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!
December 7, 2017 Bulletin A Message from The Paris Review Staff By The Staff of The Paris Review Dear Readers, Before we continue with our regular programming on the Daily, we’d like to take a moment to address the distressing news of our editor’s recent departure. The staff of The Paris Review comprises hardworking women and men who are devoted to championing excellent writing and new voices. We believe in the power of literature to connect us, change us, and heal us. The Paris Review has, as you know, a rich and storied history. It also has an exciting future. We recognize our role as leaders in the literary community. We see this as an opportunity for growth and positive change, both for The Paris Review and in the publishing world at large. We remain committed to our work and to publishing the very best writing, in print and online. Thank you to our writers, readers, and supporters. Sincerely, The staff of The Paris Review
December 5, 2017 Bulletin Joy Williams Will Receive Our 2018 Hadada Award By The Paris Review Joy Williams, 1990. Photo by Reg Innell Save the date: The Paris Review will honor Joy Williams with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement at our annual gala, the Spring Revel. Williams is the author of five short-story collections, four novels, a book of essays, and a guidebook to the Florida Keys (which Condé Nast Traveler described as “one of the best guidebooks ever written”). Williams’s writing first appeared in our Fall 1968 issue with the short story “The Retreat.” In 1973, George Plimpton decided to published her first novel, State of Grace, under the Paris Review Editions imprint; the novel was nominated for the National Book Award when Williams was only thirty. Over the decades, the Review has published nine of her stories (and will publish a tenth this spring). In our Summer 2014 issue, we interviewed Williams for the Art of Fiction series. Her interviewer, Paul Winner, noted that Williams used a flip phone, typed postcards in lieu of email, had never owned a computer, and wore prescription sunglasses, indoors and out, night and day. She told him that she didn’t have a TV or Internet or air-conditioning at her home in Arizona, and that she owned seven Smith Corona portable typewriters for writing while traveling. She is particularly noted for her writing on the environment. As she said, “Cultural diversity can never replace biodiversity, though we’re being prompted to think it can. We live and spawn and want—always there is this ghastly wanting—and we have done irredeemable harm to so much. Perhaps the novel will die and even the short story because we’ll become so damn sick of talking about ourselves.” We, however, refuse to be sick of talking about Joy Williams. Her work has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Books Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. We’re thrilled to add the Hadada to that list: it’s presented annually to a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature. Last year’s honoree was Richard Howard; previous recipients are John Ashbery, Lydia Davis, Joan Didion, Paula Fox, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton (posthumously), Barney Rosset, Philip Roth, Norman Rush, James Salter, Frederick Seidel, Robert Silvers, and William Styron. John Waters—writer, director, “counterculture demigod” (the New York Times)—will present the award. Please join us in April to celebrate Williams’s extraordinary career.
December 1, 2017 Bulletin An Alternate Recipe for Chestnuts By The Paris Review Brian Ransom, our beloved digital intern, is not from the East Coast, and so we occasionally amuse ourselves by making him try, for the first time, things like burrata, korean pears, and smoked salmon. Yesterday, he told us that he had bought himself a chestnut, but that it had been very difficult to peel. We asked if he had … eaten it raw? He had. Read More
October 10, 2017 Bulletin Women at Work By The Paris Review We are proud to announce Women at Work—our first collection of interviews in nearly a decade. Introduced by Ottessa Moshfegh and illustrated by Joana Avillez, the twelve interviews in Women at Work span the history of The Paris Review, from Dorothy Parker (1956) to Claudia Rankine (2016)—by way of Isak Dinesen, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Marguerite Yourcenar, Margaret Atwood, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, Jan Morris, Joan Didion, and Hilary Mantel. Intimate, deep, full of surprises, these classic interviews will be a source of inspiration and instruction to writers, students, and anyone else who cares about the creative process, or about the specific challenges faced by creative women. Printed on acid-free paper, in a limited edition of five thousand copies, Women at Work is available exclusively from The Paris Review, with all proceeds going to support the magazine.