,” from our Fall 2019 issue. In Newman’s “Howl Palace,” an Alaskan woman revisits her adventurous past as she prepares to sell her “unique” lakeside home:

To the families on the lake, my home is a bit of an institution. And not just for the wolf room, which my agent suggested we leave off the list of amenities, as most people wouldn’t understand what we meant.

The Terry Southern Prize, presented since 2003, is a $5,000 award honoring “humor, wit, and sprezzatura” in work from either The Paris Review or the Daily. It’s named for Terry Southern, a driving force behind the early Paris Review perhaps best known as a screenwriter behind Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider.

When she heard she’d won the Southern Prize, Leigh shared, “I’m moved and honored—not just because of the caliber of the authors associated with the Terry Southern Prize, authors I deeply admire—but because working on ‘Howl Palace’ with Emily and Hasan, getting to profit from their deeply considered editing, was one of the greatest joys of my writerly life.”

At the Spring Revel, the Southern Prize will be presented by the cartoonist Roz Chast.

We look forward to celebrating the honorees and their work at the 2020 Spring Revel on April 7, at Cipriani 25 Broadway in downtown Manhattan. That night, we will be joined by the 2020 Revel benefit chairs, actor, writer, and director Greta Gerwig and writer and director Noah Baumbach. Singer, songwriter, and musician Bruce Springsteen will present our Hadada Award for lifetime achievement to Richard Ford. Tickets are available on our site.

We are also proud to mention that The Paris Review won the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction for our submission of three stories, two of which were 2020 Plimpton Prize honoree Jonathan Escoffery’s “Under the Ackee Tree” and 2020 Southern Prize honoree Leigh Newman’s “Howl Palace.” Rounding out our winning submission was Kimberly King Parsons’s “Foxes,” from our Summer 2019 issue.

Congratulations to the winners! We hope you will join us to celebrate them, and to usher in a new decade of groundbreaking literature.

Kimberly King Parsons, Jonathan Escoffery, and Leigh Newman.

The Paris Review is honored to be the recipient of this year’s National Magazine Award for Fiction, recognizing in particular three stories published in 2019: “Foxes,” by Kimberly King Parsons; “Under the Ackee Tree,” by Jonathan Escoffery; and “Howl Palace,” by Leigh Newman. Nominees and winners were announced in a live Twittercast on February 6, and the magazine will be recognized at the awards ceremony in Brooklyn on March 12.

Below you can get a taste of all three stories.

From Kimberly King Parsons’s “Foxes” (issue no. 229)

What’s worth happening happens in deep woods. Or so my daughter tells me.

Her plotlines: In the deep woods someone is chasing, someone else is getting hacked. Hatchets are lifted, brought downdowndown. Men stutter blood onto snow. A cast of animals—some local, some outlandish—show up to feast on the bits. “The bitty bits,” she’ll say, “the tasty remainderings.” Good luck diverting her. Good luck correcting or getting a word in once she gets going. It’s gruesome, but this type of storytelling, I’ve been assured, is perfectly normal among children her age.

From Jonathan Escoffery’s “Under the Ackee Tree” (issue no. 229)

If you carry on like before with Reyha and Sanya and Cherie, is Sanya who will come beat down your door and cuss you while Cherie sneak out back. You’ll make promise and beg you a beg for she hand in marriage one time. Is Sanya you love, like you love bread pudding and stew, which is more than you have loved before. You love that when she walk with she brass hand in yours, you can’ tell where yours ends and hers begins. You love that where you see practical solution to the world’ problem, Sanya sees only the way things should be; where you see a beggar boy in Coronation Market, Sanya sees infinite potential.

Most of all, is she smile you fall for. Sanya’ teeth and dimples flawless and you hope she’ll pass this to your pickney, and that them will inherit your light eyes, which your father passed down to you.

From Leigh Newman’s “Howl Palace” (issue no. 230)

To the families on the lake, my home is a bit of an institution. And not just for the wolf room, which my agent suggested we leave off the list of amenities, as most people wouldn’t understand what we meant. About the snow-machine shed and clamshell grotto, I was less flexible. Nobody likes a yard strewn with snow machines and three-wheelers, one or two of which will always be busted and covered in blue tarp. Ours is just not that kind of neighborhood. The clamshell grotto, on the other hand, might fail to fulfill your basic home-owning needs, but it is a showstopper. My fourth husband, Lon, built it for me in the basement as a surprise for my fifty-third birthday. He had a romantic nature, when he hadn’t had too much to drink. Embedded in the coral and shells are more than a few freshwater pearls that a future owner might consider tempting enough to jackhammer out of the cement.

For more great fiction—as well as top-of-the-line poetry, art, interviews, and essays—subscribe to The Paris Review today.

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