July 28, 2010 From the Archive Congratulations to Damon Galgut By Lorin Stein The Paris Review wishes to congratulate our contributor Damon Galgut, whose novel In a Strange Room has been nominated for the MAN Booker Prize. Click here to read the excerpt that ran in the Winter 2008 issue of The Paris Review.
July 7, 2010 From the Archive Before There Was Twilight, There Was Dusk By Christopher Cox Add James Salter’s Dusk to the list of genius reissues coming out this year. Modern Library has put out a handsome new edition of the story collection, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award when it first appeared in 1988. (If songs from 1988 can be called oldies, then a book from the same year definitely qualifies as a classic reissue.) Dusk had been out of print for many years, so the new edition is a godsend for those of us who don’t have the original issues of Esquire, Grand Street, and, ahem, The Paris Review lying around. Four of the stories in Dusk first appeared in our pages, and to celebrate the return of a great book, we’ve put the full text of “Am Strande von Tanger,” the lead-off story in the collection, online here. That story is forty-two years old, and it’s still not showing any signs of age.
July 2, 2010 From the Archive Congratulations to Barbara Demick By Christopher Cox Barbara Demick wrote an excellent book about North Korea, Nothing To Envy, that has just won the BBC’s Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction. Demick interviewed dozens of defectors from the North during the years she spent living in Seoul, and the book follows the lives of six of them as they struggle to survive in Kim Jong Il’s crumbling police state. In our fall issue last year, Demick told the story of two of those defectors, Mi-ran and Jun-sang, who fell in love in North Korea but defected south without telling each other. Here’s how she sets the scene for their love affair: The night sky in North Korea might be the most brilliant in northeast Asia, the only airspace spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent. And no electrical glow competes with the intensity of the stars there. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea’s power stations rusted into ruin. The lights went out. Now when the sun drops low in the sky, the landscape fades to gray and the squat little houses are swallowed by the night. Entire villages vanish into the dusk. Even in parts of Pyongyang, the capital, you can stroll down the middle of a street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side. Such darkness is a curse, of course, but it also has its advantages. If you are a teenager dating somebody you can’t be seen with, invisibility confers measures of privacy and freedom that are hard to come by in North Korea. You can do what you like without worrying about the eyes of parents, neighbors, or the secret police. You can read a little bit more here, but you have to either buy the book or the Fall 2009 issue to get the full story.
June 11, 2010 From the Archive Wells Tower Wins Young Lions Fiction Award By Christopher Cox Congratulations to Wells Tower, whose short-story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award last night. Tower’s first two published stories were picked from the slush pile by The Paris Review way back in 2001, and both showcased what Edmund White called the “tensile strength” of his style. “His range is wide,” wrote White, “and his language impeccable, never strained or fussy.” You can hear Tower read the first of the two stories we published, “Down through the Valley,” by clicking here.