July 6, 2018 Bulletin A Send-Off to Nicole Rudick By The Paris Review After eight years as managing editor, and editing the last two issues as interim editor, Nicole Rudick has decided to leave The Paris Review. Our staff is small, and Nicole’s role, like so many of ours, extended far beyond that which is simply captured by job titles: she promoted new writers and artists, curated portfolios and conducted interviews for the magazine, edited and wrote pieces for the Daily, produced special projects—like our reinvigorated Paris Review Editions imprint and the Big, Bent Ears series—and so much more. We’ll miss her dry humor, strongly held opinions, hard-earned praise, and surprisingly colorful dress shoes. She has been equal parts tough and nurturing, a mentor to many who have passed through these doors. The day after the 2016 election, when many of us were crying quietly at our desks, Nicole gathered everyone around the pool table for a meeting. Then she turned on the music and encouraged us to dance. Read More
June 5, 2018 Bulletin Announcing Our Summer Issue By The Paris Review Our Summer issue opens with a selection from Jan Morris’s diary, begun in 2016, and each time I read it, I am struck anew by the capaciousness of her thoughts. In seventeen entries, she revisits ancient history and wonders about the near future; pulls in a constellation of people (Browning, Eliot, Wordsworth, Pepys) and places (Romania, India, Egypt); muses on her late cat, her cherished car, her beloved Elizabeth, and her advancing age. In the first entry, she dilates on the miracle of her garden: tucked away in a quiet corner of Llanystumdwy, Wales, and yet teeming with a rich assortment of life. My hope is that this issue is a version of Morris’s garden: a microcosm of the larger literary ecology, gathered (perhaps not too unassumingly) between two covers. We owe our sunny front cover to Edie Fake, the Review’s first trans cover artist. His paintings in the issue’s portfolio imagine queer spaces and invent “impossible” architectures as a metaphor for trans bodies. In the portfolio’s essay, Renee Gladman optimistically envisions in these spaces a speculative future—cities occupied by people “like new shapes arriving to some Euclidean page, wanting opposites and sames and inverses and transverses.” There are a number of firsts in this issue, not least a story by Ursula K. Le Guin. And not just any story, but a final Earthsea tale, written a year before her death. We also have work by two newcomers: Shruti Swamy’s atmospheric story in which a woman, distracted by her young daughter’s illness and another, vague distress, prepares to flee a wildfire; and Wayétu Moore’s portrait of a Vai girl cursed by village superstition and made to hide herself away. This issue’s fiction also includes stories by Ben Marcus, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Benjamin Nugent as well as the finale of Katharine Kilalea’s serialized novel OK, Mr. Field. Our interviews are with the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, known for his epically long sentences and narrative intensity, and the American essayist and Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Hilton Als, whose omnivorous writing merges and dissolves categories (he is only our third entry in the Art of the Essay; the second is Jan Morris, in issue no. 143). Rebelliousness and experimentation make their way into Kiese Laymon’s essay on the difficulty of pledging allegiance to self, family, and country, and into our glimpse into the personal library of the late feminist punk writer Kathy Acker. The issue’s selection of poetry is a spectrum of time and place: Iman Mersal (Egypt), Szilárd Borbély (Hungary), and Hilda Hilst (Brazil), plus the pre-Islamic warrior-poet ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad, whose five declarative poems describe the arc of war. Sylvie Baumgartel composes a song of intense female desire, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips thinks of a world “on fire,” in which “A man hauls crate after crate of rifles / Into a hotel. A child is shot dead / On the spot … And where did / It all go so, so wrong?” We also have poems by Maureen N. McLane, Michael Robbins, and Jana Prikryl. After her peripatetic earlier life, Jan Morris finds in her garden a kind of exile she doesn’t mind living out. Whether you are wandering or anchored this summer, I hope this issue takes you places. —Nicole Rudick
April 11, 2018 Bulletin Photos from Our 2018 Spring Revel By Julia Berick Nicole Zajdman, Josh Zajdman, Joy Williams, Don DeLillo, Dana Spiotta (Photo: Matteo Mobilio) April isn’t all cruelty and taxes. Every year, during the first week of the month, we celebrate The Paris Review at the Spring Revel. This year, we gathered friends, fans, and family to honor Joy Williams and sixty-five years of the magazine. John Waters, the legendary mustachioed auteur, was the self-described “monster of ceremonies,” escorting guests through an evening that recognized the emerging and established writers who have found a home at The Paris Review. The stars at Cipriani rivaled those across the street on Grand Central’s ceiling, as Don DeLillo, Radhika Jones, John Waters, David Sedaris, Patricia Marx, Tina Brown, Sir Harry Evans, Michael Cunningham, Lesley Stahl, Morgan Entrekin, Lewis Lapham, Hailey Gates, Ellie Goulding, Amor Towles, Dana Spiotta, Joanna Coles, Henry Finder, Emma Cline, and Kwame Anthony Appiah toasted with Review readers old and new. Guests hushed to the sound of George Plimpton interviewing Eudora Welty, a snippet from the first season of our podcast. As the crickets of Jackson, Mississippi, faded away, our publisher, Susannah Hunnewell, toasted Paris Review comrades who had died this year, including Drue Heinz, Bokara Legendre, and John Ashbery. The first award of the evening bridged the Review’s past and present. Named for our founding editor George Plimpton, the Plimpton Prize is presented each year to a new voice in fiction. The novelist David Gates presented Isabella Hammad the prize for “Mr. Can’aan,” from our Fall 2017 issue. Her story, which begins on the banks of the Jordan River a week after the Six-Day War, immerses the reader in the inheritance of loss passed through generations of Palestinians. In her speech, Hammad noted that the prize had brought her more than one kind of encouragement: Over the last few years since I’ve been living in New York, the conversations in this country surrounding the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and lives have definitely been changing … This should not distract us from the reality that the situation there has not improved. In fact, it has become palpably worse. Nevertheless, at a time when it is often difficult to feel hopeful about the future, that a story about Palestinians should win a prize like this does help me to feel a bit of hope. David Sedaris, known for spinning his own sadness into impossibly funny yarns, was awarded the Terry Southern Prize for Humor by the incomparable Patricia Marx, who threatened to upstage her honoree on the microphone as she explained her love for his work: There are plenty of writers whose work I like, but with those writers—let’s just say I didn’t read Crime and Punishment and wish I could visit the prison in Siberia and sleep on the bed of nails with Dostoyevsky. Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath—depressed. It’s different with David Sedaris. You read a story about his family or his boyfriend, Hugh, or even a line of his like, “As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character,” and you know you need to meet this writer immediately. As Cipriani’s legion of waiters noiselessly disappeared dinner, John Waters praised Joy Williams for her lifetime of characteristically uncompromising writing: Ms. Williams is a desert rat, and I mean that as a compliment. She calls wild animal trophy hunters psychopaths, and I agree with her. And wishes Earth First would rise again, though she realizes they were branded terrorists and anarchists by the FBI. You could say the same for her writing. It confuses our values and destroys moral superiority. “She’s probably not for everybody,” the New York Times once warned. But who are these “everybody” she’s not for? The literary deplorables, that’s who. If you can’t appreciate Joy Williams’s writing, you have no business being a reader. Get outta here, go to a movie or something! For all the hard edges and vacant horizons in her work, Williams warmly accepted the award and turned her appreciation to the magazine, extolling, The Paris Review appears to me a strong, glittering chain of continuity, a continuity of artistic excellence and discovery and verve, bridging the years, harboring all manner of marvels and singularities. I’m so happy to be honored here at this literary revel of revels, on the list, a very special list. I will tell you, I feel a churchy exultation and joy right now. Hadada, hadada, hadada. Our interim editor, Nicole Rudick, brought the evening to a close and the guests close to tears as she expressed her pride in the magazine’s potential and encouraged the audience to imagine that every Revel could be the best one yet. May April always bring renewed Review merriment—next year with you! Take a look at the photos below, by the photographer Matteo Mobilio, plus more from Vanity Fair and Avenue magazine—and we hope to see you next year! Read More
April 5, 2018 Bulletin Announcing the New Editor of The Paris Review By The Paris Review The board of The Paris Review Foundation is pleased to announce the appointment of Emily Nemens as editor of The Paris Review. She will be the fifth editor in the sixty-five-year history of The Paris Review. An editor, writer, and illustrator, Ms. Nemens, thirty-four, has been coeditor of The Southern Review since 2013. She has discovered and published numerous award-winning authors. In the past year alone, her selections for The Southern Review have won two Pushcart and two O. Henry Prizes; three were selected for inclusion in 2018’s Best American Short Stories. “Emily has a proven track record of finding diverse new voices outside the established networks,” says The Paris Review’s publisher, Susannah Hunnewell. “She follows what she calls ‘a meritocratic editorial agenda’ and, for example, found both O. Henry Prize winners in the pile of unsolicited submissions. Emily prides herself on working closely with writers, grooming and mentoring them in an open and collaborative process with her staff.” Read More
March 7, 2018 Bulletin Isabella Hammad Wins 2018 Plimpton Prize; David Sedaris Wins Terry Southern Prize By The Paris Review The Paris Review’s Spring Revel is a month away—tickets are available here—and the editorial committee of our board has chosen the winners of two annual prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine. It’s with great pleasure that we announce our 2018 honorees, Isabella Hammad and David Sedaris. Read More
March 1, 2018 Bulletin Announcing Our Spring Issue By The Paris Review After months of germination, our Spring issue is out today! Shrug off the winter doldrums with the bright splashes of color on our cover, painted by the Lebanese artist Etel Adnan especially for the issue. Look between the covers for a portfolio of her color-infused landscapes, text-based works, and abstractions, curated by our interim editor Nicole Rudick. The issue features two Art of Fiction interviews. The Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, winner of the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 2013, discusses a career devoted to chronicling the experiences of women and the poor: My own deepest interest as a writer is in fiction but as I have learned, it is my work that is most socially engaged that is also the most valued by my readers … There is a moral obligation to write of this. I could not ignore it. And Charles Johnson, author of the National Book Award–winning novel Middle Passage, describes the philosophical novel and writing about black America: I know that black life, like all life, outstrips our perceptions, that so much of black life still remains—to invoke Ellison here—invisible, unseen. Also: A new story by Joy Williams (“Sometimes I ride in the chthonic with the luggage, the boots and coats, the boxes of fruit and gin and books”), her tenth for the magazine. Williams will receive the Hadada, the Review’s lifetime-achievement award, at the Revel on April 3. Plus: fiction by Rachel Cusk, Kathleen Collins, Chia-Chia Lin, JoAnna Novak, Katherine Kilalea, and Danielle Dutton (you may notice a commonality in this list); and poems by Ishion Hutchinson, Dorothea Lasky, Mónica de la Torre, Alejandra Pizarnik, Major Jackson, Ange Mlinko, Nick Laird, Peter Cole, and Michael Hofmann. Subscribe now!