March 26, 2013 Bulletin Ottessa Moshfegh Wins Plimpton Prize; J. D. Daniels Wins Terry Southern Prize for Humor By The Paris Review Each year, at our annual Spring Revel, the board of The Paris Review awards two prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine. It is with great pleasure that we announce our 2013 honorees. The Plimpton Prize for Fiction is a $10,000 award given to a new voice from our last four issues. Named after our longtime editor George Plimpton, it commemorates his zeal for discovering new writers. This year’s Plimpton Prize will be presented by Jeffrey Eugenides to Ottessa Moshfegh for “Disgust” and “Bettering Myself,” from issues 202 and 204. The Terry Southern Prize is a $5,000 award honoring work from either The Paris Review or the Daily that embodies the qualities of humor, wit, and sprezzatura. The prize is given in memory of our loyal (and very funny) contributor Terry Southern. The 2013 Terry Southern Prize will be presented by John Hodgman to J. D. Daniels for his “Letter from Majorca” and “Letter from Kentucky” (issues 201 and 203) and his frequent contributions to the Daily. From all of us on staff, a heartfelt chapeau! (And if you haven’t bought your ticket to attend the Revel—supporting the magazine and writers you love—isn’t this the time?)
March 26, 2013 Arts & Culture Maps By Ben Lytal People pretend the idea of fact-checking fiction is hilarious and a paradox and maybe even scandalously bureaucratic and wrongheaded. But when fiction gets facts wrong, people care. If a novel claims to be about a real place, people say, It should at least get the street names right. If somebody writes a story about Manhattan, and he mixes up the streets, he’s expected to fix it. When I first realized this, it worried me. If I ever wrote a story, I thought, it would be murder to go back and change the street names. Not because of their precious sonic qualities, the effect removing them would have on the rhythm of the sentences. But because likely I’d have done more than transpose street names. I’d have bent Broadway to intersect with Bowery so that my hero could stumble out of a Bowery bar and look up and be able to see Grace Church, for example. Moving the streets, shuffling them back or prying them apart, would ruin the effect. Which could have been the fact-checker’s point—everybody has the real Manhattan in their head, and with it a host of associations. We love Manhattan; don’t change it. Years later, I wrote a book about my hometown, Tulsa. And after I was done I decided to call it A Map of Tulsa. My father read it and sent a simple, complimentary e-mail. Which was the perfect thing. Then when I was home and we could talk in person and were alone for a minute, he mentioned that there was just one thing: I had gotten a few details of geography wrong in my book. For example, St. Francis Hospital being right by the highway. Yes, I said, that’s right. I know. Which amounted to: I did it on purpose. Read More
March 26, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Robert Frost By Sadie Stein “See, I haven’t led a literary life. These fellows, they really work away with their prose trying to describe themselves and understand themselves, and so on. I don’t do that. I don’t want to know too much about myself.” —Robert Frost, the Art of Poetry No. 2
March 26, 2013 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Happy Menocal, Artist By Happy Menocal DAY ONE 1 A.M. Go to bed with Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals, a book about the work habits of famous artists, writers, philosophers, musicians, etc. Resolve to have a regimented, productive day tomorrow. All these people seem to subsist on coffee and alcohol and amphetamines. I feel like a toddler with my juice and crackers and noodles. 7:45 A.M. Begin work on a little ad that’s due today for Stubbs & Wootton—fancy slippers made in Spain. It’s for a promotion they’re doing during the Ides of March. Someone at the company started the e-mail chain for the ad with the subject line “Eyes of March,” and I kinda want to do the visual about that. Decide instead to just paint Caesar, wearing the slippers, looking warily over his shoulder. I google “man sitting on column” because I want Caesar to be sitting on a crumbled stump of a column, and find this devil dog. My husband and I puzzle over where our two thousand terrible black umbrellas have gone, as now it’s raining and we have only one. He doesn’t bring it up this morning, but most times when we’re on the subject John likes to note that the pebbled plastic hook on the common street umbrella reminds him of that embalming tool they used in ancient Egypt to take your brain out through your nose. Read More
March 26, 2013 On the Shelf Teen Writers, and Other News By Sadie Stein Herewith: writers as teenagers. Only Allen Ginsberg looks suitably awkward. Feisty indie Inkwood Books, of Tampa, lives to fight another day. The secret lives of unfinished books. The uneasy marriage of poetry and e-readers. Applying science to the Shakespearean authorship mystery.
March 25, 2013 Bulletin There and Back Again By Sadie Stein Since 2003, the Tolkien Society has celebrated Tolkien Reading Day on March 25. Why today, which is neither Tolkien’s birthday, nor Bilbo’s, nor Frodo’s? The answer will be obvious to regular observers of the holiday: March 25 marks the downfall of Sauron.